SOURCE: Dobson, Joanne. “Sex, Wit, and Sentiment: Frances Osgood and the Poetry of Love.” American Literature 65, no. 4 (December 1993): 631-46.

In the following essay, Dobson surveys Osgood's published and unpublished poetry, asserting that Osgood was a provocative and witty commentator on the highly codified sexual attitudes of her day.

Preserved in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society is an intriguing literary artifact: a miniature slate—three by three and three-quarters inches—upon which is barely discernible the final written word of the popular nineteenth-century American poet Frances Sargent Osgood (1811-1850). That word is “angel.” According to the accompanying envelope, Osgood addressed this communication to her husband, the portrait artist Samuel Stillman Osgood, on her deathbed after the power of speech had failed her. This minor—indeed, virtually unknown—oddity of American literary history may well constitute a self-consciously constructed sentimental artifact. Without cynicism I suggest that leaving behind...