Listen to a short interview with Joan Shelley RubinHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane
In the years between 1880 and 1950, Americans recited poetry at family gatherings, school assemblies, church services, camp outings, and civic affairs. As they did so, they invested poems--and the figure of the poet--with the beliefs, values, and emotions that they experienced in those settings.
Reciting a poem together with others joined the individual to the community in a special and memorable way. In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Joan Shelley Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words.
Emphasizing the cultural circumstances that influenced the production and reception of poets and poetry in this country, Rubin recovers the experiences of ordinary people reading poems in public places. We see the recent immigrant seeking acceptance, the schoolchild eager to be integrated into the class, the mourner sharing grief at a funeral, the grandparent trying to bridge the generation gap--all instances of readers remaking texts to meet social and personal needs. Preserving the moral, romantic, and sentimental legacies of the nineteenth century, the act of reading poems offered cultural continuity, spiritual comfort, and pleasure.
Songs of Ourselves is a unique history of literary texts as lived experience. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and "popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.
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Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America
Listen to a short interview with Joan Shelley RubinHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane
In the years between 1880 and 1950, Americans recited poetry at family gatherings, school assemblies, church services, camp outings, and civic affairs. As they did so, they invested poems--and the figure of the poet--with the beliefs, values, and emotions that they experienced in those settings.
Reciting a poem together with others joined the individual to the community in a special and memorable way. In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Joan Shelley Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words.
Emphasizing the cultural circumstances that influenced the production and reception of poets and poetry in this country, Rubin recovers the experiences of ordinary people reading poems in public places. We see the recent immigrant seeking acceptance, the schoolchild eager to be integrated into the class, the mourner sharing grief at a funeral, the grandparent trying to bridge the generation gap--all instances of readers remaking texts to meet social and personal needs. Preserving the moral, romantic, and sentimental legacies of the nineteenth century, the act of reading poems offered cultural continuity, spiritual comfort, and pleasure.
Songs of Ourselves is a unique history of literary texts as lived experience. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and "popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.
Listen to a short interview with Joan Shelley RubinHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane
In the years between 1880 and 1950, Americans recited poetry at family gatherings, school assemblies, church services, camp outings, and civic affairs. As they did so, they invested poems--and the figure of the poet--with the beliefs, values, and emotions that they experienced in those settings.
Reciting a poem together with others joined the individual to the community in a special and memorable way. In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Joan Shelley Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words.
Emphasizing the cultural circumstances that influenced the production and reception of poets and poetry in this country, Rubin recovers the experiences of ordinary people reading poems in public places. We see the recent immigrant seeking acceptance, the schoolchild eager to be integrated into the class, the mourner sharing grief at a funeral, the grandparent trying to bridge the generation gap--all instances of readers remaking texts to meet social and personal needs. Preserving the moral, romantic, and sentimental legacies of the nineteenth century, the act of reading poems offered cultural continuity, spiritual comfort, and pleasure.
Songs of Ourselves is a unique history of literary texts as lived experience. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and "popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.
Joan Shelley Rubin is Professor of History at the University of Rochester.
Table of Contents
Contents Introduction Part I THE POET IN AMERICAN CULTURE 1 Seer and Sage 2 Amateur and Professional 3 Absence and Presence 4 Sophisticate and Innocent 5 Celebrity and Cipher 6 Alien and Intimate Part II POETRY IN PLACE AND PRACTICE 7 Listen, My Children: Modes of Poetry Reading in American Schools 8 I Am an American: Poetry and Civic Ideals 9 Grow Old Along with Me: Poetry and Emotions among Family and Friends 10 God’s in His Heaven: Religious Uses of Verse 11 Lovely as a Tree: Reading and Seeing Out-of-Doors Coda “Favorite” Poems and Contemporary Readers Notes Index
What People are Saying About This
This is a book that needed to be written. Superb and original, it not only recovers a vast amount of American cultural history, it changes the way we understand the present. It is a book to celebrate- and reread.
Werner Sollors
In its fresh takes on poetry from Longfellow and Markham to Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Pinsky, Songs of Ourselves is both an elegy to the emotional life of a bygone period and an affirmation that even after the rise of high modernism and New Criticism, traditional, regular, and at times sentimental poetry continues to be enjoyed to this day. Werner Sollors, is author of Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature
Robert Pinsky
Here is a model of what scholarship can do: knowledge, imaginatively applied to matters of importance. Joan Rubin gives an understated but forceful history of poetry's readership, fads, attainments and allegiances in the United States. Implicitly, by sheer force of information, Rubin dispels blather—wiping away trite assumptions, displacing stereotypes, and correcting nostalgia for some vague good old days. Through the lens of a central human art, this book provides a new way of regarding Americans and our culture.
Lawrence Buell
This unusually wide-ranging, admirably researched, resourcefully argued study demonstrates far better than anyone has done before the crucial importance of poetry in the making of American culture--not only in the past but in our own time as well. This book should be of great interest not only to specialists in literature and cultural history but to any reader interested in the place of poetry in American life. Lawrence Buell, author of Emerson
Scott Casper
Joan Shelley Rubin tells a new history of American poetry, broader than a chronicle of writers or literary movements. Here are the people who read poetry: in school, at home, in church, around the scout campfire. Exhaustively researched, dazzlingly written, Songs of Ourselves reveals how poems transcended and escaped the printed page to take their place in Americans' lives and experience--from immigrant classrooms a century ago to poetry slams today. Scott Casper, University of Nevada, Reno
Dana Gioia
This is a book that needed to be written. Superb and original, it not only recovers a vast amount of American cultural history, it changes the way we understand the present. It is a book to celebrate- and reread. Dana Gioia, Poet and Former Chair, National Endowment for the Arts