she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person’s name, which was Whistler. She warn’t ever the same, after that; she never complained, but she kind of pined away and did not live long…. Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was alive, and it didn’t seem right that there warn’t nobody to make some about her, now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn’t make it go, somehow.3
Even though Huck appreciates her verses, this episode (the most caustic piece of satire in the novel) could be read as a death-knell for nineteenth-century poetry.4 Like her books, Emmeline is full of “stuff and poetry,” which comes “out of her own head” yet never demands her “to stop to think” as she slaps down lines and then scratches them out in a process that “warn’t particular” because it attends only to the materiality of rhyme, just as Huck attends only to the materiality of the books on the parlor table, looking in but hilariously not reading them. The ironclad association between death and poetry proves fatal for Emmeline, who pines away after hanging fire on a failed rhyme, a joke that would be cruel if her creative process were not so utterly de-animated as to make her seem already dead long before. At the very least, the heavily embodied, nearly embalmed work of Emmeline’s poetics lacks any classical sense of inspiration—her poems breathe death, not life. Yet if verse “tributes” mark death even when they do not also produce it, then Emmeline’s death is incomplete, for “there warn’t nobody to make some about her, now she was gone.” This “didn’t seem right,” so Huck tries to “sweat out a verse or two” himself, but “can’t make it go, somehow.”
Somehow. In these scenes, poems are everywhere and yet nowhere, everywhere because they are nowhere—like Emmeline, whose death puts her on display throughout the house in the relics that attest to a presence made possible by dying. The missing poems structure social relations (private conversations, public tributes) between men and women, individuals and institutions, and the living and the dead, yet they are so generic as to have no identity and need none. That said, I hope some readers will have noticed that my quotation elides Emmeline’s most famous tribute, her “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d,” emphatically delivered in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which for so many readers has condensed all that they think was awful about nineteenth-century verse (“comically mawkish” in the words of one recent account, which finds nothing else worth saying about it).5 Although I yearn to know more about those poems Huck did not read, and that poem he could not sweat out, I too have little to say about the poem Twain allows him and us to read. I love nineteenth-century “stuff and poetry,” but I have often found myself reading, writing, and talking around nineteenth-century poems, with much to say about everything except them.
To some extent, this book investigates why. A preliminary conclusion is that nineteenth-century poems are often most interesting for the ways nineteenth-century people did or did not read them and the ways they did or did not sweat them out. That is, this book details how poems facilitated actions, like reading, writing, reciting, copying, inscribing, scissoring, exchanging, or circulating, that positioned people within densely complex webs of relation. These webs could be communal (Chapters 1, 2, and 5), political (Chapters 2, 3, and 4), historical (Chapters 4 and 5), or racial (Chapters 3, 4, and 6). As every chapter demonstrates, these webs were both intellectual and affective, linking readers with their poems but also with themselves, with each other, with the dead, with authors, with the past, and with various forms of imagined community—a term original to nineteenth-century poetics and not twentieth-century political theory (as Chapter 4 explains). I cannot reach these worlds of lived experience by reading poems in the way I normally would, using the protocols of close reading, since close reading emphasizes the careful analysis of formal, complex uses of language, while producing and valuing interpretation above all else. A large majority of nineteenth-century poems seem unable to hold up to the rigors of this kind of relation. Part of my aim in this book is to recapture some of the ways poems were meaningful outside of a model based on literary analysis; these alternative modes of making meaning can be difficult to see when interpretation is the goal. The relations that made nineteenth-century poems meaningful for nineteenth-century readers therefore require different readings from us, and The Social Lives of Poems will demonstrate how a contemporary critical account of poetry might engage with and integrate historical readings of poems.
On Reading Poems
Let me now introduce one such scene of historical reading. “For a long time it has been a cherished purpose of mine, stranger though I am, to write you,” explained the Civil War veteran N. G. Awtell in an 1873 letter to Whittier. Chapter 5 will work through several dozen of these epistolary encounters between Whittier and his readers. Awtell’s letter is unusually descriptive however, and makes a worthy introduction to a scene of reading as it looked in the nineteenth century. Renewing an intention to establish in fact a relationship long cherished in fancy, Awtell explained to Whittier,
That purpose was recalled last night, on my return from the evening service, by finding in the hands of my eldest son, two small volumes of blue and gold, in which he seemed to be intensely interested. The volumes are somewhat soiled, and they are pencil-marked on many a page. Long years ago they were a gift to me from my father-in-law…. Th ose volumes were an inspiration to me in the “moral warfare” which ushered in the Great Conflict which resulted in the accomplishment of some of the stirring prophecies which are found in them; and they were my companions through all the bloody struggle. What a troop of recollections come thronging into my mind as I look upon those volumes! Th e bidding adieu to the dear ones at home, the rush across Penn. in open cars, the toilsome marches under the broiling sun, or through the long dark nights, the weary days of waiting and watching, floundering in the mud, and snow, and rain, the storm of battle, and all the grim and ghastly scenes of war. How at times the burning words read in those volumes have fired my soul! Read in many a quiet nook, in Mary land, and on Virginia’s sacred soil, and under the magnolias and Palmettos of South Carolina; read by bivouac fires in the ears of many of my noble comrades, who reddened that southern soil with their life blood; and in the presence of dusky forms, whose souls caught their inspiration; read too in “the smoking hell of battle,” and on the hospital’s tiresome couch! Surely all these recollections are a sufficient apology for intruding upon your attention. I owe you a debt of gratitude for these volumes. So oft did I commune with them before the war, that their author was like a personal friend to me; and now he is to me as a faithful comrade who has stood by my side, and shared my tent, and with me felt the battle’s fiery breath, and has been true in defeat and in victory.6
Like the notebooks crafted with painstaking care by the peddler Thomas Shaw, which I consider in Chapter 1, or like the collaborative books of the antislavery community that I examine in Chapter 2, the blue and gold volumes (likely an edition of Whittier’s Poetical Works published by Ticknor and Fields in 1857) that Awtell discovered in his son’s hands one night condense a whole system of social relations in their soiled and pencil-marked pages. Such smudges and marks poignantly archive encounters with the poems over time, in which the physical connections between hand, pencil, and book mark out the psychic
