cannot be recuperated by “reading against the grain”), I do so in part because open secrets disturb what is better left unsaid or unread.18 For much of the twentieth century, nineteenth-century poetry was not part of American literature. Canonical accounts of American literary history, stretching from the work of George Santayana and Van Wyck Brooks in the 1910s to the “New Americanists” of the 1980s, excised American poetry (versions of Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville excepted), for complex institutional and ideological as well as aesthetic reasons, leaving behind a literary history that considered poetry and prose two separate traditions.19 The clean separation of poetry and prose in the study of American literature may seem normal now but would have been baffling in the nineteenth century, when most authors wrote in every genre; poems appeared in newspapers, novels, and other prosaic formats; and readers were promiscuous in their tastes. In the past twenty years, however, there has been a surge of interest in nineteenth-century American poetry.20 This surge was galvanized by recovery projects in feminist and African American literary scholarship, and it has accelerated since the publication, in the 1990s, of major anthologies edited by John Hollander, Cheryl Walker, Joan Sherman, and Paula Bennett.21 Even if nineteenth-century American poetry is not yet, and possibly never will be, a field (its asymmetry with Victorian British poetry is structural and dates to the nineteenth century itself), it is no longer possible to read it in terms of lack or impoverishment. Nineteenth-century American poetry is large; it contains multitudes.
Having said that, though, I want to make a final point about how contemporary practices of reading poetry sometimes obscure our understanding of its past. The word “poetry” will appear relatively infrequently in the following pages. I am far more interested in nineteenth-century poems than I am in nineteenth-century poetry, for “nineteenth-century poetry” is an invention of the twentieth century.22 This jejune point (all periods are conceived retrospectively) has a twist, for “poetry” is a term with almost no purchase on the subjects of this book, because in the nineteenth century, poetry is not a genre. Poems have operative functions for nineteenth-century readers and writers, but poetry is a retro-projection. Of course, I do not mean that the nineteenth century had no concept of “poetry” as something distinct from other forms of writing. John Stuart Mill’s essay “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” (1859) is only the most famous English-language example of a much longer history of thought on the question “what is poetry?” My point is that “poetry” refers to an abstraction—something both immaterial and impossible to localize in any poem or even any genre. While all genres are abstractions, they have historical value if they exist in reflexive relation to their own myriad specific instances. This is not true for “poetry” in the nineteenth century, because that abstraction has no meaningful affiliation with any nineteenth-century object. Nineteenth-century poems did have clear, legible relations to specific genres, formats, media, modes of circulation, and forms of discourse and address, and nineteenth-century readers knew how to read these relations in ways that twentieth-century readers did not. For example, magazine verse, which has often seemed hopelessly abstract and ahistorical—that is, generic—took on meaning through its location in the magazine. The format and the medium supplied historical force to the poems, but this force cannot be isolated or read out of any poem’s words alone. The Social Lives of Poems will have much to say about poems that are “generic” in this forceful sense and how such forces were generated, understood, and deployed by readers and writers.
The bifurcation of poetry and prose therefore has worked in tandem with two related processes: the abstraction of “poetry” into a synonym for pure expressiveness (this is what Mill means when he says that “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” or what Jackson identifies as “lyricization”) and a concomitant elevation of “poetry” into a standard for absolute literariness.23 This tripartite process of abstraction, isolation, and elevation has meant that “poetry” is something few poems, and certainly few early American poems, can easily be.24 As Mill’s essay demonstrates, it is not yet possible to talk about both “poetry” and a poem, except in terms of the latter’s relative failure to realize the former. The idea that “poetry” can mean something both abstract and also specific (the idea that there can be such a thing as nineteenth-century poetry, or African American poetry, or American poetry) comes later, at the turn of the twentieth century, and the formation of this latter-day nongenre is an event this book only glimpses at its very end.
So, when I say that I will consider poems more often than I consider poetry, I mean two things: I will look carefully at (that is, read) poems that almost certainly fail any test of literariness. But I will also consider poems outside the abstraction of “poetry.” Poetry was not a nineteenth-century genre; instead, in the nineteenth century, there were many poetic genres that operated hierarchically but also in dynamic tension with each other.25 Poems were not all equal, but their relative values and functions could change over time. One of the major through-lines of The Social Lives of Poems will be to track the movements of certain genres—specifically, ballads and their ancillary forms, including minstrel songs, contraband songs, and spirituals—as they moved up and down the hierarchy of genres in nineteenth-century America. The genres on which I focus were never clearly disarticulated from each other, and a term like “ballad” was ascribed to widely varying types of poems. As we shall see, much of the social charge that ballads carried was generated by the ambiguities of their uncertain relations to other kinds of poems above and below them in the hierarchy: ballads could be both priceless and worthless, the vestiges of ancient culture and racial authenticity (which I discuss in Chapters 4 and 6), vehicles of divisive politics (Chapter 2) or national affiliation (Chapter 3), highly aestheticized forms of value and sentiment (Chapter 5), or the cheap medium of scandal and schlock peddled by figures like Jonathan Plummer and Thomas Shaw (whom I take up in Chapter 1). These peddler-poets helped to constitute legitimate poetic culture through their marginality, the worthlessness and scurrility of their ballads defining, through their exclusion, the parameters of literariness and public decorum.
If the shifts and transformations of ballads in the nineteenth century form one through-line in this book, the other through-line is the career of John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier is not so much the book’s focus as he is a witness to the histories that it tells.26 Whittier was one of the most popular nineteenth-century writers, and his popular readership was central to his authorial persona—that is, he was understood as America’s most well-loved and widely read author, intimately familiar to readers from very different geographic, social, economic, and cultural places. The earlier examples of Barker and Awtell attest to some of the ways readers made Whittier’s popular persona contribute to their own investments in his poems. His popularity was a postbellum phenomenon, and it marked a dramatic shift from Whittier’s earlier identification with radical abolition. Chapters 2 and 5 will examine this transformation; as we shall see, many readers attributed Whittier’s power as an author (of everything from antislavery invective to regionalist nostalgia) to his facility with ballads. Whittier’s work therefore provides convenient points of access through which to view various phases in the social history of poems during America’s long nineteenth century.
A roadmap of the project is as follows: the first three chapters track the circulation of ballads and other, related kinds of poems in three antebellum places: the local culture of New England circa 1800 (Chapter 1), the antislavery movement in Philadelphia in the 1830s and 1840s (Chapter 2), and the (imagined) borderlands between North and South and black and white during the Civil War (
