Before the publication of Elizabeth Renker's provocative book, the phrase “postbellum realist poetry” might have seemed paradoxical to critics of realism, poetry, and nineteenth-century literature. If one were to interpret visually the literary histories of these three composite terms, what would emerge is a Venn diagram seemingly with no center. As the story goes, the postbellum period is the twilight of American poetry, a dark age of formulaic, genteel verse that cannot hurry its way to modernism fast enough. On the other side of the diagram lies realism, an engaged and vibrant discourse where fiction presumably reigns—fiction from the 1880s and 1890s, that is. As critics conventionally tell us, it is not until the final decades of the nineteenth century that the Age of Realism really begins with works such as William Dean Howells's (1837–1920) The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Henry James's (1843–1916) The Bostonians (1885–86). Writing from the seemingly invisible center of this Venn diagram, then, Elizabeth Renker in Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 develops a new approach to postbellum poetry that recognizes its profound engagement with realism even before the 1880s.This book is as much a study of the story of realism as it is a study of realist poetry itself. Combining historiography with nuanced close reading, Realist Poetics both charts and deconstructs the “genre-exclusive story of realism” (2). Renker not only supplies a working theory and archive of realist poetry in the postbellum period (especially in the often-forgotten 1870s) but also investigates the institutional actors that brought about poetry's omission from American literary realism in the first place. In Renker's previous book, The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (2007), she emphasized the importance of historiography in the field of literary studies. In Realist Poetics, she renews this commitment, focusing not on curricular history, but on literary history—particularly that of realism in the US as it has been almost exclusively linked to the fiction and criticism of William Dean Howells. In Renker's view, much has been left out of this literary history by ignoring the work of poets.Comprised of six concise, self-contained chapters, Realist Poetics appears organized in terms of cause and effect. The brief introduction and chapter 1, “The ‘Twilight of the Poets’ in the Age of Realism,” investigate nineteenth- and twentieth-century assumptions about realism that led to the misreading and devaluation of postbellum poetry as “a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode” (16). Renker establishes in her introduction the overarching premise that poetry's omission from the core narrative of realism has less to do with anything inherent in postbellum verse and more to do with the fact that “[s]cholarship on realism has followed Howells in its genre exclusions” (2). Chapter 1 supports this claim by returning to the 1880s to historicize Edmund Clarence Stedman's (1833–1908) noteworthy phrase “the twilight of the poets” (Stedman, “The Twilight of the Poets” Century Illustrated 30.5 [1885]: 787). Today, Stedman's phrase is shorthand for postbellum poetry's failure to reject romantic gentility and embrace realism. Renker shows, however, that this version of the twilight narrative—far from being a retrospective scholarly assessment about postbellum poetry—is actually a perpetual misreading of Stedman, passed down through literary history by a series of powerful cultural arbiters, including Howells himself. As Renker strikingly shows, when postbellum poets such as Stedman and Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) invoked the twilight narrative, they did so to lament that poetry, in their view, was becoming too realist. The original “twilight of the poets,” then, was a twilight of romantic poetry in which Stedman and others felt that poets were not living up to their calling as transcendent truth-tellers. According to Renker, that this version of the twilight narrative did not survive shows how important Howells's dismissals of poetry have been to the critical narrative of realism.If the first chapter inquires into the cause of the twilight narrative, the subsequent five chapters of the book examine the effects or “casualties” (55) of it: the poets who have gone unrecognized for their realist practice and influence on later realist novelists. Two of these casualties, Herman Melville (1819–91) and the still undervalued Sarah Piatt (1836–1919), garner deep dives from Renker in stand-alone chapters (chap. 3, “After Wings: Sarah Piatt”; and chap. 6, “Melville Renders the Real”). In these finely argued chapters, Renker highlights Piatt's collection A Woman's Poetry (1871) and Melville's posthumously published Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: With a Rose or Two (1967) as important works of realist poetry in need of much greater attention. In contrast to these case studies, the middle chapters of Realist Poetics explore the casualties of the twilight narrative in clusters. Renker organizes these groupings by a shared type of realist poetic practice. Chapter 2, “Reality Categories in Periodical Poems,” recovers poems from periodicals that engage a common binary, romance and reality, often for surprisingly different ends; and chapter 4, “Poetic Realisms,” extends this project by exploring later “subtypes” (76) or specific variations on the romance-reality binary, such as the Gothic poetry of Rose Terry Cooke (1827–92), in which idealist dreams are juxtaposed against real traumas. The last of these groupings, chapter 5, “Late-Century African American Poets and Realist Gentility,” focuses on the category of the “genteel”—another term wielded against postbellum poetry as anti-realist—this time in the context of 1890s African American verse. Renker argues that the genteel in black poetry should not be read monolithically as conservative or apolitical. Rather, she clarifies that this mode encompasses a variety of stances toward white gentility, many of which function as “black-voiced reality checks” (102) on the mode itself. The chapter recuperates little-known African American poets such as Priscilla Jane Thompson (1871–1942), George Marion McClellan (1860–1934), W. H. A. Moore (dates unknown), and Henrietta Cordelia Ray (1849–1917).From these chapter summaries alone, readers will see that Renker's definition of realist poetics is capacious. But throughout the book, Renker reminds us that realism has always been a more heterogeneous tradition, generically and politically, than has been acknowledged by the “large narrative frames” (36). As she writes, The thick history of this culture of poetic exchange has been obscured both because of entrenched field narratives and also because it proffers no solitary, exceptional “genius”—no Howells as “champion”—no “manifestos”—no “great movement”—in short, none of the trappings that served the large narrative frames the field relied on in early attempts to establish a literary history. (36) With “no ‘dean’ … and no manifesto” (10), realist poetics is deeply discursive and rooted in modes of authorship and exchange intrinsic to periodical culture. Although this heterogeneity has previously contributed to poetry's illegibility in the history of realism, Renker's recovery of the genre demonstrates that literary histories can be more flexible and capacious than previously assumed.In kind, Renker is careful to historicize the word realism in the context of postbellum poetry. Taking a cue from Raymond Williams's Keywords (1976), Renker offers a “core vocabulary” (35) of postbellum realist poetry that includes obvious terms such as “reality” and “the real thing,” but also some that are less obvious such as “poems about the present,” “the natural and scientific,” “twilight and dusk,” and “seasonal changes.” Realist poetics is not defined, then, by a particular topic or diction deemed “realist.” In Renker's view, the genre coalesces around an epistemological indeterminacy about what counts as “real.” Renker's close reading of Emma Lazarus's (1849–87) “August Moon” (1877) powerfully illustrates poetic realism's diverse imagery and dialogic nature. A dramatic dialogue, “August Moon” stages a debate between the realist Claude and idealist Ralph. The poem showcases how ostensibly romantic tropes and forms, like the moon and the use of affected, formal diction, can serve realist positions. As Renker humorously observes, “Claude's first utterance is to tell Ralph—in Latin—to shut up” (42). While one might associate Latin in poetry with the arcane or nostalgic, in Lazarus's poem it represents the language of “real” knowledge that cuts through the veneer of romanticism. Herein lies the value of Renker's move to theorize realism in poetry by an epistemological debate, rather than any particular “gritty” subject matter or style of diction.To read the story of American literary realism as told by Renker and the poets she discusses is to reread a number of other stories told about nineteenth-century American literature. Realist poetry includes a diverse range of writers, from the canonical Stephen Crane (1871–1900), to the recovered Sarah Piatt and George Marion McClellan, to the unknown and anonymous poetry of periodical culture, to still other poets better known for their prose, like W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), Rose Terry Cooke, and Herman Melville. Joining critics Paula Bernat Bennett and Mary Loeffelholz, Renker challenges the portrayal of nineteenth-century American poetry as “a story of Whitman and Dickinson surrounded by hacks” (9). Furthering that challenge, Renker's account of realist poetry also brings recognition to the 1870s, a decade that has fallen through the cracks of literary history. Too late to join the poetry of war, and ostensibly too early to be protomodernist, many important women poets of the 1870s—Sarah Piatt, Lucy Larcom (1824–93), and pre–“New Colossus” Emma Lazarus—have been overlooked in anthologies that move directly from Whitman to Crane. One hopes that Renker's theorization of a realist tradition in poetry will help to make visible these and other poets of the time. Overall, Realist Poetics compels new attention to poetry from the 1860s through the 1890s. Guided by Renker's in-depth discussions of numerous types of realist poems, readers have the opportunity to rethink what genres are really important to the literary history of realism.