In January 1870, Sarah M. B. Piatt published a seemingly simple poem, “A Child’s First Sight of Snow,” in The Galaxy, an illustrated, monthly “magazine of entertaining reading”:

Oh, come and look at his blue, sweet eyes,
          As, through the window, they glance around
And see the glittering white surprise
          The Night has laid on the ground!

This beautiful Mystery you have seen,
          So new to your life and to mine so old,
Little wordless Questioner – “What does it mean?”
          Why, it means, I fear, that the world is cold.
(93)

At the end of the 1840s, American poetry – and American poetry by women in particular – was collected, packaged, and marketed to a wide readership in a way that it never had been before. Three anthologies of American women's verse hit the literary marketplace at the close of the decade: Caroline May's The American Female Poets in 1848, followed in early 1849 by Rufus Griswold's The Female Poets of America and Thomas Buchanan Read's The Female Poets of America. This situation invites certain questions: Why three big books of the same nature at the same time? What was the purpose of these endeavors? How did these books position the qualities and roles of women's poetry at mid-century? What effect did the publication of these anthologies have on the field of American women's poetry, then and now?

While answers to these questions will undoubtedly shed light on issues of American women's historical poetics and how that poetics was (and continues to be) read, I want to remind readers at the outset of the fundamental concern at the heart of this story: the production of books whose contents were meant to be read did not ultimately result in such reading, at least not in the long run. Subsequent editions of each of these anthologies appeared every few years up through the 1860s – proof that there was a steady contemporary readership and demand for them – yet not one of the 123 women poets showcased in these anthologies are read by general readers today, and only a handful have found their way into university classrooms and critical discussions of literary history. In this way, this is not simply a story about a watershed moment in the history of women's poetry – its unprecedented production, circulation, and reception – that now feels far away from us in the twenty-first century; it is also about how these anthologies themselves have long positioned these poets both everywhere and nowhere. A close look at these books shows just how vexed the placement of the woman poet in literary culture was, as each editor grappled with questions about women poets’ visibility and invisibility, about their privacy and publicity.

In July 1837, the noted Quaker writer, minister, and reform advocate, Joseph John Gurney, left his native England and made a series of trips to Canada, the West Indies, and North America. During his time in the United States, Gurney visited southern and northern cities alike, speaking widely upon prison reform, the abolition of slavery, and religious disunity in the Quaker church. On Gurney's departure from Philadelphia, a group of Quaker women presented him with a friendship album titled “The American Offering” as a gift for his seventeen-year-old daughter Anna, who had been left behind in England during her father's journey. The album has 134 gold-edged leaves, and Anna's name is printed on its cover and title page. [Fig. 1] The rest of the pages contain approximately 100 poems, interspersed with prose excerpts and illustrations. While the selections are handwritten, the compilers also clearly had the conventions of print in mind, as they carefully inscribed the titles of poems and often added a relevant illustration.

The opening poem, signed by Elizabeth Lloyd and titled “To Anna Gurney,” declares that the album contains “a wreath” of the “native flowers” of the United States to serve as a “uniting bond” between Anna Gurney and her fellow Quakers. While “The American Offering” itself contains prose and illustrations as well as poetry, Lloyd indicates that it is the poetry in particular that will create and sustain this transatlantic “bond.” In the final stanza, Lloyd marks exactly what Anna can expect to find in this collection of this “country's poesy”:

Lloyd makes clear that this poetry is not remarkable because it is the “country's gayest,” but because it is its “purest” and “sweetest.” This purity and sweetness is referenced again, yet put differently, in the final line, where she marks the poems as “unpretending” and “simple.” What accompanies this characterization is the insistence that the poems are wholly American – they “bloom in her bowers,” are “no rare exotics,” and, most simply put, are “native.”