Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 by Elizabeth Renker (review)

In Realist Poetics in American Culture, Elizabeth Renker calls for a reexamination of postbellum American poetry, arguing that this body of work played a central role in defining the commitments of realism. Rejecting the conventional argument that the realist turn unfolds primarily in fiction, Renker's study argues persuasively that postbellum American poetry deserves far more critical attention than it has to date received. In dismissing this body of work, an earlier generation of scholars had argued that the genteel strategies of these poems signaled the aesthetic stagnation of the genre, a nostalgic turning back to late Romantic ideals. Rejecting the critical tendency to label the postbellum period as an era of decline, the fabled "twilight of the poets," Renker instead contends that many postbellum writers used poetic conventions to examine the relationship between the real and the possibilities of literary representation. Offering readings of poets both familiar and newly recovered, Renker argues that these writers use genteel conventions both skeptically and self-consciously, interrogating their own reliance on late Romantic tropes and introducing realist commitments in ways that other scholars have fundamentally misunderstood.

Renker's study thus builds on some of the central premises of Paula Bernat Bennett's Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003). Reading works by Phoebe Cary and Sarah Piatt, among others, Bennett argues that these writers use genteel poetic conventions to critique the limits of white middle-class femininity. Yet the centrality of genteel tropes and domestic scenes in these poems led to the critical dismissal of these and many other nineteenth-century women poets by twentieth-century scholars. Bennett's study offers a powerful corrective to this misreading: she argues that women poets use irony and skepticism to interrogate the same genteel conventions that their poems also deploy.

Like Bennett, Renker contends that irony undermines some of the idealist assumptions that these postbellum poems' genteel conventions seem at first glance to endorse. Renker's argument thus fundamentally depends on the incisive close readings she offers of poems by both men and women, whites and African Americans. Focusing intensively on the four decades after the Civil War, Renker advances an argument that will fundamentally change the critical conversation about this period. Realist Poetics brings into focus a whole understudied body of writing, repositioning newly canonical figures like Sarah Piatt, high canonical figures like Herman Melville, and a fascinating group of little-studied African American poets as central participants in a lively debate about how poets might best respond to the mandates of representing the real.

The first three chapters of Realist Poetics lay the groundwork for this analysis. Chapter 1 examines the origins of the phrase "the twilight of the poets," arguing that its use in the late nineteenth century is in fact evidence of the liveliness with which poets debated the aims and limits of the genre. Chapter 2 outlines what Renker calls "reality categories" through readings of exemplary periodical poems in which these categories are explicitly signaled (35). Chapter 3 then goes on to argue that debate about such reality categories is extremely common in the poetry of this period, provided one knows how to read for an ongoing conversation that is often only implicitly signaled. This chapter then analyzes a set of poems that extend the dialogue about the relationship between the real and the ideal in ways that would have been readily visible to nineteenth-century readers but are far less apparent to twenty-first-century eyes.

Particularly significant for scholars pursuing feminist work on nineteenthcentury writing will be Renker's analysis of Sarah Piatt, whose work Bennett was instrumental in recovering. In chapter 3, Renker contends that Piatt is a crucial figure for understanding the tension between the real and the ideal, arguing that Piatt's engagement with this debate is often more readily evident in her complex treatment of metaphor than in her choice of content for her...