The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. Cohen

      How to Read a Nineteenth-Century Poem

      On Not Reading Poems

      The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America is an exploration of the lived history of literary writing in the United States, which I hope will illuminate for contemporary readers some of the many ways in which people in the past engaged with poems in their daily lives. Rather than offering a history of poetry, this book instead attempts to think through a variety of social relations that poems made possible, whether materially (as when one person transcribes and sends a poem to another, for example) or theoretically (such as the imagined history projected by a nineteenth-century genre like the ballad). The next six chapters thus open up a series of arguments about the encounters between nineteenth-century people and their poems, in which “their poems” is a deliberately ambiguous possessive meant to conflate the poems people read, the poems they wrote, and the poems they used in other ways. While I try to be as precise as possible when I discuss how encounters with poems structured the experiences of much larger forms of being, I also speculate a great deal. This project partially falls within the history of reading, and reading is a speculative enterprise. I will examine many instances of readers reading poems, which I draw from different kinds of archival sources, but to introduce the problems of reading historically, I would like to begin with two scenes of people not reading poems. Nonreading, as we will see, can also be a productive enterprise, one that takes many forms, from ignoring, forgetting, and suppressing to copying, transcribing, reciting, memorizing, collecting, exchanging, and mimicking. All of these ways to not read a poem are important counterpoints to their more obvious alternative, and together they help me ask: What might a poetic history of the United States look like when it is generated from a place beyond the bounds of “reading” as we typically understand it?

      My question is partly defensive, since the engagements between people and poems that I take up throughout The Social Lives of Poems often have a problematic relationship to reading. I am mostly interested in poems that have not been read in a long time; poems that, based on what I can deduce from their archival context, may never have been read at all; and poems I assume some readers might think not worth reading or, at least, and this is a key distinction, not closely. Put another way, many of the poems I consider have a vexed connection to literariness. I will respond in part by showing that debates about taste, value, and merit can be found throughout the entire period covered in this study: people in the 1790s questioned the social and literary value of broadside ballads; in the 1830s, of antislavery verse; in the 1860s, of war poetry; and in the 1880s, of minstrel songs and slave spirituals. But for now I want to look at some fictional moments in which nineteenth-century ideas of value bracket and are

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