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Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War-era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating "authentic" poetry for intellectuals from "popular" poetry for everyone else. Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century's developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets' class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry's status in American culture--both in the past and present--and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry's appeal. Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.… (meer)
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
For Paula Bernat Bennett, with admiration, gratitude, and love
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Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Economic rhetoric dominates the reviewer-reader relationship. Despite the North American's insistence that it has witheld critique at reader's expense, reviews repeatedly underlined their responsibility to rescue the naïve reader from spending money on something that was imperfect poetry, or not even poetry at all. (Chapter 1: "National Ideas Shall Take Birth", p.45)
Reviewing a Byron volume, one critic contends that "the first object of a good writer, [is] that of being understood." (Chapter 1: "National Ideas Shall Take Birth", pp.47-48)
Such reviews oddly appeared to advocate a democratic poetry that many could appreciate, while they insulted lazy and leisured readers ensconced on soft sofas. Beyond its intimation of resentment at class privilege, this attitude encodes a gendered thrust at leisured ladies. (Chapter 1: "National Ideas Shall Take Birth", p.49)
[. . .] Poe expressed irritation when morality appeared explicitly. "Now, conveying of what is absurdly termed 'a moral,' is a thing entirely apart from these considerations, and should be left to the essayist and the preacher." (Chapter 2: "Flattering the Prejudices of the Multitude", p.100)
Citing Holmes's fame, the North American affirmed readers' importance: "Immediate popularity . . . is no bad proof of the excellence of poetry . . . He who sings for the public and cannot find a grateful audience, would do better to keep his music to himself. (Chapter 2: "Flattering the Prejudices of the Multitude", p.106)
Poe is the poster boy for how strongly reviewers -- and biographers, who encode another form of review -- could impact a poet's future. We should situate these critiques with the larger context; as Fisher reminds us, " The cultural milieu of the nineteenth century was rife with egotism and jealousies, added to which are related attempts to vent spleen, in print and otherwise, upon anyone who may have questioned the status of self-important artists and writers." Such contentiousness may not have damaged the writer's [E.A. Poe's] long-term reputation, a fact the would likely have amused the author. Scott Peeples observes, "I believe Griswold did more good that harm to Poe's long-term popularity by stimulating a character debate that kept people writing about Poe for decades, keeping prospective readers curious and thereby keeping Poe very much in print." (Chapter 2: "Flattering the Prejudices of the Multitude", p. 121)
Faith Barrett, for example, emphasizes "the crucial role that poetry played in nineteenth-century culture: in the Civil War era, Americans believed that poetry could make vital contributions to the ongoing debate about the meaning of national identity. Northerners and Southerners alike believed that poetry could not only reflect but also shape events that took place on battlefields."
These trends paralleled reviewers' postbellum return to dividing audiences between educated and popular, a strategy that necessarily ensured their own weakened authority. Instead of envisioning a democratic readership that embraced every citizen, as they had done during the Civil War, they narrowed their scope insisting that authentic and truly original poetry spoke only to a small putatively more intelligent, more sophisticated, more discerning readers. The bottom line was that readers kept reading what they liked, and poets wrote what they liked, ignoring critics' preferences. But poetry as an admired and virtually omnipresent discourse disappeared, in no small measure due to reviewers' myopia, segregation, and hierarchization of audiences, and collective circumscription of American women's poetry. (Chapter 5: Scarlet Experiments: Dickinson's New English Among the Critics, p. 217)
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Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War-era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating "authentic" poetry for intellectuals from "popular" poetry for everyone else. Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century's developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets' class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry's status in American culture--both in the past and present--and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry's appeal. Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.
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