Through Ohio State’s Knowledge Bank, we offer a curated look into Piatt’s extensive body of work, bringing forgotten materials to the forefront of digital humanities research.
Despite Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt’s significant body of work and a national and international reputation for half a century, she fell into obscurity upon her death in 1919. At that time, modernist poets were turning against their poetic predecessors for their alleged stodginess, conventionality, and excessive emotion, sometimes called (derogatorily) sentimentality. Sentimental male poets were replaced with alternative male writers like the newly rediscovered Herman Melville, while women were not only minimized but expunged from a newly emergent canon. Piatt was rediscovered in the 1990s by numerous scholars working independently of one another. Since that time, she has quickly gained stature as a major artist.
Podcasts
“Discovering Sarah Piatt: America’s Lost Great Writer,” hosted by Elizabeth Renker
“Discovering and Recovering Sarah Piatt, an interview with Elizabeth Renker,” Voices of Excellence podcast (hosted by David Staley)
Oral Histories and Other Recordings
A collection of interviews with researchers who contributed to the first and second waves of Piatt’s recovery or who are working on topics that illuminate her life and times. It also features recorded readings and responses to individual poems.
The Early Poems of Sarah Morgan Bryan (Piatt) in the New York Ledger, 1857-1861
A collection of all the known poems she published in the Ledger between 25 April 1857 (when she was not yet 21) and 18 May 1861, just one month prior to her marriage. With one exception, none of the Ledger poems is currently available in any published edition. (Paula Bernat Bennett included “The Memorials” in Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt, 2001.) In addition to the 86 currently known poems in the Ledger, she also published no fewer than 80 poems in The Louisville Daily Journal and its evening edition, The Louisville Evening Bulletin.
Piatt herself never collected the Sallie M. Bryan poems in book form during her life. (She reprinted a few of them in her later books.) Readers interested in the Ledger poems will also want to consult the “Index of Sallie M. Bryan’s Poems in The New-York Ledger, 2 Feb. 1856 - 31 Aug. 1861” by OSU doctoral candidate Kayla Probeyahn, available at the Resources for Teaching and Study page listed below.
The Capital, 1871-1880
This digital version of The Capital includes every issue published in volumes 1-9, from March 12, 1871 through February 22, 1880. A rare Washington, D.C. weekly newspaper and important historical record of Reconstruction, this paper was founded and managed by Donn Piatt, Sarah Piatt's cousin by marriage, who often featured her poems in its pages.
Resources for Teaching and Study
Resources for Teaching and Study is an ongoing project that at present includes first-wave Piatt scholar and Lutheran pastor Larry R. Michaels’ catalogue of Piatt’s Biblical allusions; a co-authored essay by first-wave scholars Paula Bernat Bennett and Karen L. Kilcup about Piatt’s recovery and importance; and Kayla Probeyahn’s “Index of Sallie M. Bryan’s Poems in The New-York Ledger, 2 Feb. 1856 - 31 Aug. 1861.”