SOURCE: “The Village World of Lizette Woodworth Reese,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. LVI, 1957, pp. 91-104.

In the following essay, Kindilien provides in-depth analysis of Reese's literary devices and important themes in her poetry.

The first volume of poetry written by Lizette Woodworth Reese appeared unheralded and without explanation in 1887, the year following the death of Emily Dickinson. Cutting through the ruling pattern in the direction selected by a later school of lyrists, she entered a literary scene in which she was to have a secure and merited place for the next half century. Paul Hamilton Hayne, Sidney Lanier, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell were alive and writing when Lizette Reese was a young girl, but she seems to have been little affected by any of these poets. Nor did the New Poetry of the central years of her life...