Journalism and Poetry in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article examines the inter-relationship of journalism and poetry in the nineteenth century, when poems on topical issues regularly appeared in newspapers alongside prose reports of the same events. Poems and news reports addressing the Cotton Famine of the 1860s are examined through the dual lenses of literary analysis and field theory, to query how journalism—and the idea of journalism—might be expanded, challenged, or developed by exchanges with poetry, or, in the Bourdieusian sense, how poems might modify the journalistic field. The article argues that nineteenth-century newspaper poems built on and extended the journalism-as-educative paradigm, seeking to move readers from reflection to action, and contributing significantly to the “crusadism” of the late nineteenth-century press. Nineteenth-century newspaper poetry worked with, but distinctly from, journalism to act on and mobilise the reader, and it also critically reflected on the journalism on which it drew and within which it was embedded. The ways nineteenth-century poetry worked to change the way the function of journalism was conceptualised suggest provocative implications for the twenty-first century.