The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. Cohen

      How to Read a Nineteenth-Century Poem

      On Not Reading Poems

      The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America is an exploration of the lived history of literary writing in the United States, which I hope will illuminate for contemporary readers some of the many ways in which people in the past engaged with poems in their daily lives. Rather than offering a history of poetry, this book instead attempts to think through a variety of social relations that poems made possible, whether materially (as when one person transcribes and sends a poem to another, for example) or theoretically (such as the imagined history projected by a nineteenth-century genre like the ballad). The next six chapters thus open up a series of arguments about the encounters between nineteenth-century people and their poems, in which “their poems” is a deliberately ambiguous possessive meant to conflate the poems people read, the poems they wrote, and the poems they used in other ways. While I try to be as precise as possible when I discuss how encounters with poems structured the experiences of much larger forms of being, I also speculate a great deal. This project partially falls within the history of reading, and reading is a speculative enterprise. I will examine many instances of readers reading poems, which I draw from different kinds of archival sources, but to introduce the problems of reading historically, I would like to begin with two scenes of people not reading poems. Nonreading, as we will see, can also be a productive enterprise, one that takes many forms, from ignoring, forgetting, and suppressing to copying, transcribing, reciting, memorizing, collecting, exchanging, and mimicking. All of these ways to not read a poem are important counterpoints to their more obvious alternative, and together they help me ask: What might a poetic history of the United States look like when it is generated from a place beyond the bounds of “reading” as we typically understand it?

      My question is partly defensive, since the engagements between people and poems that I take up throughout The Social Lives of Poems often have a problematic relationship to reading. I am mostly interested in poems that have not been read in a long time; poems that, based on what I can deduce from their archival context, may never have been read at all; and poems I assume some readers might think not worth reading or, at least, and this is a key distinction, not closely. Put another way, many of the poems I consider have a vexed connection to literariness. I will respond in part by showing that debates about taste, value, and merit can be found throughout the entire period covered in this study: people in the 1790s questioned the social and literary value of broadside ballads; in the 1830s, of antislavery verse; in the 1860s, of war poetry; and in the 1880s, of minstrel songs and slave spirituals. But for now I want to look at some fictional moments in which nineteenth-century ideas of value bracket and are bracketed by nineteenth-century acts of reading poems—or, rather, not reading them.

      In William Dean Howells’s 1886 novel The Minister’s Charge, a crucial scene in the apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker takes place over the exchange of a poem. Barker—a farm boy from rural Massachusetts with literary propensities—comes to Boston in a disastrously misguided effort to sell his poems. His money and manuscripts are stolen on his first night in town, but, with no desire to return to the misery of hardscrabble farming, he stays on to make his way in the city. After a series of scrapes and misadventures, Barker finds employment as a hotel clerk, and one evening, two of the hotel’s residents, the art students Miss Swan and Miss Carver, ask him to read aloud a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. The scene begins with Mr. Berry, a law student from the Wyoming territory, coming to Barker’s room.

      “The young ladies sent me