Feeling Used: Literary History without Reading

The Social Lives of Poems examines “how people used poems” from the 1790s to 1903, “how they read them, and how their readings . . . can themselves be read to recapture otherwise evanescent traces of the past” (p. 9). A literary history in essence, with its eye on reading readings, the book is often addressed to literary critics. The emphasis on using poems, Cohen insists, helps “link the material worlds of poems and poetic genres with their textuality and language,” toward recounting “a history of literariness and genre from a wide array of engagements with poems, of which reading is one option among many” (p. 9). The methods used here can be applied to genres other than poetry, but they are compellingly against-the-grain in the study of a genre whose critics have placed a heavy emphasis on close reading as a practice and on formal unity, experimentation, and authorial personality as values. The historical milestones and contexts Cohen engages offer a roadmap for future historiographies of “literariness and genre” in the United States.

This book’s approach witnesses a larger tendency in literary historiography. Important recent studies show the influence on one side of methods from book history—increasingly turning its attention to questions of race, nationality, and emotion—and, on the other, from literary studies’ conversations about the public role of the critic and the practice of critical reading. Anchored by the terms “surface reading” and “distant reading” (designating approaches different from the “close reading” most literary scholars are trained to do), this conversation is rooted in the feeling that literary scholarship’s emphasis on reading texts to unveil hidden ideological or psychological agendas or deep patterns has lost its cultural force. While leading scholars of the field, such as Ted Underwood and Heather Love, have persuasively questioned these distinctions and the anxieties that underlie them, the controversy has yielded provocative new literary-historical scholarship. Leah Price, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Christopher Hager, and Virginia Jackson, to name only a few, have published nuanced arguments that consider literature as something people both read and used; as a cultural force both liberating and restrictive; and as an indicator of larger shifts in the relationships among readers, writers, and the technologies associated with writing. Readers become as significant as writers in this approach, and poetic “quality” becomes a rigorously historicized quotient, rather than an initial evidentiary selection factor for the analyst. As I will suggest, this method in Cohen’s hands manifests a subtlety of analysis that advances the practice of reading rather than sidesteps it—leaving this reader, at least, not with a sense of feeling used by a theoretical trend, but of witnessing feelings, used historically.

“Reading has mostly been an invisible and ephemeral process,” Cohen reminds us, “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” (p. 11). This is a healthy caveat for historians, both about reading as a historical activity and the evidentiary challenges of written accounts of reading. Cohen takes up a history of reading by other means: by reading poetry, as his title’s evocation of the Annales school suggests, from the bottom up, instead of from Emily Dickinson down. Here circulation counts as much as a well-turned phrase; the nostalgic or patriotic aura of the author is as significant as his or her (mostly his) style. Cohen turns to the many other-than-textual ways in which individual poems took on meaning: their tokenization in intimate exchanges or scrapbooks, their significance in papers when printed next to other news items, or their iconic meaning in political contests like abolitionism. In each chapter, debates about poetry—authenticity in authorship, aesthetic or sociopolitical value, race and expression, and the relationship of the local...