SOURCE: Richards, Eliza. ‘“The Poetess' and Poe's Performance of the Feminine.” Arizona Quarterly 55, no. 2 (summer 1999): 1-29.

In the following essay, Richards discusses Poe's strategies for coping with the encroachment by women poets in the nineteenth-century poetic arena formerly reserved for men.

… forms that no man can discover For the tears that drip all over … 

Poe, “Dream-Land”

Poe's aesthetic discourse registers a crisis of masculine literary sentiment sparked by the influx of women poets to the American marketplace in the 1830s and '40s. At this time, white, middle-class women, supposed embodiments of the emotions associated with privatized domestic life, gained greater sanction not only to write, but also to publish in the most “intimate” of forms, lyric poetry. “The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward,” Poe proclaims in 1846, and women poets were invited to cultivate this potentially wayward public medium with genteel literary sentiments (“Marginalia” 139). Concerned that...