Poets in the Iron-Mills

Since the 1^st of June, lost my job and lost my room. I pretend to try, even if I tried alone. I forgot the part. Lose my hands to use my heart. Even if I died alone.

Sufjan Stevens, “Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)”

“Thirty years ago a historian would have been laughed out of the profession for proposing a study of song-poetry” (7), historian Clark D. Halker remarks in his assessment of postbellum working-class poetry and song, For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865–95 (1991). The pages that follow consider Halker’s own book retrospectively, arguing for its renewed interest. Although published after the inauguration of the canon wars and, in theory, already potentially pertinent to Americanist literary scholars, especially those exploring issues of class, For Democracy, Workers, and God was reviewed in journals of history, folklore, and music but did not cross the disciplinary boundary into American literature studies. The subfield of American literature to which it was of most pressing relevance—postbellum poetry—remained chronically neglected at that time, a situation that has since begun to change. Indeed, postbellum poetry had long been treated as a generic twilight zone, a “changless glimmer of dead gray” (434),¹ as Edwin Arlington Robinson had put it, partially illuminated by the late innovations of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and, eventually, Robinson and perhaps Stephen Crane. Anthologist E. C. Stedman’s somber assessment of the poetic era as a “twilight interval” in 1900 became a conventional opinion (xxviii). When Roy Harvey Pearce proposed in 1961 that the latter part of the nineteenth century was “the seeming break in the continuity of American poetry,” rescued only by Robinson (256), he thus reiterated a familiar narrative about an allegedly anemic era. In recent years, scholars have begun to rewrite this poetic history, creating a newly fertile climate that warrants a fresh engagement with Halker’s research.

Halker’s purpose as a historian is “to expand knowledge of the musical and poetic history of the American working class” and at the same time to argue that the song-poems he has recovered “offer a lens onto the larger world of Gilded-Age workers and labor protest” (4). As he points out, the labor unrest of the postbellum era has long claimed historians’ interest, but the song-poets he discusses, and the genre they created, have been forgotten. Halker thus recovers a group of individuals whose class position obscured their agency in a foundational historical narrative. He also restores to that narrative the lively poetic genre they created and purveyed which, also as a function of their class position, circulated in mostly ephemeral forms. On these grounds alone, his contribution is substantial. Indeed, Halker’s “cultural approach to working-class history” (6) is of a priori interest to scholars of the Gilded Age. Although in 1991 Halker felt it necessary to defend the worth of such an inquiry, pointing out that “working-class lore and song have yet to receive just due” (2,3), today his study should find ready interest among literary scholars for its contributions to the related histories of the working class, the Gilded Age, and the genre of poetry.

Halker is a historian and musician. His aims did not include rewriting the history of postbellum poetry and he does not situate his work in that context at all. (The single tantalizing exception is his observation that the labor publications that printed the song-poems also routinely printed poems by Whitman, Whittier, Pope, Shelley, and Keats [88].) Yet the relevance of his research to scholars now addressing that history from a variety of new standpoints is profound indeed. Paula Bernat Bennett’s Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003), for example, argues that the lyric poetry of this era was not a transcendent artifact, as late-Victorian and early modernist aesthetics would hold, but a sociopolitical activity and form of...