Reading the Readers Who Remake the (Poetry) Texts

Quick: who is the national poet laureate? Given the scant media coverage of Kay Ryan's recent induction as the nation's sixteenth poet laureate, you will not be alone if your response is slow to come. In today's infotainment mass media environment, poetry can appear quaintly archaic, which perhaps explains its inclusion in the best-selling retro-chic The Dangerous Book for Boys. With entries that narrate the Battle of Thermopylae, explain how to hunt and cook a rabbit, and reprint "The Seven Poems Every Boy Should Know," the book evokes nostalgia for the good old days when boys were boys, their upper lips were stiff, and they . . . recited the verse of Percy Bysshe Shelley?

Such seemingly incongruous associations would be right at home in Joan Shelley Rubin's latest book, which delights in dismantling cultural categories often taken for granted. Songs of Ourselves follows Rubin's first two monographs, Constance Rourke and American Culture (1980) and The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), in treating many of the same enduring themes in American cultural history. But while this latest, most ambitious addition to the Rubin oeuvre explores debates over American literary traditions and investigates how cultural distinctions are both articulated in theory and ignored in practice, it does so from the perspective of the American reader. Following the methodological assumptions of "history of the book" scholarship—the field devoted to questions of authorship, publication, distribution, and readership, which, much like Rubin's own historical career, has blossomed over the past two decades—Rubin takes for granted that readers are not bound by authorial intent but instead remake texts.¹ Accordingly, this book reads the readers, asking how, why, and in what mediating historical circumstances they have remade the poems they read. Animating the book is a central question: what do the (figurative) re-readings of Whitman's personal, singular song tell us about Americans and their encounters with poetry in the first half of the twentieth century?

A good deal, as it turns out, and Rubin is both exhaustive and enterprising in answering this question. Focusing on poetry in actual, everyday practice—rather than on what the critics or the poets themselves said about poetry—opens up a whole new deposit of cultural evidence, which Rubin mines with revisionist zeal. She has examined publisher's records, the private papers of poets, librarians' bibliographies, periodical debates, teachers' manuals, immigrant memoirs, readers' diaries, poetry criticism, and religious newsletters. Less conventionally, she also uses two more recently generated sets of data: a sample of nearly five hundred readers who responded to her 1995 "Author's Query" in the New York Times Book Review seeking memories of poems learned in school between 1917 and 1950, along with reflections on the meaning of that task then and now; and the "mammoth" database established in response to former poet laureate Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, which invited readers to submit the title of their favorite poem along with a brief explanation of that choice. Aware of these samples' limitations (which skew disproportionately, though not exclusively, northeastern, educated, white, and middle class), Rubin offers probing readings carefully balanced with a wealth of other evidence.

Placing readers at the center of the story in this way allows Rubin to challenge conventional wisdom at many points. Among the central challenges: that poetry suffered a "decline" after 1900; that Victorian-era poetry simply disappeared after the arrival of literary modernism; that ordinary readers adhered to cultural divisions established by critics or scholars (e.g., traditional vs. modernist, avant-garde vs. popular, sacred vs. secular); and that we as historians can assume what poems meant to readers even when, as in the case of interwar Americanization programs, the prescriptive meanings might seem rather clear. Her book thus joins a growing body of scholarship that insists on the agency of ordinary readers and understands reading as a creative act mediated but never determined by the many social relations...