Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 by Elizabeth Renker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 by Elizabeth Renker Martin Griffin Elizabeth Renker Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 New York: Oxford UP, 2018. 207 pp. Elizabeth Renker begins her study of late nineteenth-century American poetry by energetically discussing how the motif of the "twilight" of poetry moved through the cultural discourse of the late 1880s and 1890s, beginning as an individual judgment and coming to dominate the collective assessment of that era's poetic production. Edmund Clarence Stedman's rhetorical turn in an 1885 essay published in Century illustrated, "twilight" quickly became, as Renker notes, "an instant catchphrase" (17). The trope, suggesting a poetic culture that has almost run its course, became all the more tenacious when allied with George Santayana's languid put-down of the genteel tradition twenty-five years later. Renker suggests in the introduction that Santayana essentially inherited the glib dismissal of poetry in those decades from Stedman's earlier commentary. Renker argues forcefully that more recent generations of critics and scholars have either fully bought into the gentility-and-twilight proposition, or worse, have challenged it by simply moving the Overton window of acceptable literary periodization backward so that selected poets are seen as harbingers of modernism, or at least transitional figures in a teleological process toward poetic liberation from Victorian constraints. Her broader mission in the book is to investigate the arguments over realism in American letters in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, or, more accurately, the multiple approaches that poets took to opening up the available poetic modes and forms in order to represent precisely the struggle over realism and idealism in national literary culture; this struggle also impacted the work of female poets and black poets in specific ways. She closes the study with a chapter on Melville's relationship to realist poetics. Renker is particularly interested in the ways in which the ideological meta-discourse of realism can be used to exclude or include particular voices, and she draws on the British critic Raymond Williams as someone who treated ostensibly consensual literary history as a convenient story rather than an incontestable truth. Elaborating on the complex relationship between cultural [End Page 93] forms and social conflict in which Williams played a major role during the 1960s and 1970s, Renker presents what she calls "reality categories," a cluster of the four terms real, reality, realistic, and realism (10–11). Williams utilized these terms to reveal anew a literary and intellectual struggle that emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century and is, in many ways, still under way. Now and then, however, it seems that Renker has perhaps not taken Raymond Williams fully to heart, in that he was trying to explore the interaction of culture and society in literature and drama while also nudging people to move on from a fruitless debate over rigid choices between fixed concepts (for example, either the aesthetic investments of British Romanticism or the reformist program of realist fiction) shaped by almost-invisible political agendas. Renker sometimes gives the impression of falling into the trap that she sees others as already in—to fight a terminological war is to endorse the power of terminology, in some obvious way—and she has to redirect Realist Poetics in American Culture toward its true objective: an investigation of the social dynamics underlying literary forms. The achievement of the book is to make a consistent and expert case for a reading of late nineteenth-century American poetry that neither sees it as the last wave of a dying lake of sentimental versifying nor selectively designs an inspirational narrative of earlier-than-thou modernist sensibility to make us feel comfortable with the notion of poets who have the right ideas but are hobbled only by an outdated set of literary fashion choices. As the title suggests, the phrase "realist poetics" is a determining factor in describing the kind of work done between the covers. Renker sets this out as her mission statement, so to speak, but leaves an interesting question hanging in the air. That question, of how to assess the realist poetics of the era, is bound to be focused on...