Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America

258 Pages·2010·3.034 MB·English

by  Shira Wolosky (auth.)

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull
This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary
works and public figures in Great Britain, North America, and continental Europe
during the nineteenth century. The volumes in Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and
Letters evoke the energies, achievements, contributions, cultural traditions, and
individuals who reflected and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian
period. The topics: critical, textual, and historical scholarship, literary and book his-
tory, biography, cultural and comparative studies, critical theory, art, architecture,
science, politics, religion, music, language, philosophy, aesthetics, law, publication,
translation, domestic and public life, popular culture, and anything that influenced,
impinges upon, expresses or contributes to an understanding of the authors, works,
and events of the nineteenth century. The authors consist of political figures, art-
ists, scientists, and cultural icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles
Darwin, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor, and their
contemporaries.
The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD (Indiana University), FEA. She has taught
at William and Mary, Temple University, New York University, and is Research
Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She is the founder and
editor of The Wordsworth Circle and the author of English Romanticism: The Human
Context, and editions, essays, and reviews in journals. She lectures internationally on
British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory, intellectual history, publishing
procedures, and history of science.
PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE:
Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid
Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson
Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau
Byron, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson
Romantic Migrations, by Michael Wiley
The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider
British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield
Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders
British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter
Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis
Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk
Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore
Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited
by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews
Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison
Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto Gabriele
Romanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. Peer
From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood
Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson
Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner
Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett
Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt
Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America, by Shira Wolosky
FORTHCOMING TITLES:
Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust, by Thomas Brennan
The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Annette Cozzi
John Thelwall and the Wordsworth Circle, by Judith Thompson
Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian
The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson
Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism, by B. Ashton Nichols
Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain, by Clare A. Simmons
Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, by Gregory Leadbetter
Romantic Dharma, by Mark Lussier
Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab
Jewish Representation in British Literature 1700–1853, by Michael H. Scrivener
Poetry and Public Discourse
in Nineteenth-Century
America
Shira Wolosky
POETRY AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA
Copyright © Shira Wolosky, 2010.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-10431-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-28880-9 ISBN 978-0-230-11300-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230113008
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Contents
Preface: Poetics, Culture, Rhetoric ix
1 Modest Claims 1
2 Emily Dickinson and American Identity 15
3 Public and Private: Double Standards 31
4 Genteel Rhetoric, North and South 45
5 Edgar Allan Poe: Metaphysical Rupture
and the Sign of Woman 67
6 Claiming the Bible: Slave Spirituals
and African-American Typology 83
7 Women’s Bibles 97
8 Fragmented Rhetoric in Battle-Pieces 113
9 Plural Identities and Local Color 125
10 Emma Lazarus’ American-Jewish Prophetics 139
11 Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Crossing Languages 153
12 Harvard Formalism 163
13 Walt Whitman’s Republic of Letters 175
Postscript: Charting American Trends: Stephen Crane 201
Notes 211
Sources and Abbreviations 247
Index 251
Preface: Poetics, Culture,
Rhetoric
C
ontemporary aesthetic theory is a house divided between formalist
and historicist trends. This aesthetic split persists in culture studies,
with its renewed interests in society and culture after the twentieth
century’s emphasis on formalist poetics. The rise of formalism is in fact
itself an historical phenomenon, out of and in response to social and
economic transformations taking place throughout the nineteenth
century and the position of art within these transformations. The
challenge remains on how to pursue social-formalist readings without
reducing poetry to the first or excluding history in the second. As
Theodore Adorno commented in “Lyric Poetry and Society,” in lyric
poetry “the thinking through of a work of art justly requires a con-
crete inquiry into social content;” but this is not to say that lyric works
be “misused as objects for the demonstration of social theses.”1
Rhetoric opens an avenue across this divide toward a historicist-
formalist approach. Rhetoric is the art of making claims. But it can
also be claimed that the tropes and patterns of rhetoric themselves
structure experience in so far as it is mediated by and expressed
through language. Rhetoric therefore bridges the chasm between
poetics and culture. Through shaping and re-patterning of the rhe-
toric that surrounds it, literature—including poetry—simultaneously
reflects, interacts with, and intervenes in culture. Rhetoric provides a
site where literature intersects with other forms of discourse, and not
least public ones. The rhetorical modes of a culture penetrate literary
representation; while literature derives its materials through such rhe-
torical matrices, doing so in ways that are more self-conscious, self-
reflective, creative, and directed to its own ends.
As against the views of poetry as a self-enclosed art object that
twentieth-century formalism projected, nineteenth-century poetry
plays a vibrant and active role in ongoing discussions on defining
America and its cultural directions. Here the mutual implication of
rhetoric and literature takes on surprising power and significance.
The notion of a self- enclosed poetic realm was not generally assumed
x Preface: Poetics, Culture, Rhetoric
in the nineteenth century except as an anxiety and looming threat
within American culture itself. Instead, poetry directly participated in
and addressed the pressing issues facing the evolving nation through
its responses, circulation, and creative reflections on the rhetoric of
national life.
In this study, poetry is treated as a distinctive formal field in which
the rhetorics of nineteenth-century American culture find intensified
expression, concentration, reflection, and creative generation. The lit-
erary force and genius of a writer often entail mastery of the rhetorical
constructions widely available in his or her surrounding culture rather
than a withdrawal from them into a pure or self-reflective aesthetic
language. Poetic language and composition draw on, but also illumi-
nate and redirect the rhetorics of social-cultural life. One argument of
this study is that poetry gains both historical grounding and aesthetic
coherence and force through the investigation of its transformative
relationship to the rhetorics that surround it. This is not to collapse or
deny all aesthetic difference. Poetic mastery itself may be measured in
how a text deploys the rhetorics it responds to and remakes, its com-
plexities across a variety of life-worlds. Such rhetorical analysis does
not reduce literature to historical or ideological reproduction of social
experience. Rather, , rhetorical analysis investigates the relations of
literature to historical and cultural experiences through its own in-
trinsic practices, as mediated through linguistic patterns that engage
and formulate values, attitudes, interests, and cultural directions at
large in society. Investigating poetic structures such as voice, imagery,
setting, self-representation, and address as they interpenetrate with
rhetorical contexts and practices ultimately illuminates and affirms
poetry’s cultural importance and aesthetic power.
In pursuing the rhetorical intersections between poetry and public
discourses, this study addresses both individually and in relation
to each other, the writings of women and men, of Southerners and
Northerners, and of genteel and elite across different regional, ethnic,
racial, and religious identities. Particular attention is given to reli-
gious contexts, not merely as they are subsumed into the categories
of race, gender, and class, as if religion were simply a derivative aspect
of them, but also as itself a major force in the formation of American
self-understanding penetrating social, political, racial, and gendered
spheres. In poetry, as in speeches, sermons, fictions, and newspapers,
nineteenth-century America’s efforts at self-definition took shape
through religious claims and counter-claims. The Bible, as a founda-
tional text of American national identity, provided terms for articu-
lating and arguing many different sides of American commitments.
Preface: Poetics, Culture, Rhetoric xi
Here the outstanding feature is the way the Bible in particular be-
came a rhetorical base shared by even violently opposing interests and
across a wide range of poetic undertakings.
One topic in which literary and cultural expression intercross
through common and core rhetorical formations is modesty, a central
parameter for defining both poetic and social conduct for women.
Here I review and revise what have been traditional interpretive par-
adigms situating women and women’s writing in private, domestic
spaces as against public ones. Poetry in fact served as a major avenue
for women’s emergence into and participation in public issues. This
is a context even for Emily Dickinson, whose writing addressed and
contended with the cultural forces of when she lived despite–even
through—her iconic privacy.
Nineteenth-century male poets more confidently regarded them-
selves as participating in public national formation, although they too
faced questions about their status as artists. Their work particularly
takes up the challenge of establishing American poetic languages, in
both contradistinction against British antecedents and also as con-
testing regional claims and usages of common idioms and expressions
that take on different courses and senses within varied American com-
mitments. The issue of plural identities itself emerges as a defining
and enduring American condition. Especially after the Civil War, po-
etry explores and offers new conceptions of America as a national
framework and new conceptions of both the individual’s and the
community’s place within it, including regional, ethnic, gendered, re-
ligious, racial, and economic identities. But nineteenth-century social
transformations also involve an increasing domination of American
culture by commercial interests, pressing to the side poetry and other
cultural and civic involvements. By the century’s end, there is evident
a redrawing of poetic lines as a boundary against the active world,
with the poem now emerging as a self-enclosed aesthetic object sepa-
rate from public social life.
This study emphasizes poetry as it addresses, critiques, and partici-
pates in American cultural events. Poetry is presented as an art in its
own right, but in terms of a rhetoric shaped by history and that shapes
history in turn. This nineteenth-century public poetry finds its cul-
minating figure in Walt Whitman, who at once asserts poetry’s public
power and also the threats to it posed by American cultural trends.
Such public address in fact largely impels the nineteenth century’s
poetry, the role of which, as this study investigates, was to represent,
articulate, and help define within its own unique terms and through