Literary Connecticut by Eric D. Lehman

Author:Eric D. Lehman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2014-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Author and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the most gifted and influential crusaders for women’s rights and economic equality. Library of Congress.

Two poets, Emma Hart Willard and Laura Hawley Thurston, took their Connecticut educations and shared their gifts for education and literature. Born in 1787 in Berlin, a descendant of Thomas Hooker, Emma worked tirelessly for the “cause of female education” as a teacher. Like the Beecher girls, her path toward education began early, with her parents encouraging her to participate in family discussions and debates. By age sixteen, she was already heading the Berlin Academy, where she began her formal schooling. While instructing there, she also taught during alternate seasons at two other schools in Hartford. By age twenty, she was heading up academies in her native state, as well as in Massachusetts, Vermont and Troy, New York. She believed the education of women had been for too long overshadowed by male-centered philosophies and that it was essential that women learn things like mathematics, which would do more than promote beauty and youth. She penned essays, speeches, poetry and textbooks like History of the United States, Republic of the Americas. While her work in education was progressive, her works in poetry were more limited. She wrote one poem commemorating the centennial anniversary of Farmington called “Our Fathers.” Another poem, “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,” captures the rhyme-dominated verse popular in mid-century:

When in the dead of night I lie

And gaze upon the trackless sky,

The star-bespangled heavenly scroll,

The boundless waters as they roll, —

I feel thy wondrous power to save

From the perils of the stormy wave:

Rocked in the cradle of the deep,

I calmly rest and soundly sleep.

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