When Poets Ruled the School

If you read a lot of books and essays about modern and contemporary American poetry, you will encounter nothing so frequent as the wish to prove that poetry has remained in some way important—that poetry can, for example, exercise political power (however broadly “political” and “power” are construed), that it can retain a large audience, and that poetry (or at least some poetry) deserves more time than it currently gets, both within the institutions of education (from primary schools to Ph.D. programs) and outside them. Other than Walt Whitman (who troped, and aspired to, certain kinds of public, though rarely institutional, power) and Emily Dickinson (who often troped her lack of public power), critics of modern and contemporary poetry often overlook the American nineteenth century, seeing in it—with some reason—exactly what the modernists who helped to form our own tastes reacted against.

Yet to look at the published verse of that nineteenth century—especially in postbellum America, when a larger country had more readers, more books, and many more schools—is to see a time when poetry seemed to do more of what we now call “cultural work.” More people read more poems, at home and at school, and not only read but memorized them, parodied them, and quoted them in speeches, diaries, and letters to friends. As Dana Gioia notoriously put it, “poetry mattered” to Americans of those decades, whether or not it “matters” now.¹Paula Bennett has recently shown how many American women poets advanced arguments about women’s rights and women’s roles through poetry published in newspapers but not in codex books, or through books whose initial receptions—whether controversial, like that of Phoebe Cary’s Poems and Parodies (1854), or respectful, like that of Sarah Morgan Bryan (Piatt, whose profound talents anthologists ought now to recognize)—belie later neglect.²

Yet these were not, for the most part, the poets who had the broadest or deepest effect on postbellum culture; theirs were not the poems that girls and boys most often memorized, that young women quoted in letters to friends and suitors, or that resounded in opera houses when their authors traveled to recite them. The most prominent American poets of the era were those most often memorized in schools: the four Massachusetts-based “schoolroom” (or “Fireside”) poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell (with an assist from the New Yorker William Cullen Bryant), whose busts adorned many a mantel, and whose names ended up on many a public school. Also recited and (so teachers said) loved in schoolrooms, though not so venerated, was a later generation of poets who made their livings not only from book sales but from newspaper columns and recital tours. Two of the most successful such poets were James Whitcomb Riley and Eugene Field, whose midwestern adulthoods and anti-elitist personae (rural in Riley’s case, childish in Field’s) spurned the haute-bourgeois tone of an older New England, even as their verse reused its modes.

Those modes, their popularity, and its meaning inspire Angela Sorby’s Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance and the Place of American Poetry, 1865—1917 (2005). Sorby devotes one chapter apiece to Longfellow (or rather, to the meaning and reception, in schools, of his most popular poems); to Whittier’s famous “Snow-Bound” (1866) (which she treats, at once gingerly and tendentiously, as a poem about racial whiteness); to the children’s magazine St. Nicholas; to Riley; to Field; and to Emily Dickinson, who seems—by the end of the book—not only a counterpoint, but a logical endpoint, to the “official” schoolroom culture amid which Sorby begins. As a form of attention to the poetry that postbellum Americans read, Sorby’s study complements not only Bennett’s volume, but also Mary Loeffelholz’s From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2004), Christoph Irmscher’s narrower, and superbly sympathetic, Longfellow Redux (2006), and...