Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (review)

The publication of Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry underlines the growing interest in this field, and this collection will do much to encourage faculty to bring this rich spectrum of work into the classroom. Given the extensive research that Paula Bennett and Karen Kilcup have done in the field of women's writing, it comes as no surprise that their collection places particular emphasis on the contributions of women poets. In their introduction to the volume, Bennett and Kilcup offer a helpful overview of the ways poetry circulated as popular literature in the nineteenth century and worked to shape American national identity by offering women writers and writers of color extraordinary opportunities to reach a growing audience of readers from all walks of life.

Divided into four sections, Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry opens with a group of essays that focus on a representative selection of the subgenres of nineteenth-century poetry, including American Indian poetry, the sorrow songs, erotic poetry, working-class poetry, Civil War poetry, post-bellum realist poetry, and the schoolroom poets. Part two foregrounds individual poets in their own cultural or historical contexts; Lydia Sigourney, Margaret Fuller, Frances Harper, Emma Lazarus, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are the women poets featured here. Part three offers specific teaching strategies for making this work intellectually exciting in the classroom, including discussion of cross-genre and cross-disciplinary approaches, as well as approaches that reconsider the parameters of the American Renaissance and the nineteenth-century literary canon. Finally, in part four, Philipp Schweighauser offers a helpful bibliography of both print and electronic sources that scholars may wish to use in bringing these poets into the classroom.

While many essays in the volume touch on the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman, using these canonical writers as a point of comparison or contrast, probably the most important intervention this volume makes is that it calls for an examination of the full spectrum of nineteenth-century American poetry. The collection is particularly persuasive in making the case for including poetry by noncanonical writers even at the undergraduate level and in survey courses. As Bennett and Kilcup argue in their introduction, the cultural centrality of poetry in nineteenth-century America would seem to support Lawrence Levine's contention, as expressed in his book Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, that the boundary between high and low cultural forms did not become fixed until the very end of the century. Because poems can be relatively brief and because some are highly topical in their approach to current events, including poetry on an American literature syllabus can be an ideal way to reexamine twenty-first century assumptions about the relationship between high and popular art forms in the nineteenth century. As many of the contributors note, undergraduates who think of poetry as an elite literary genre are often surprised to learn about the very different cultural position poetry occupied in the nineteenth century.

Teachers interested in pursuing questions about the cultural position of poetry may find Paula Bennett's essay on the poetry of mill workers and the songs of blackface minstrelsy particularly helpful. Among the many essays in the volume that discuss the role of sentimental stances, Paul Lauter's essay on Sigourney, Angela Sorby's chapter on teaching the schoolroom poets, and Elizabeth Savage's essay on sentimentalism may be most useful to scholars who are wondering how best to guide students' critical approaches to the political implications of sentimentalism. Both Sorby's study and Eliza Richards's essay on the women poets in Poe's circle offer specific strategies for foregrounding the issues of print culture through use of online sources. Schweighauser devotes several pages of his bibliography to a discussion of electronic sources; this section will no doubt prove particularly useful to faculty whose students have only limited access to archives or research libraries.

Depending on the constraints of their curricula, some readers may wish that...