The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America by Michael C. Cohen (review)

Michael Cohen opens his study of Americans’ relationships to—and as mediated through—nineteenth-century poetry with a question: “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?” (1–2). In The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America, he posits an answer that comprehends both the nineteenth century and poetic genres in broad terms. His study spans a period from 1790 to 1903. The poetry he engages to map a host of social relations forged, contested, renegotiated, dissolved, and renewed during this period includes the familiar as well as the forgotten or the willfully ignored—poems with “a vexed connection to literariness” such as broadside ballads, antislavery verse, and popular war poetry (2). These unfamiliar or unknown poems provide particularly fertile ground for Cohen’s project, as it complements conventional close readings with a more sustained focus on the ways American poems were not read, but rather “used.” “[N]onreading,” he argues, “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” (1). This reading of nonreading, particularly in the chapters directly concerned with early America, contributes much that is truly novel to studies of literary culture, racial identity, and citizenship during the post-Revolutionary and antebellum periods. Using poems provided Americans ways of relating to one another during moments of local crisis and collective tragedy and helped produce a shared sense of national memory and identity that shaped and reflected environments in flux.

The term use allows Cohen critical command over both the materiality and the formal elements of a diverse group of American poems, and enables the book to chart “a history of literariness and genre from a wide array of engagements with poems, of which reading is one option among many” (9). Cohen’s impressive archival research yields evidence that registers the responses of the “ordinary reader,” often “invisible to history” (11). In analyzing, for example, the notes and illustrations with which readers bedecked their printed or handwritten copies of poems, readers’ letters to poets, authors’ personal notebooks, and performances of familiar lyrics, he argues for the function of individual poems as manifestations of social affiliations and anxieties and, in crucial instances, the means of imagining new forms of communal identification. The model of “imagined community,” as Cohen reminds us, is a formulation original to literary studies rather than political theory, and he persuasively demonstrates poetry’s role in mediating and articulating new forms of racial and national identity (7).

As it traces the circulation of an array of individual poems (rather than the contours of “American poetry” as a retrospectively conceived genre), the book also brings a truly diverse cast of readers, and nonreaders, to the fore:

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.

(10)

Indeed, the tenuous distinction between common and cultured readers, the difference between “varses and verses,” was more often muddied than preserved as readers across regional, socioeconomic, political, and racial identities recited, sang, copied, or manipulated the words of a single poem (21).

Two threads run across chapters that encompass broadside balladry in the late eighteenth century, antislavery poems of the antebellum period, and minstrel songs and spirituals of the second half of the nineteenth century. The first is the function of all these poems as versions of “the ballad,” a poetic genre whose protean definitions chart moral and aesthetic debates about the value of ancient cultures, authenticity, popularity, and citizenship in nineteenth-century American life. The second is...