Poets in the Iron-Mills

Abstract

“Thirty years ago a historian would have been laughed out of the profession for proposing a study of song-poetry” (7), historian Clark D. Halker remarks in his assessment of postbellum working-class poetry and song, For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865–95 (1991). The pages that follow consider Halker's own book retrospectively, arguing for its renewed interest. Although published after the inauguration of the canon wars and, in theory, already potentially pertinent to Americanist literary scholars, especially those exploring issues of class, For Democracy, Workers, and God was reviewed in journals of history, folklore, and music but did not cross the disciplinary boundary into American literature studies. The subfield of American literature to which it was of most pressing relevance—postbellum poetry—remained chronically neglected at that time, a situation that has since begun to change. Indeed, postbellum poetry had long been treated as a generic twilight zone, a “changless glimmer of dead gray” (434),1 as Edwin Arlington Robinson had put it, partially illuminated by the late innovations of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and, eventually, Robinson and perhaps Stephen Crane. Anthologist E. C. Stedman's somber assessment of the poetic era as a “twilight interval” in 1900 became a conventional opinion (xxviii). When Roy Harvey Pearce proposed in 1961 that the latter part of the nineteenth century was “the seeming break in the continuity of American poetry,” rescued only by Robinson (256), he thus reiterated a familiar narrative about an allegedly anemic era. In recent years, scholars have begun to rewrite this poetic history, creating a newly fertile climate that warrants a fresh engagement with Halker's research.