The Complete Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1884 - 1935

Brings together nearly five hundred poems by Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman, one of the most influential thinkers of her time. This book also makes available a full index of poem titles to assist scholars, students, and critics in finding and contextualizing Gilman's poetry.

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This volume brings together for the first time nearly five hundred poems by Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman, one of the most influential thinkers of her time. It represents the significant poetry this writer, lecturer, feminist, and pioneer sociologist chose to publish during her lifetime. The introduction places the poetry within its cultural and historical context at the turn of the nineteenth-century, this volume also includes extensive endnotes, an index, textual notes and a forward by Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt of Shepherd University that further illuminates Gilman's life and work. This collection also makes available for the first time a full index of poem titles to assist scholars, students, and critics in finding and contextualizing Gilman's poetry. Known today for "The Yellow Wall-paper" and the utopian novel, Herland, Gilman began her career with poetry. In 1890, the publication of "Similar Cases" in the Nationalist ("the chief organ of the Bellamy doctrines") established her as a "poet of nationalism."
She attracted the attention of Professor Lester Ward whose "Gynaeocentric Theory" was in Gilman's estimation "the greatest single contribution to the world's thought since Evolution." After her first volume of poems, In This Our World (1893), was published, she gained recognition among literary circles frequented by Ina Coolbrith, Edwin Markham, and Charles Lummis. Women and Economics (1898) assured Gilman the international reputation that her poetry had begun as a leading voice for social reform alongside luminaries as Jane Addams and Susan B. Anthony.