Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917 (review)

In the introduction to his most recent collection, Good Poems for Hard Times (2005), Garrison Keillor laments the loss of what he defines as a national culture that can link the national experience of one individual to another through a common core of reference and understanding. "The common life is precarious," he writes. "I fear a future in which America becomes a loose aggregate of marauding tribes—no binding traditions, no songs that we all know, not even 'The Star-Spangled Banner' or 'Silent Night,' no common heroes, no American literature. . . .The last singer recognizable to everyone was Frank Sinatra; the last poet known far and wide was Robert Frost. There are no replacements in sight" (xx). What Keillor laments is what teachers observe daily: that there is no longer a common set of reference points that mark American culture, points that most Americans can turn to and be assured that the person sitting beside them at the library table, or standing on the subway, or waiting in line at the high school cafeteria, or legislating in Washington, or ministering in a New York City soup kitchen, will recognize. Keillor's own volume of poems—together with the first in the series, Good Poems (2002)—is an attempt to address this, as are the many "One Book, One County," or "One Book, One City," or "One Book, One School" programs that are flourishing at the beginning of this troubled century.

All of which makes Angela Sorby's fascinating study, Schoolroom Poets, particularly timely—though the book is not addressed specifically to the cultural fragmentation in North America. It is an examination, however, of a time when those cultural reference points were in place, and they were poetry. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, poets like John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Whitcomb Riley were culturally linked as the "Fireside Poets," evoking a time when families would read to each other close by the fire—the need for heat and light creating a community in which poetry itself became an equal necessity. For Sorby, however, a more apt metaphor is the "Schoolroom Poet," for in the schoolroom these poets found canonization—both for their work and for their lives, which grew into mythic tales—and popularization through anthologies, in which they became standard fare. Through the effects of their repetition in McGuffey's Readers, through publication in culturally affirmed children's journals such as Mary Mapes Dodge's St. Nicholas, and through school performances and social recitals, the work of the "Schoolroom Poets" became binding cultural ties that linked American culture in a great web of acknowledgement and familiarity. Sorby writes of a time when it seemed, at least, as if there was a common American culture expressed through its poetry, and she attempts to historicize that cultural phenomenon—now so utterly vanished—and explore its effects upon the poetry itself as it was crafted, as it was understood by its adult and child audiences, and as it was contextualized through performance and publication. The point of popular poetry, Sorby claims, "is not to engage with literary history but rather to make social history by forming communities" (xxvi). What Sorby does so well in this book is to explore the interactions of the texts and the social communities that received them, focusing here on two generations of poets whose evolutions in terms of reception would lead to the development of modern poetry for children.

Writing of Eugene Field's enormous popularity, Sorby notes that the "question becomes one that demands as much cultural spadework as literary analysis" (127). It is an observation that readily applies to her entire study, and speaks to her strength in it: her cultural spadework and...