Genealogies of convention: Reading the poetry of Sarah Piatt and Herman Melville in the nineteenth-century American culture of anthologies.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates literary conventions in nineteenth-century America---the way they are generated, circulated, transformed, and codified by the genre of the anthology and the way Sarah Piatt and Herman Melville enact and redefine convention in their poetry. Until recently, the poetry of Piatt and Melville has fallen outside mainstream discussions of nineteenth-century American poetry. The deliberate and distinctive braiding of enigma and convention that runs throughout their verse challenges us to develop new ways of reading nineteenth-century American poetry that no longer maintain the dichotomies that oppose convention to authenticity and/or a modernist aesthetic of excellence. Focusing on multiple-author collections, I not only recover a largely unaddressed facet of nineteenth-century American print culture but also clarify the way the anthologies shape and are shaped by the conventions of the poems they collect. The first two chapters address the defining conventions of the nineteenth-century sentimental infant elegy and examine Piatt's complex evocations and transformations of those conventions. In the first chapter, I explicate the process by which myriad anthologies of infant elegies systematized conventions now considered characteristic of sentimental infant elegies. The second chapter details Piatt's fascinating transfiguration of those conventions, the way her poems evoke, modify, reject, embrace, and foil the thematic and formal features of sentimental child elegies. The last two chapters turn to the print culture of the American Civil War. In chapter three, I argue that a consideration of Frank Moore's multiple-author collections, in particular <italic>The Rebellion Record</italic>, clarifies the way in which anthologies enabled citizens to become citizen-poets and projected an image of poetical and political unification. Chapter four examines Melville's scrutiny of the vexed task of commemoration and the particular capacity of poetry to illuminate and capture the horror and sublimity of glory and of war in <italic>Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War</italic>. Recognizing convention in more nuanced and historically accurate (and material) terms enables us to see more clearly the complex renderings and rendings of convention that appear in---and, indeed, constitute---the poems of Piatt and Melville. This dissertation is grounded on the premise that the poetry of Piatt and Melville cannot be extricated from the nineteenth century's culture of multiple-author collections without tearing the fabric of the poems themselves.