Poems

Elizabeth Stoddard's poetry burns with a longing that feels almost dangerous for its era. Written in the mid-nineteenth century by a woman who refused to be quiet, these poems ache for freedom, for love, for a self not constrained by convention. Stoddard writes of desire as entrapment and freedom as the thing always just out of reach, the threshold this poet perpetually stands upon but never quite crosses. The poems move through landscapes of yearning: lovers who cannot be held, dreams that dissolve at waking, the weight of a world that demands women's resignations. There is rage here, quiet and smoldering. There is grief for the selves women were not permitted to become. Stoddard's voice is unmistakable, direct where her contemporaries turned coy, specific where they generalized. These are poems for anyone who has felt the cage of expectation and dared to want something more.