Professing Poetry Anew

Abstract

The three books under review, all of which focus on poetry and attend in some way to American poetries of the twentieth century, enact in common a challenge to critical approaches that fail to take into account poetry’s participation in its social world: poetry’s meanings are inseparable from the circumstances of its production and circulation, its readers and reception history, its biographical encodings, and its political engagements. Their announced assumptions of reading as social act and poetry as social text could easily resonate as old news; after all, cultural studies has had considerable impact even on the relatively conservative field of poetry studies, despite its being in some ways still caught in New Criticism’s wake. Yet in these skillful studies, which offer very different reading experiences and divergent perspectives on literary value, the social and cultural emphasis is news that stays news, taking fresh forms and yielding significant readings and reconceptualizations of literary history that challenge entrenched critical binaries. The three books share, too, a sense of urgency—a sense of poetry, poetry reading, and poetry criticism in crisis. To some extent each implicitly or explicitly blames traditional modernist studies or the high modernism on which it focused for the crisis; the history of modernism and modernism’s legacies, then, are part of the terrain these works provocatively remap. In Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007), Joan Shelley Rubin, a cultural historian, presents a social history of reading, not literary interpretation, though in passing she quarrels with literary critics who have made what she considers inadequate or biased arguments. As her title’s allusion to Whitman suggests, one of Rubin’s principal aims is to provide a “more democratic portrayal of American culture than we have previously possessed” through a “more inclusive account of American