The Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt Recovery Project
Professor Elizabeth Renker, The Ohio State University Department of English

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919), a popular, prolific, and acclaimed poet during her lifetime both in the U.S. and abroad, published more than 600 poems in venues including popular, influential, and well-regarded newspapers; popular and elite magazines; anthologies; periodicals for children; and eighteen books. No firm total number of her poems can be established at this time; the results of this project to date make it clear that more poems remain to be discovered. Others have surely been lost.

Born on a farm in Fayette County, Kentucky into slaveholding families on both her maternal and paternal sides, she began publishing her poems in the 1850s while still a teenager. Two of the most powerful editors of the age, George D. Prentice of the well-known political newspaper The Louisville Daily Journal and Robert E. Bonner of the blockbuster story paper The New York Ledger, published her regularly and brought her work to a wide audience. Her early poems typically appeared under her initials, S.M.B., or under her maiden name, Sallie M. Bryan. 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 counterpart, The Louisville Evening Bulletin.

In June 1861, just as the Civil War was breaking out, she married John James Piatt ("J.J."), a poet and abolitionist from Ohio. The newlyweds moved to Washington, D.C., where J.J. worked as a government clerk in the Lincoln administration under antislavery firebrand and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase. Sarah and J.J. and their growing family would live in multiple locations across the coming decades: in Georgetown and D.C.; at West Liberty, Cleves and North Bend, Ohio; in Queenstown, Ireland (now Cobh), where they moved in 1882 for J.J.’s new job as U.S. Consul, Cork; and in Dublin. Upon their return to the U.S. in 1895, the Piatts lived in several locations before they eventually moved back to their home in North Bend, Ohio, in 1898.

Despite her 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.

The Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt Recovery Project, which is ongoing, at present includes the following subprojects:

Oral Histories and Other Recordings

This site collects 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

This site collects 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.”