SOURCE: “The Sentimental Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity in Lydia Sigourney's Nature Poetry,” in Legacy, Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall, 1988, pp. 3-18.

In the following essay, Finch claims that Sigourney has been widely neglected recently because she fails to accommodate the predominant model of poetic subjectivity and instead describes nature poetically, but without using it as a means to her own self-expression.

In the revision of American women's literary history that has been taking place over the past few decades, one important area has remained almost completely untouched.¹ While novels, stories, and memoirs by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women are reissued and reappraised every year in mounting numbers, years after Cheryl Walker's The Nightingale's Burden and Emily Stipes Watts's history of American women's poetry, virtually no new revisionist work has been done on American women poets. Apparently, most scholars feel that there was no American woman poet worth...