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

Children's poetry has long been a part of the study of children's literature, albeit a minor one. Very little critical or historical work has been done in the area, especially when it comes to U.S. children's poetry, and especially when one looks for book-length studies. Of the work that has been done, most concentrates on the children's poetry of Great Britain, and that usually takes the form of individual author studies rather than broad surveys (Morag Styles's From The Garden to the Street: Three Hundred Years of Poetry for Children [1998], for example, is the first noteworthy survey on the subject, and it barely touches on U.S. poetry). This paucity of critical work makes the publication of Angela Sorby's magisterial Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 all the more exciting, and all the more crucial.

A poet herself, Sorby begins her exceptional study by theorizing and historicizing some of the commonplaces held by those interested in contemporary poetry, commonplaces regarding the function of poetry in the lives of nineteenth-century Americans, especially children. "[O]nce upon a time," these commonplaces go, "within living memory but just barely, people knew poems, repeated them, and wove them into their daily lives. Once upon a time, in other words, poetry mattered to middle-class people in a way that it no longer does" (xi). She continues, noting the assumption that "Nineteenth and early-twentieth-century popular poetry . . . was truly popular," and that this "popularity had something to do with repetition," with "quotidian public expression," "with the body," with "memory," and with a readership "large enough to be conflated with all" (xii). Sorby, however, not satisfied merely to repeat these assumptions, instead interrogates them in a manner similar to how James Machor, Janice Radway, Cathy Davidson, and scholars like them have interrogated the practices of novel reading. That is, she seeks to discover how popular nineteenth-century American poetry was "used, both practically and ideologically, by both individual readers and the institutions that supported them" (xii). And she succeeds marvelously.

Recalling that nineteenth-century poetry is usually ignored by contemporary critics because it is seen as "a literary-historical dead end," failing as it does to inform modern and postmodern poetry (as modernism is often seen as a break from the features dominant in the nineteenth century) (xxvi), Sorby offers us a new way of reading nineteenth-century poetry, one that concentrates on its performative possibilities. She stresses that the amazingly popular textbook series the McGuffey Reader—which taught over 116 million children how to read between the years 1839 and 1920—concentrated not on literary analysis but rather on the performance of poetry, the speaking of poetry, the memorization and embodiment of the texts. Thus, for example, Sarah Josepha Hale's "It Snows" operates not as a perfectly formed verbal icon but rather as a "performance piece, allowing the reader to showcase a range of emotions," for the readers, "like method actors . . . are expected to submerge their individuality in the emotions of the text, and through those emotions, communicate to others" (xxxi). The suggestion is that ever since New Critical reading techniques were naturalized in the mid- to late twentieth century, we have forgotten other uses of poetry, uses common still on playgrounds and city streets where children recite playground rhymes.

Sorby's book focuses on the social dimension of nineteenth-century schoolroom poetry, the poetry written by New England poets like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier, and by westerners like Eugene Field and James Whitcomb Riley. The poems produced by these writers, along with "hit singles" (as she calls them) by poets such as Elizabeth Akers ("Rock Me to Sleep"), Sarah Josepha Hale ("It Snows" and "Mary's Lamb"), Joyce Kilmer ("Trees"), and Walt Whitman ("O Captain! My Captain!") comprised "an archive of popular...