What Is “Reconstruction Poetry”?

Eric Foner observed in 1997 that no period in US history “has undergone a more complete reevaluation since 1960 than Reconstruction” (“Slavery” 96). And while one of the most significant shifts in nineteenth-century US literary historiography since the 1990s has been the scholarly reassessment of Civil War poetry as an important archive rather than a blur of bad verse, the category that I here call “Reconstruction poetry” has not yet entered the field-Imaginary.¹ This essay argues that now is the time to excavate this category and to institutionalize it as such in our disciplinary frameworks. An extensive and heterogeneous archive, Reconstruction poetry provides a mostly unknown record of the competing social meanings of Reconstruction as they unfolded. Broad and diverse populations wrote, read, circulated, and shared poems in both written and oral forms and in a profusion of media including newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, books, songs, personal correspondence, and public oratory. These routine habits of poetic expression and consumption served as a common—indeed, a daily—way to respond, directly or indirectly, to evolving social conditions and to participate in (often contentious) public discourse about them. Parsing the archive of Reconstruction poetry with care will both add a vital chapter to the recent surge in scholarship about the social histories of poetry and contribute a significant array of largely unknown primary sources to our nation’s changing historiography of Reconstruction.

It’s worth pausing over why we have inherited a gap in the field-Imaginary where Reconstruction poetry might have already been institutionalized. Michael C. Cohen reminds us that “the determinations for what counts as poetry worth reading” are always embedded in social, institutional, and generic histories that shift over time (“Getting” 150). Complex overlapping factors have produced and sustained the habitual disciplinary neglect of Reconstruction poetry, three of which I can briefly address here. First, as Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs have influentially argued, the status of the year 1865 as a standard period marker and “a terminus in American literary history” is one whose repercussive simplifications have become especially glaring in the present moment (260). Among recent vital new histories of Reconstruction, Gregory P. Downs’s After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (2015) stresses, for example, that Robert E. Lee’s 1865 surrender at Appomattox was not even the end of wartime.²

Second, literary and historical scholarship about Reconstruction has mostly focused on prose—as if the thriving cultures of reading, writing, copying, publishing, sharing, reciting, and circulating poems were somehow not part of actual history. This genre exclusion arose as an epiphenomenon of twentieth-century ideological definitions of “poetry” as an abstraction irrelevant to history. Joseph Harrington influentially challenged this set of assumptions in his 1996 essay “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature.” Augusta Rohrbach similarly noted more recently that “students and scholars have come to treat most nineteenth-century poetry as a kind of relic” rather than as a thriving medium for nineteenth-century experience (1).

Third, and bound up with these more general ideological genre exclusions, twentieth-century scholarship institutionalized a narrative about postbellum poetry in particular as an era of lamentable poetic decline best skipped while zooming ahead to modernism. This hegemonic field narrative typically enshrines Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman as beacons whose heroism kept poetry alive amid an artistic darkness of genteel poets and hacks. Edmund Clarence Stedman’s influential 1885 designation of the postbellum period as a “twilight of the poets” and George Santayana’s damning critique of the era as mired in a “genteel tradition” undergirded the dismissive and derogatory constructions that held steady across twentieth-century scholarship and continue to circulate even now.³ Twentieth-century historical accounts of Reconstruction as a period of national failure have their uncanny echo in these accounts of the postwar period as the nadir of US poetry.

One of the many complex effects of the twilight narrative was to leave a vast array of postbellum poems unread. A second, related effect was to minimize the disciplinary fortunes of particular authors whose poetic production was tied to the Reconstruction era. Many such poets have remained on the...