LibriVox volunteers bring you 10 recordings of An Apology for Sadness by Anne Lynch Botta. This was the Weekly Poetry project for March 13, 2011.

Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta was an American poet, writer, teacher and socialite whose home was the central gathering place of the literary elite of her era.

At Mrs. Botta's receptions every Saturday night, attendees would find the most well-known writers, actors and artists, such as Poe, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Horace Greeley, Richard Henry Stoddard, Andrew Carnegie, Mary Mapes Dodge, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Butler, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Delia Bacon, Grace Greenwood, Bayard Taylor, William Cullen Bryant, Helen Hunt Jackson, actress Fanny Kemble, Daniel Webster, and many more. Her friend Kate Sanborn started her literary lecturing career at these receptions. Said a Boston writer: "It was not so much what Mrs. Botta did for literature with her own pen, as what she helped others to do, that will make her name a part of the literary history of the country." (summary from Wikipedia)