ties of family that passed reformism from his father-in-law to son’s him and then again from him to his son. The books then trace his history in the war, bringing forth a “troop of recollections” that march with him back across the war time landscape (like Union soldiers, the volumes are in blue), from his home in Rhode Island, through Pennsylvania, Mary land, Virginia, and down into South Carolina. Memories of reading Whittier’s poems link experiences of “the weary days of waiting and watching … and all the grim and ghastly scenes of war” to the literary tropes of warfare (“the smoking hell of battle”) and the American landscape (“Virginia’s sacred soil,” “the magnolias and Palmettos of South Carolina”). Poems “read by bivouac fires in the ears of many of my noble comrades” transfer to bodies that later “reddened that southern soil with their life blood.” These deeply embedded memories and associations in turn bind Awtell to Whittier, a stranger and yet “like a personal friend to me.”
Awtell records the bond between the material volumes he possessed and the emotional values they possessed for him: the “debt of gratitude” he owes Whittier is, I think, more than merely a metaphor. The poems are not abstracted texts—like Barker, he never specifies which poems he read, nor does he assess their literary qualities or even what he thinks of them as poetry. Instead, Awtell relates to the books through the attachments they foster and the personal, familial, poetic, imaginative, and historical memories they record. Therefore, if his account cannot be characterized as a critical reading of Whittier’s poems, Whittier’s poems are valuable to him (as they are to Barker and company) precisely because they do not require such a reading. In place of a critical posture in which the poem becomes a piece of language that demands interpretation, Whittier’s volumes prompt a familiar and familial relation in which the poems stand in for a whole host of intimacies.
The Social Lives of Poems focuses on engagements such as these. I work across an extended nineteenth century (from the 1790s to 1903), examining how people used poems, how they read them, and how their readings—what they read, how they read, and what they thought about what and how they read—can themselves be read to recapture otherwise evanescent traces of the past. To “use” a poem, in this project, includes a broader range of functions than poems are usually imagined to have.7 As a critical term, “use” helps me link the material worlds of poems and poetic genres with their textuality and language, in order to build a history of literariness and genre from a wide array of engagements with poems, of which reading is one option among many.8 Poems long occupied a complex position in the history of social life and sociality, I argue, and their roles in creating lived and imagined relations among people require an outlook that includes but is not limited to reading. While some readers found in poems a resource for critical interpretation, literary and aesthetic pleasure, and the enjoyment of linguistic complexity, many more turned to poems for spiritual and psychic well-being; adopted popular song tunes to spread rumor, scandal, satire, and news; or used poems as a medium for personal and family memories, as well as local and national affiliations, as the following chapters demonstrate.9 While people sometimes testified directly to these kinds of intimate associations with their poems in letters or diaries, for example, I also read the history of use out of a diverse set of practices that include acts of quoting, reciting, memorizing, rewriting, parodying, reading collectively, reading aloud, exchanging, scrapbooking, cataloging, editing, anthologizing, and transcribing poems.
Therefore, throughout this book, I suspend the assumption that poems are meant to be read.10 This is not an argument for distant or surface reading, for uncritical or reparative reading. I will closely read and interpret many poems, and I will closely read many different readings of poems, which I take from various kinds of archives. But my goal in opening up the material and social histories of poems is not to fold that context back in to my interpretation of the poem. Instead, I want as much as possible to take my cue as a reader from the practices of nineteenth-century readers. As we have already seen, things happen when people read poems (even when they don’t “read” them), and it is not always clear what those things are, nor is it always clear what reading a poem means. But is also not clear that reading a poem is necessarily the proper way to use it. This last point questions a belief that is so basic to critical practice as to seem hardly critical at all: namely, reading is what you do with poems. In fact, the twentieth-century history of lyricization, provocatively theorized by Virginia Jackson, could be an extended elaboration of critics’ longstanding assumption that poems want to be read.11 Lacking a reader, they supply a “speaker,” who “reads” (that is, recites) the poem in a fictive temporality, always now again. Yet the ambiguous “they” of my last sentence demonstrates the ambiguity of lyric reading: as Jackson demonstrates, critical readings supply the speaker; poems do not. Or, as Paul de Man put it more outrageously, “No lyric can be read lyrically nor can the object of a lyrical reading be itself a lyric”—interpretation is always mystified, because the action is identical to its object, so that interpretation creates what it claims to uncover.12 “Reading,” in this critical sense, does not require a historical reader; indeed, critical reading may never require any reader. It does not matter if no one (including, notoriously, the author) has ever found the meaning that my reading discovers in a poem; as the condition of their very possibility, critical or lyric readings must supplant historical reading.13 Interpretation is the “fallacious lyrical reading of the unintelligible,” according to de Man, but “true ‘mourning’ ”—by which I think he meant noninterpretation—“is less deluded. The most it can do is to allow for non-comprehension.” Much of what the following chapters describe will fit into these spaces of noncomprehension, where misreadings, missed readings, and everything in between offer evidence of the “historical modes of language power” toward which de Man’s essay finally gestures.14
Reading, then, is difficult to pin down. After all, “reading” is a pliant word form, sliding between verb and noun and shifting from action to subject to object. A short list of meanings includes perusing, studying, scanning, interpreting, analyzing, reciting, a recitation, an interpretation, an evaluation, a sense, or a piece of information. This set indicates that “reading a poem” might involve seeing, hearing, and speaking, as well as a range of relations from objective (as when I “take a reading” from an instrument like a thermometer) to personal (as when I give you “my reading” of an ambiguous situation). But if it is difficult to locate reading conceptually, it is even harder to find it historically. Reading has mostly been an invisible and ephemeral process, and no reader has ever left behind an account of his or her engagement with a book that can be taken as simple evidence, let alone aggregated into the sort of data (sales figures, signature counts, print runs, pricing) familiar to adjacent fields like descriptive bibliography, the historiography of literacy, and book history. Whether taking a wide-angle approach to the social, cultural, and political contexts of books and reading or focusing narrowly on specific case studies that illuminate different mechanisms of the book trade, ways of teaching reading and writing, or modes of consuming texts, these critical disciplines have said little about reading as an intimate or personal practice.15 Indeed, efforts to construct deep frameworks for understanding the conditions of reading have often been presented as antithetical to any consideration of the opinions or responses of individual readers, which always contain irreducibly idiosyncratic elements.16 The “ordinary reader” is the one invisible to history; because so few readers have ever left a mark, those who leave behind traces of their reading are, by definition, no longer representative. Histories of reading always note the problems of evidence with which their projects must grapple. The archive of reading is limited and also open-ended—limited to individual responses that may or may not characterize broader opinion, while simultaneously spread across very different types of records. But perhaps because of these challenges, scholars have been inventive and imaginative in uncovering reading’s histories, which, like nineteenth-century poems, are everywhere and nowhere at once.17
On Poetry
Being everywhere and nowhere at once is the condition of the open secret, and poetry is the open secret of American literature: so much of it, so popular, so unread, so seemingly unreadable. If I continually anticipate—defensively—a complaint
