SOURCE: “‘But O My Heart’: The Private Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, University of Iowa Press, 1999, pp. 267-84.

In the following essay, Knight discusses what Gilman's private poetry reveals about her inner life.

In 1894, a few months after Charlotte Perkins Stetson (Gilman) published her first volume of poetry, she received a congratulatory letter from William Dean Howells proclaiming her a “gifted prophetess.” “[The poems] are the wittiest and wisest things that have been written this many a long day and year,” Howells wrote. “You speak with a tongue like a two-edged sword. I rejoice in your gift … and wonder how much more you will do with it.”¹ Howells didn't wonder for long. Second and third editions of the critically acclaimed volume quickly appeared, and over the course of her lifetime Gilman would publish nearly five hundred poems. Unapologetically didactic and designed to...