Professing Poetry Anew

The three books under review, all of which focus on poetry and attend in some way to American poetries of the twentieth century, enact in common a challenge to critical approaches that fail to take into account poetry's participation in its social world: poetry's meanings are inseparable from the circumstances of its production and circulation, its readers and reception history, its biographical encodings, and its political engagements. Their announced assumptions of reading as social act and poetry as social text could easily resonate as old news; after all, cultural studies has had considerable impact even on the relatively conservative field of poetry studies, despite its being in some ways still caught in New Criticism's wake. Yet in these skillful studies, which offer very different reading experiences and divergent perspectives on literary value, the social and cultural emphasis is news that stays news, taking fresh forms and yielding significant readings and reconceptualizations of literary history that challenge entrenched critical binaries. The three books share, too, a sense of urgency-a sense of poetry, poetry reading, and poetry criticism in crisis. To some extent each implicitly or explicitly blames traditional modernist studies or the high modernism on which it focused for the crisis; the history of modernism and modernism's legacies, then, are part of the terrain these works provocatively remap.

In Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007), Joan Shelley Rubin, a cultural historian, presents a social history of reading, not literary interpretation, though in passing she quarrels with literary critics who have made what she considers inadequate or biased arguments. As her title's allusion to Whitman suggests, one of Rubin's principal aims is to provide a "more democratic portrayal of American culture than we have previously possessed" through a "more inclusive account of American literature" (6), one that highlights the co-existence of multiple canons. Her research emphasizes the "often ignored fact: that nineteenth-century verse and non-modernist expression persisted alongside poetic innovation and experimentation" (4-5) and attends to diverse forms of poetry, especially those that circulated through public venues of schools, civic gatherings, and religious ceremonies. Although the years covered, 1880-1950, have at their center the period of high modernism, its challenging texts rarely appeared in school textbooks or recitations, citizens' handbooks, or church publications and consequently figure infrequently in her book except as forces eroding valued roles played by the poet and contributing to the decline of poetry reading. Songs of Ourselves participates in the current expansion of modernist studies by attending to early-twentieth-century readers' sustained interest in the Fireside Poets or their gradual embrace of the "new poetry" of Edna St. Vincent Millay or Vachel Lindsay, and by demonstrating that highbrow, lowbrow, and popular are not categories that can be linked in simple ways to class, gender, geography (urban vs. rural), or race.

Unfortunately, racial reading dynamics are not well explored: Rubin announces in her introduction that "because of available evidence, the readers I discuss are by and large white and middle class, although I have tried to overcome that limitation where possible" (10). Her claims about available evidence are unpersuasive, belied by works like Elizabeth McHenry's 2002 study of nineteenth-century African-American literary societies, Forgotten Readers. Sources such as Harlem Renaissance journals, bulletins of black churches, correspondences of major poets such as Langston Hughes or Gwendolyn Brooks could have enriched the data on which Rubin drew, just as Rubin's survey of living readers conducted via an inquiry in the New York Times Book Review could presumably have been supplemented through inquiries placed in periodicals with large African-American readerships. Admittedly, however, it is difficult to ensure representative presentation in any project based on case studies, and Rubin certainly has cast her net...