Known among the Middle Atlantic intelligentsia and literati as a witty and versatile writer, considered by George Washington and the Chevalier de La Luzerne a gracious and elegant host, Annis Boudinot Stockton (1736-1801) wrote over a hundred poems on the most important political and social issues of her day. Only for the Eye of a Friend brings back into public view the works of a poet whose published works and manuscrits earned her, in her day, a wide audience among colonists and international readers alike. The quality and quantity of Stockton"s literary output makes her an apt counterpart to he seventeenth-century predecessor Anne Bradstreet and the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson.