I liked a lot of the poems, only loved a select few, but it was still very insightful and informative. It's very interesting to see early American authors and poets, even before America itself was a thing, and relate to them.

One of my concerns reading this collection was whether or not it would include diverse poets, poets of color and immigrants, which is does very little. There are at least five Black poets starting from Phyllis Wheatley and ending with Gwendolyn Brooks, at least one Jewish poet, and a handful of poets who were immigrants, although the number dwindles once America is established as a country. I was worried about if racist, slaveholding poets would be included. The poetry collection isn't titled "Great Poems by Great American Women," so I can agree that's my fault for assuming. My thoughts on this is of course swayed by my position in time, because I'm sure when they put this book together they weren't thinking to include that because it was something so commonplace it went without saying, but I especially thought of it because of the brief biographies about the poets before the poems. Most of them include whether or not the woman was married or had children. The fact that that was included is a shining example of the position in time the editor lived in. Anyway, whether or not they were slaveholders is not included, in fact I'd say many of the women were from Northern states, but there are two poets included who's works I purposefully avoided because I learned of their beliefs a few months ago. Charlotte Perkins and her best friend / cousin(?) Grace Ellery Channing were proud eugenicists. The beliefs and actions these women took in their lives, I think, are more important than whether or not they were married and had children. At that point I wondered if other women had similar beliefs, which would sour my opinion of the poems I liked if I found that out. I don't know where this essay is going. I just feel like that information should've been presented. It also gives more context to the type of America those women lived in, even for the women born in the same year but in different places and different religious upbringings and whatnot. Not that this is a history book, but it is there without even trying.