Social Realism in The Select Poems of Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

This study examines the contemporary social issues reflected in the select poems of Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt. This also examines and revisits the forgotten poet¿s more than a half-century¿s literary contribution to the American Poetry. Sarah Piatt¿s personal and social exposures to the realism of her contemporary 19th Century literary era make the subject interesting. While her poems exhibit her poignant awareness of her personal encounters, her poems express an anxiety and anguish as experienced by her. She nurtures in herself a painful grievance against the de-humanizing forces in the society like civil war, slavery, subjugation of women and political corruption. She constantly made an attempt to unveil the impact of all these evils on humans. Her poems are written in a conventional poetic form using all the literary devices of alliteration, assonance, personification and other poetic devices to decorate her poems and to make her poems impregnated with rich content. The study of her poems shows that her poems serve the humanity and the readers through the discussion of human conflicts and domestic hurdles and also societal struggles.