Eliza Townsend.

About Eliza Townsend

Eliza Townsend was a 19th-century American poet. Though she wrote mostly anonymously, she was at the end of her life considered the first U.S. woman poet to receive critical acclaim. Nicholas Biddle said that a prize ode Townsend wrote for The Port Folio while he was editor of the magazine was, in his opinion, the finest poem of its kind which at that time had been written in the United States. Many of her other pieces received the best approval of the period, but, as she kept her authorship a secret, it did not enhance her personal reputation. In much of her work, there was a religious and poetical dignity, with all the evidences of a fine and richly-cultivated understanding, which entitled her to be ranked among the distinguished literary women who were her contemporaries.