The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. Cohen
wished to see the poem; she could not remember the name of it, but she was sure she should know it if she saw it in the index. She mingled these statements with her greetings to Lemuel, and Miss Carver seemed as glad to see him. She had a little more color than usual…. [Miss Swan] insisted upon Lemuel’s reading. “Jessie says you read beautifully.” … At heart he was proud of his reading, and he ended by taking the book. When he had finished the two girls sighed. “Isn’t it beautiful, Jessie?” said Miss Swan. “Beautiful!” answered her friend. Berry yawned. “Well, I don’t see much difference between that and a poem of Longfellow’s. Why wouldn’t Longfellow have done just as well? Honestly, now! Why isn’t one poem just as good as another, for all practical purposes?”1
This is a poetry “reading” in multiple senses, since Barker “is proud of his reading” in that he knows and understands Whittier’s poems and also that he knows he can recite those poems beautifully. This reading (that is, the scene and my interpretation of it) depends on two related tensions: between the materiality of Barker’s book (his “copy of Whittier’s poems” with its helpful index) and the affective transports his reading enables (the girls’ sighs, Berry’s yawn) and between the senses of intimacy and unfamiliarity the poem engenders—Miss Swan “could not remember the name of [the poem], but she was sure she should know it if she saw it.” This complex “reading” creates a situation that allows Howells to “read” the relations made visible in the shared act of reading. The characters’ responses index a range of social positions: the girls’ sighs comically contrast with Berry’s yawn, a difference that maps the distance between the sentiment of feminine New England and the hardy, if uncouth, Western territories. With so much in play around this unnamed poem, however, it may be easy to overlook that the poem is, in fact, unnamed. Indeed, the passage is ambivalent about Berry’s only apparently obtuse question: why isn’t one poem just as good as another? The novel never quotes from or identifies the poem, and even if the women declare it “beautiful,” they cannot remember its title, which, for “the practical purposes” of the plot, is irrelevant. What matters is the scene of recitation and exchange; one poem would seem just as good as another, for any might serve the pretext of bringing together a mixed company in a private space (this is the closest thing to a sex scene in Howells’s novels). Thus, the novel seems tacitly to endorse Berry’s position, that the difference between Longfellow and Whittier is less important than what they share, a place of distinction in late nineteenth-century letters.
But the scene would look much different if they were reading Whitman, and so despite what Berry says, the use of Whittier in The Minister’s Charge is anything but accidental. Both Barker and Whittier were farm boys who made good. Like Barker, Whittier was renowned locally in his youth for writing morally serious poetry. Unlike Barker, of course, Whittier became one of the most famous and beloved poets of the nineteenth century, known first as a zealous abolitionist and reform advocate, then later as a nostalgic chronicler of the legends and lost worlds of old New England. The passage from the novel intrigues me because its use of the poem evacuates the poem of content, making it a cipher to facilitate what looks like a moment of pure exchange. At first, it seems that Whittier’s name (which is not Longfellow’s, a difference that matters, pace Berry) organizes the scene. But then it becomes clear that even if the poem is “by Whittier,” it is no longer “his poem” since it generates readings, like the company’s sighs and yawns or Barker’s beautiful recitation, which transform it from a literary text into a social relation. The poem acquires a social life because it creates social life, and the intimate reading of the poem seemingly requires no concern for the poem itself.
Or not. The Minister’s Charge is concerned with the dissolution of moral authority in postbellum America, which Howells tracks across a range of institutions, from the family, to the ministry, to literature, art, and culture. In fact, the novel may be critiquing the cultural investment of such authority in poetry, rather than mocking any perceived decline in poetry’s literary value at the end of the century (a story often told as the “twilight of the poets”).2 For the scene I describe is not the only instance of missed reading (and misreading) in this novel, which begins just after Barker has recited his verses to the Rev. and Mrs. Sewell while they are vacationing near his home in the country. The Reverend’s “passion for saying pleasant things to people” leads him to give Barker false praise, thus kicking the plot into motion. “You knew the poetry was bad,” Mrs. Sewell reproaches him. “I could tell you were dishonest,” she continues, but Barker “pinned his faith to every syllable.” Blessed with a boundless capacity for self-justification—he is “faithfuller and busier in [his parish duties] than he might have been if he had not laid so much stress upon duties of all sorts, and so little upon beliefs”—Rev. Sewell concludes that “it requires no end of [profuse syllables] to make the worse appear the better reason to a poet who reads his own verses to you” (3, 5). Sewell’s commitment to social forms therefore determines his misreading of Barker’s reading. These poems (which we also never read) “were not without ideas of a didactic and satirical sort, but they seemed so wanting in literary art beyond a mechanical facility of versification” that Sewell fails to realize just how serious Barker’s literary ambitions are (6). The nonalignment of social and literary forms in the reading and misreading of poems constitutes a serious failure in The Minister’s Charge. There are consequences if you get it wrong.
In this sense, Howells’s accounts of missed readings make interesting companions to the better-known example of Emmeline Grangerford’s unthinking verse writing in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Barker’s “mechanical facility of versification” makes his poems unreadable if not wholly unread. Emmeline’s verses, like Lemuel’s (and Whittier’s), also seem unreadable—and, like theirs, literally cannot be read in this novel, with one major exception. Yet the lure of aesthetic contempt that Twain dangles before us belies just how compulsively creative verses can be when they go unread. Huck, of course, has a fraught relationship with books and reading, and the Grangerfords’ literary culture famously mystifies him. As Huck explains, their parlor displays “a big family Bible, full of pictures … ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ about a man that left his family; it didn’t say why … [and] ‘Friendship’s Offering,’ full of beautiful stuff and poetry but I didn’t read the poetry.” Huck’s nonreading of these books leads him to the family’s “crayons,” “which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old.” While the books leave Huck feeling secure, Emmeline’s pictures give him the “fan-tods,” and they drive him finally to her scrapbook.
This young girl kept a scrap book when she was alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head. It was very good poetry…. Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn’t ever have to stop to think. He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn’t find anything to rhyme with it she would just scratch it out and slap down another one, and go ahead. She warn’t particular, she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about, just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her “tribute” before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker—the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person’s name, which was Whistler. She warn’t ever the same, after that; she never complained, but she kind of pined away and did not live long…. Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was alive, and it didn’t seem right that there warn’t nobody to make some about her, now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn’t make it go, somehow.3
Even though Huck appreciates her verses, this episode (the most caustic piece of satire in the novel) could be read as a death-knell for nineteenth-century poetry.4 Like her books, Emmeline is full of “stuff and poetry,” which comes “out of her own head” yet never demands her “to stop to think” as she slaps down lines and then scratches them out in a process that “warn’t particular” because it attends only to the materiality of rhyme, just as Huck attends only to the materiality of the books on the parlor table, looking in but hilariously not reading