[In the following excerpt, Peterson analyzes the cultural contexts surrounding Harper's poetry, seeing her writing as an "experimental activity" that appropriated the nineteenth-century discourse of sentimentality and broke down social distinctions between public and private spheres.]

Poetry—in both its recited and printed forms—was … an experimental activity for Watkins Harper, serving as a structural frame through which she could fashion herself in the public role of poet-preacher in order to articulate her vision of nineteenth-century America. In accordance with Unitarian literary theory, in which the British novelist Maria Edgeworth and poet Felicia Hemans were put forth as models of good taste, Watkins Harper conceived of poetry as moral and didactic preaching in which originality was less important than the ability to create character in the reader. In particular, sentimentality became a mode whose purpose was not to unleash an excess of emotion in the reader but rather to channel feelings toward benevolent and moral ends, develop Christian character, and forge social bonds that would commit the individual reader to work for the betterment of society. Thus, Watkins Harper's poetry was designed to rationalize the emotions in order to encourage her audience's social activism.

In appropriating sentimentality to fashion her poetic discourse, Watkins Harper was of course working with a mode that had come to dominate antebellum literary discourse. Relying on contemporary modernist norms, early twentieth-century critics have tended to devalue her work because of this very sentimentalism and didacticism. In To Make a Poet Black, for example, Saunders Redding condemns Watkins Harper both for being "a full-fledged member of the propagandist group," indulging in "particular" rather than "general" feelings, and for allowing herself to be "overwhelmed" by "the demands of her audience for the sentimental treatment of the old subjects" and thus "gush with pathetic sentimentality." His comments further suggest that Watkins Harper's popularity—her acquiescence to the taste of her nineteenth-century public—was a sign of artistic weakness which "led her into errors of metrical construction." Such evaluations dehistoricize Watkins Harper's poetry, ignoring the cultural work it performed. It is only recently that revisionist scholarship on sentimental culture has been able to place Watkins Harper's poetry in its proper cultural context that would help us understand her enormous popularity in the nineteenth century….

[It] may be noted here that sentimentality in America was an outgrowth of the ideology of separate spheres that sought to establish a strict dichotomy between the public male sphere and the domestic female one. Written largely by and for women, sentimentality took as its main subject such domestic themes as the family, the home, motherhood, and childhood. More specifically, according to Philip Fisher [in Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel, 1985], sentimentality occupied itself with the socially weak and helpless whose plight was most often inscribed upon the body, rendering it a highly bodied form. Such a pitiable portrayal of the weak was designed to evoke feelings of pathos in the reader, to create, in Fisher's words, "an inward and empafhetic emotional bond." Yet, if sentimentality initially seemed to locate itself within the private worlds of domesticity and feeling, in the hands of many writers—both white and black—it quickly extended itself to more public and political themes. Much sentimental literature, in fact, illustrates the extent to which the public comes to infiltrate and inhabit the domestic, thereby politicizing it, and conversely the degree to which metaphors of domesticity are appropriated to express the political, thereby domesticating it. Ultimately, sentimentality's demand that its readers respond with compassion and sympathy to the plight of the oppressed dictated, as Fisher has noted, a "public" extension of the reader's private self out toward the other. It is important to note, however, that in the case of many black writers, Watkins Harper included, their reading public was conceptualized not merely as female but also as male; and at all times their goal remained the public one of stirring moral conscience in order to effect social change.

An analysis of one of Watkins Harper's earliest poems, "The Syrophenician Woman," may serve to illustrate some of the ways in which sentimental discourse is deployed in her poetry. The poem inaugurates her earliest volume of poetry available to us, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, first published by a Boston house, J. B. Yerrinton and Sons, in 1854 and then in a slightly enlarged edition by a Philadelphia printer, Merrihew and Thompson, in 1857 (there are no extant copies of Forest Leaves [1845], which Still has named as Watkins Harper's first published collection). The selection of "The Syrophenician Woman" as a first poem is revealing, since several other poems in the collection ("Eliza Harris," "The Dying Christian," and "Ethiopia") appear to have been written earlier. But "The Syrophenician Woman" is a highly appropriate inaugural choice as it encapsulates themes and techniques that recur throughout Watkins Harper's poetry and illustrates her early awareness of poetry as experimental activity.

Cast as a narrative, Watkins Harper's poem focuses on the Syrophenician woman as the weak and oppressed subject whose plight is designed to evoke the reader's compassion. It is a revision of the New Testament story told in Mark 7 of the mother who begs Jesus to cast out unclean spirits from her daughter. The theme of the fallen woman is common in Watkins Harper's poetry, yet it is present here only indirectly—as the biblical source of poetic inspiration. Although the biblical verses might well resonate in the reader's ear, Watkins Harper's poem actually depicts the mother's attempt to save her (ungendered) child from death by hunger. The poem universalizes the themes of hunger and poverty, but it also allows those readers who so choose to apply these circumstances to the specific historical experience of African Americans; and it remains possible that such experiences were evocative of Watkins Harper's own childhood as well. As in Mark's account, Watkins Harper's woman remonstrates with the Lord who at first fears "wast[ing] the children's bread" but then acknowledges her moral superiority. She thus takes on a preacherly function, becoming the voice of moral conscience itself. Finally, the poem also illustrates the basic thrust of Watkins Harper's narrational strategies. For if the poet initially positions the Syrophenician woman as a first-person narrator, in the third stanza she becomes a character in a third-person narrative, distanced from the reader and mediated by the interposition of an authoritative narrator who, in telling her story, seeks to stir the moral conscience of her readers just as the woman had Jesus': "With a purpose nought could move, / And the zeal of woman's love, / Down she knelt in anguish wild—."

Like "The Syrophenician Woman," many of Watkins Harper's other antebellum poems also insist on a reconfiguration of the categories of public and private. Her poetry functions, then, on one level as "public" poetry that narrates multiple social histories through the characterization of representative types: slavery in "The Slave Mother" and "The Slave Auction," temperance in "The Drunkard's Child," poverty in "Died of Starvation," appropriate marriage choices in "Report" and "Advice to the Girls," female sexuality and the double standard in "The Contrast," and finally, Reconstruction racial uplift work in her poems of the 1870s. On occasion it may also represent, very indirectly, the "private" history of Watkins Harper's own life in which feelings stemming from the autobiographical facts of orphanhood or death find covert emotional expression as, for example, in "The Dying Christian": "She faded from our vision, / Like a thing of love and light; / But we feel she lives for ever, / A spirit pure and bright."

Yet in Watkins Harper's poems the public-private dichotomy finds itself repeatedly deconstructed. Thus, if the public history of African Americans is seen most often to unfold within the "private" familial sphere, the poems' depiction of the slave mother's or the fugitive's wife's fate, for example, historicizes African-American family life and demonstrates the degree to which it is never "private." These characters are representative because history has inscribed itself on their bodies; yet Watkins Harper's narrational strategy is one that, unlike the sentimental discourse of the dominant cultural, seeks carefully to deemphasize the African-American body and focus instead on emotional response. In addition, as the poems' narrating persona, Watkins Harper empowered herself to comment upon their events, thus giving public voice to her own private opinions. And, in availing herself of contemporary public poetic conventions to portray her own private emotions, concerning orphanhood and death, for example, she was able to make public her deepest feelings while simultanenously veiling them behind the anonymity of conventional poetic discourse. Finally, just as other African-American writers sold their slave narratives or spiritual autobiographies after delivering antislavery speeches or sermons, so Watkins Harper sold her books of poems to the audiences that had come to hear her lecture. In this sense her poetry can be interpreted as autobiography, as an indirect account of an individual life.

If such poetry relied on sentimental discourse in order to call attention to the plight of the weak and the oppressed while refusing to scrutinize their bodily form, it was also designed in public performance to rationalize the speaker's body. To achieve these goals, Watkins Harper made use of an "aesthetics of restraint" whose chief "coping strategies," in Buell's words, were "narrative and meter"; in this aesthetics, emotion is contained "within formal limits conceded themselves to be limited" [Introduction to Selected Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]. Indeed, as critics like Frances Smith Foster, Maryemma Graham, and Patricia Liggins Hill have noted, Watkins Harper most often chose the narrative mode over the lyric, implicitly suggesting her desire to avoid the lyric, traditionally associated with the spontaneous expression of emotion. In Watkins Harper's poetry, passion is subdued and rationalized by means of narrativization. In order to narrate different nineteenth-century "public" and "private" histories, Watkins Harper relied on highly conventional poetic forms just as she utilized highly traditional rhetorical modes in her public speaking; it was perhaps the very traditionalism of her verse that made publication with a mainstream press possible and ensured her popularity throughout the nineteenth century. Specifically, the poetic forms she appropriated were the ballad and the hymn, and in the Reconstruction period, the epic as well, all three of which are ancient poetic modes grounded in incontrovertible forms of narrative authority and designed to bring together in community the disparate elements of the audience.

In appropriating the ballad form, Watkins Harper turned to the work of such contemporary poets as Longfellow who had adapted the European ballad to American subjects. In its origins the ballad grew out of oral folk culture as the product of an anonymous author who voices the concerns of the community; in addition, in the British tradition the broadside ballad came into being as a vehicle for political expression. As she made use of the ballad form, Watkins Harper invoked its oral, communal, and political functions in order to recount diverse social histories embedded in nineteenth-century American culture at large. In these ballads, plots unfold around social themes as characters interact with one another, often by means of dialogue, while Watkins Harper as narrator intervenes on occasion to provide authorial judgments and reinforce the moral point of the poem, as, for example, in "The Slave Auction": "Ye who have laid your love to rest, / And wept above their lifeless clay, / Know not the anguish of that breast, / Whose lov'd are rudely torn away." Rather than view such authorial commentary as a sign of excessive sermonizing and didacticism, we should recognize its important function as a vehicle that enabled Watkins Harper to authorize, and make public, her own personal opinions on social issues. It also encouraged her in other poems to become the poetic protagonist and speak out directly in her own voice as, for example, in "Free Labor": "I wear an easy garment, / O'er it no toiling slave / Wept tears of hopeless anguish, / In his passage to the grave."

Watkins Harper's awareness of the need to temper personal political passion through narrative control is articulated in her poem "A Mother's Heroism," which depicts Elijah Lovejoy's mother's reaction to the news of her son's death: "It seemed as if a fearful storm / Swept wildly round her soul; / A moment, and her fragile form / Bent 'neath its fierce control." Watkins Harper's personal convictions about mob violence are here projected onto the poetic protagonist. But speech enables Lovejoy's mother to regain control of her emotions and consequently to articulate a narrative of liberty: "' 'Tis well! 'tis well!' the mother said, / 'That thus my child should die. / 'Tis well that, to his latest breath, / He plead for liberty; / Truth nerved him for the hour of death, / And taught him how to die.'" If narrative here is a means of emotional and physical containment, allowing Lovejoy's mother's "fragile form" ultimately to resist the "fearful storm's" "fierce control" in order to impose its own control, so is Watkins Harper's conventional use of the ballad's formal elements—the four-line stanza composed of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines, whose brevity makes metrical substitutions difficult, and an ABAB (or ABCB) rhyme scheme that need not be technically perfect. In its origin, the simplicity and regularity of this stanzaic form served the purposes of memorability and popular appeal in oral folk culture. In Watkins Harper's poems the conventionality and formal limitations of the ballad stanza further served the poet's im perative of emotional restraint.

Familiarity with the ballad enabled Watkins Harper to experiment with another verse form not usually encompassed under the rubric of poetry—the hymn, whose stanzaic form is identical to that of the ballad. For, like other contemporary Unitarians and abolitionists such as Lowell, Longfellow, and Whittier, Watkins Harper wrote poems that are hymnal in nature and intent. As public poetry designed for oral performance and to move the entire congregation, the hymn is grounded in a literary philosophy of simplicity and clarity. As Isaac Watts, the great English hymn writer, whose compositions were freely adapted by American Unitarians, admitted: "In many of these composures, I have just permitted my verse to rise above a flat and indolent style … because I would neither indulge any bold metaphors, nor admit of hard words, nor tempt the ignorant worshipper to sing without his understanding" [Quoted in Donald Davie, English Hymnology in the Eighteenth Century, 1980].

It was Watkins Harper's genius to take the hymn form beyond religious exaltation to social appeal and, in the Reconstruction period, to political argument. Thus, "That Blessed Hope" speaks in traditional language of the poet's desire to join Christ in Heaven: "Help me, amidst this world of strife, / To long for Christ to reign, / That when He brings the crown of life, / I may that crown obtain!" But other poems directly address current social and political conditions in a discourse that, unlike that of the ballad, does not center on representative types but rather is given to reflective commentary that will stir the readers' moral conscience and commit them to social action. "Ethiopia," for example, predicts God's deliverance of this nation's sons from slavery—"Redeemed from dust and freed from chains, / Her sons shall lift their eyes"—while "Bible Defence of Slavery" specifically attacks the American churches' support of slavery and the hypocrisy of their missionary efforts abroad: "Oh! when ye pray for heathen lands, / And plead for their dark shores, / Remember Slavery's cruel hands / Make heathens at your doors!" If the hymn verse in its simplicity and regularity was designed, like the ballad, to appeal to popular understanding, it also enabled Watkins Harper once again to contain her own political passion within formal limits and thereby legitimate the radicalness of her political stance.

Watkins Harper's poems also appeared, of course, in printed form, thus allowing her to abstract herself from the public's gaze and invert that strategy of looking away adopted by Greenfield's audience in order to appreciate her music as "sounds right sweet." Published singly in newspapers, the poems were also brought together in book form, making it possible to read the poetic volume as a continuous narrative and seek out links between the poems. Although we have no way of knowing to what extent Watkins Harper was able to control her own publication process, we may nonetheless speculate as to how the sequence of poems in each volume might add to our understanding of both her social ideology and her methods of appealing to contemporary audiences. Like the collected volumes of Lydia Sigourney and other contemporary white women poets, none of Watkins Harper's volumes may be said to form a progressive linear narrative; instead, they appear to resist strict organization. But the poems within each volume, as well as from volume to volume, are unified by a common ethos—evangelical Unitarianism—and by the recurrent emergence of related themes; moreover, the positioning of the first and last poems of each volume as well as the additions made from edition to edition function as a kind of cultural statement.

If there is a particular structural principle operative in Watkins Harper's two surviving antebellum collections of poems, I suggest that it is a framing device in which the first and last sets of poems tend to constellate around a particular topic, or in which the last poems function as a kind of counterweight to the first. Thus, the initial and final poems of the 1854 Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects focus for the most part on the topic of slavery, while those of the central section are concerned with multiple themes—death, temperance, marriage, female sexuality, and so forth. Such a framing device tends to foreground the material of the frame itself rather than that which is placed inside it. In this instance it embeds within the frame some of Watkins Harper's most personal concerns—death, orphanhood, the social construction of women's sexual and marital roles—allowing these to recede somewhat from the reader's line of vision. But it also points to the presence of a common thread that unites all these social issues—the perversion of power relations between strong and weak, whether between master and slave, man and woman, or rich and poor—of which slavery remained for Watkins Harper the most egregious. The dominance of slavery in Watkins Harper's thinking is further reinforced by the addition of a new group of poems at the end of her 1857 edition of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, almost all of which focus on this one topic—"The Tennessee Hero," "Free Labor," "Lines," "The Dismissal of Tyng," and "The Slave Mother (A Tale of the Ohio)."

The very last poems of both the 1854 and 1857 editions of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, however, explicitly seek to link the social oppression of women within the "private" sphere to larger political issues. They portray women whose lives are constrained, even destroyed, by male political action, be it American slavery or other forms of bondage. Thus, "Eva's Farewell," a retelling of the death of Stowe's Eva, who refuses to live any longer within the context of Southern slavery, concludes the 1854 edition, while "The Slave Mother (A Tale of the Ohio)," a poetic account of Margaret Garner's murder of her child in Ohio in 1856, is appended to the 1857 edition. Finally, two biblical poems, "Rizpah, the Daughter of Ai" and "Ruth and Naomi," complete the 1857 volume. If "Ruth and Naomi" recounts the well-known story of female friendship in which the widowed Naomi exiles herself from the land of Moab and returns to Bethlehem accompanied by her faithful daughter-in-law Ruth, "Rizpah, the Daughter of Ai" narrates a much less familiar story. Turning to the biblical account of Joshua's conquest of Canaan, it retells from the woman's point of view Rizpah's sorrow over David's sacrifice of her sons to the Gibeonites as a penance for Saul's betrayal. All four poems thus illustrate how from biblical times to the present women within the supposedly protected domestic sphere have been made to suffer as a consequence of male political actions.

Watkins Harper's poems, as we have noted, occasionally served as accompaniments to her speeches. Indeed, in Watkins Harper's canon verse and lectures cannot be considered isolated aesthetic objects that exist separately from one another but must be viewed as coextensive not only with each other but with her essays and fiction as well. Poems and prose interact continuously as social concerns find their way equally, and often in exact detail, into both forms. As Frances Foster has shown, for example [in A Brighter Coming Day: A Francis Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, 1990], Watkins Harper's description of "the stain of blood and tears upon the warp and woof of cloth made by slave labor is woven into both her poem "Free Labor" and her 1855 "Free Labor Movement" speech; and her antebellum praise of Moses in the essay "Our Greatest Want"—"I like the character of Moses"—is later developed in her postbellum epic. Aunt Chloe's Reconstruction political efforts in Sketches of Southern Life are echoed by the fictional character of Aunt Linda in Iola Leroy (1892), just as the poetic hero's martyrdom in "A Story of the Rebellion" is embodied in the slave Tom in the same novel. Watkins Harper's appeal to the "women of America" to demand justice for the Negro in her 1892 speech "Woman's Political Future" is reiterated in the 1895 poem "An Appeal to My Countrywomen," and the 1895 poem "Only a Word" is actually embedded in a later essay, "True and False Politeness" (1898). Throughout the volumes, poems on slavery and temperance make concrete the abstract propositions set forth in the speeches and essays. And finally, Watkins Harper's belief in the redemptive power of Jesus Christ reverberates as a constant theme in all her writings, poetry and prose.