American Realism | Cheryl Walker (essay date 1991)
Cheryl Walker (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: Walker, Cheryl. “Nineteenth-Century Women Poets and Realism.” American Literary Realism 23, no. 3 (spring 1991): 25-41.
[In the following essay, Walker assesses the works of nineteenth-century female poets as part of the realist tradition.]
Since the 1940s, poetry has been virtually excluded from most discussions of realism. One argument against including poetry as a vital element in realism asserts that realism usually involves a type of content and an attitude toward that content, whereas poetry is preeminently a matter of form. “No other kind of writing holds its own words up to the light as poetry does,” states Jan Montefiore,1 and it is that same linguistic self-consciousness that argues against poetry as a model of realism.
These days poetry has become, if anything, less concerned with what might be referred to in an old-fashioned way as verisimilitude and more...
[The entire page is 6356 words long]
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