The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

periodicals and poems that featured domestic ideals empowered Martha McMillan and gave her subjectivity in her home. In women’s periodicals, sentimental poetry was a genre primarily written by and for women. Women used domestic periodicals to publish single works of poetry that they usually did not publish in larger print collections. However, newspapers and magazines in the nineteenth- century would not often copyright poems, causing what Meredith L. McGill calls “the culture of reprinting” (Sorby 421). When magazines published poems, the periodical did not give credit to the real author, and so readers usually gave recognition to the magazine itself. Because individual poems were so widely circulated, readers felt like the poem belonged to them. This sense of ownership and authorship of poetry was “empowering for the masses, because it [gave] them the means to express themselves” (Sorby 422). The collapse of authorship in nineteenth-century poetry let readers connected personally and emotionally with poems, and “at any moment the reader [was] ready to turn into a writer” (Sorby 422). The genre of sentimentalism was perfect for this attitude of authorship—because of its emphasis on emotions and nostalgia, “anyone who can feel […] can read and write poetry” (Sorby 427). Especially for first-person poems, readers were able to situate themselves into the “I,” and thus poems became part of a reader’s own biography (Sorby 426). The emotional sphere of sentimental poetry invited readers to participate, and thus women readers of religious and domestic periodicals simultaneously became writers. Angela Sorby’s analysis of sentimental poetry informs McMillan’s own poetry, quoted and original, in her 1868 journal. Martha’s entry on January 15, 1868 features a poetic quotation from Fanny R.’s “Home” essay: “‘I sit alone, alone in thought / And thronging visions come’ / I feel myself a girl again / A girl at home.” The first two lines of this poem are directly from 51