History of Cinema

American Poetry, 1871-1900


Filmed from the holdings of the Harris Collection of

American Poetry and Plays, Brown University

Microfilmed on behalf of Brown University by Northeast Document Conservation Center, as part of the Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project of the Research Libraries Group

Primary Source Microfilm

An imprint of Thomson Gale

American Poetry,

1871-1900
Unit 12: Reels 551-599


Filmed from the holdings of the Harris Collection of

American Poetry and Plays, Brown University

Microfilmed on behalf of Brown University by Northeast Document Conservation Center, as part of the Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project of the Research Libraries Group

Primary Source Microfilm

An imprint of Thomson Gale

Primary Source Microfilm

An imprint of Thomson Gale

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Table of Contents

American Poetry, 1871-1900 from the Holding of the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays at Brown University…………………………….………………..…vi

Unit 12 (Reels 551-599)…………………………………………………………..….…1

American Poetry, 1871-1900

from the Holdings of the Harris Collection of

American Poetry and Plays at Brown University

The Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays, which includes a strong Canadian literature list as well, is housed at Brown University’s John Hay Library in Providence, Rhode Island. It began in the mid-nineteenth century as the private collection of Albert Gorton Greene. Greene, a poet, lawyer, and judge, “collected poetry in a way unusual for his day,” reports the catalogue for the Special Collections at Brown: “instead of collecting only finely bound editions of the works of prominent poets, he attempted to collect every printed volume of American and Canadian poetry and plays.”¹ Collecting American literature was unusual at the time, and collecting so broadly was certainly an eccentric practice. After his death in 1868, most of the American literature collection was purchased by Caleb Fiske Harris, an important collector of American poetry and plays, who continued to build the collection. Following Harris’s death in 1881, Senator Henry Bowen Anthony, a collector of Americana, bought the collection of about five thousand volumes and bequeathed it to Brown in 1884. The collection has continued to grow and today contains more than 250,000 titles.
The present Primary Source Microfilms edition of the John Hay Library’s microfilms of its holdings covers American poetry from 1871 to 1900.² The selection of titles for microfilming was overseen by Rosemary Cullen, the senior scholarly resources librarian at the John Hay Library. Cullen states that the list of about 8,500 titles is as comprehensive as possible, and it is representative of the miscellaneous holdings of the collection from this period.
It is the nonselective collecting principle that makes the Harris Collection one of a kind, and the scholarly value of the archive today lies in its representation of little-known or unknown materials and figures, along with its holdings of well-known writers who continue to be regularly anthologized and taught. Thus, while it is certainly an important resource for textual scholars interested in variants of words, passages, and poems, in the “fluidity” of texts by major, canonical poets, the Harris Collection is an even more important resource for students and scholars of American social, cultural, and literary history, providing a wealth of materials for original research and analysis. Cullen reports that she regularly gets mail from scholars who have looked everywhere, with no success, to locate a text, and the Harris Collection will most likely have it. In her words, it is “the once famous, the never famous, the obscure” that the “Harris is really best known for,” and the value of this microform set, she adds, is that it makes available titles that are not likely to be available elsewhere.
The collection comprises not only books of poetry but ephemeral verses, such as pamphlets of poetry published as advertisements, that would not ordinarily have been preserved in libraries. The rapid proliferation of mass media of ephemeral publishing, serving diverse audiences and purposes, and the coincident impulse to collect such texts mark a late nineteenth-century moment, and it is the collecting of disposable ephemera that grants them their value for the present, because very few copies of such stuff survive or are publicly accessible.
Since the Harris Collection has preserved these texts without making editorial value judgments as to their literary merit, it has also preserved a material knowledge of books and publishing; as Anatole France wrote, “The only exact knowledge there is is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books.”³ Thus this microfilm publication is a useful resource not only for American cultural historians and students of literature but for scholars interested in the history of the publishing and circulation of texts in America. The microfilm edition gives images of the physical appearance of the volumes and indicates their dimensions with a centimeter ruler that shows the scale of the image, which would enable research on the changing packaging of books. And poetry volumes in the late nineteenth century not only came in different formats, but they often came with illustrations; a microfilm edition would document this “synaesthetic” cultural moment in American publishing that is likely indicative of a certain stage in the history of literacy.
Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” describes the modern masses as “a collectivity in a state of distraction.”⁴ The Harris collection of American poetry, in the spirit of the distraction that is a symptom of the transition into modernity, documents the emergence of the masses and the publishing boom in poetry that accompanies it. Thus the collection, useful for scholars of book publishing and popular culture, also documents how what came to be the United States was in a state of “distraction” in a different sense as well. For in the late nineteenth century, the ongoing internal migration and foreign immigration rendered more difficult—and gave a different texture to—the general Western experience of modernization, urbanization, and industrialization.
The collection gives a sense of this peculiarly American version of late nineteenth-century “distraction.” There is a good deal of poetry published on the themes of urban versus rural life, on local events, and on regional experience—verse about the developing West, the various areas of the Midwest, and the South, as well as about specific states. Regional literature is a growing field of study, and, again, the “nonregional,” generic mediation of poetry would complicate the questions of that field of study in a productive way. There is also a lot of verse published in German, by native speakers, addressing other immigrant native speakers, as well as dialect ballads—which would be of interest for studies of dialect representation and even studies of the use of such dialect material by twentieth-century poets.
The archive holds many examples of poetry on domestic life, which would provide insights into daily life or quotidian experience. Occasional verses, such as graduation poems, poems commemorating marriage anniversaries, birthdays, and funerals, Easter and Christmas—the microfilm set has thirteen editions of Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “The Night Before Christmas”—are also of interest to American social and cultural historians. Sentimental love poems, pious verses on religious topics, verses on temperance and women’s suffrage, funerary verses, primers, alphabet rhymes, and songs and ballads for children are other areas of study that this archive would be useful for. Children’s verse, in particular, was a thriving genre at this time, and it is well represented. The collection also holds a lot of poetry on American history, patriotic poetry occasioned by the U.S. centennial, and poetry about the Civil War from both northern and southern perspectives, including memoirs and reminiscences about the experiences of specific regiments. Poetry about Native Americans—both eastern and western tribes—is also well represented. In general, the representations of American history and of race—of African Americans and Native Americans—in popular verse are topics that this archive makes available for study.
There are also little-known African American authors in the collection, as well as surprising items, such as an edition of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), published by W. H. Lawrence and Company in 1887 in Denver, Colorado. This case brings up another area of interest—the history of the American publishing industry, which, while concentrated in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, was once far less centralized than it has become. As a counterforce against a modern distraction or “scattering,” many printers in many smaller cities and towns around the United States published verse of interest to the local community.
Finally, there is a huge number of examples of oral forms such as ballads, hymns, and songs that circulated in print in this period. These forms that rely on establishing multiple memory paths—of regular meter, vivid imagery, sound patterns such as rhyme schemes, alliterations, and repetitions of all sorts—also attest to the popularity of poetry as a genre. In the nineteenth century there was an oral culture of poetry, of memorization and recitation of poetry as a social activity, and a lot of the popular verse in the collection records, in print, that history of an oral culture in the process of gradually being printed out of social existence.
The availability of such archival materials makes for the infrastructure of literary research, and this microfilm edition is invaluable for scholars and students who do not have easy access to the Harris Collection, saving them precious travel time and funds. The project will open up areas of research on materials that are difficult to access and therefore in danger of being overlooked. And such material also forms an infrastructure for new kinds of communication between archival research in social and cultural history, textual scholarship, and literary criticism and theory.
For the archive would also be useful for scholars and critics who work on canonical figures—from both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It would enable work on literary historicizing, so to speak, of major poets by invoking the context of the history relevant for literary production—what kinds of poetry were being published, circulated, and read and in what format. Each social activity has its different historical trajectory, and a poet’s response to his or her historical, social, political, and economic contexts is always mediated by the generic rules of the medium and a historically changing concept of what can be said and received as poetry at any given time. A poet like Emily Dickinson, for example, was in conversation with the popular culture and the sentimental discourses of her time, and an understanding of her work, including her radical formal innovations, would benefit from placing her in the context of the prevailing cultural discourses as they circulated in the convention-bound medium of poetry. How poetry negotiates between the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions that may determine certain aspects of literary production and generic imperatives is a crucial question: poetry will not reduce to its diverse determining contexts, but it needs to be placed in conversation with these contexts. And this archive would enable investigations of poetry in its multiple contexts, as well as help keep in view the essentially popular nature of poetry as an art form. Poetry was, in the late nineteenth century, a mass art: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has about 150 entries in this thirty-year time period; Oliver Wendell Holmes has about sixty; John Greenleaf Whittier has eighty-two entries. Edgar Allan Poe has sixty-one titles, in English and in French.
The archive would also be useful for work on canonical modern poets born in the last decades of the nineteenth century, for it brings up important questions. What kinds of verse were twentieth-century poets like Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson or modernist poets like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Wallace Stevens exposed to? What was the popular poetic and literary cultural environment of their crucial formative years? How did the backdrop of popular poetry affect the development of an elitist modernist aesthetic and the inaccessibility of much of modern verse to a general audience?
Another fascinating line of work such an archive would enable is tracing the influence of major figures like Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman,⁵ Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Emily Dickinson through the verse published in the 1870–1900 period, to see how they were appropriated and to what extent they may have reached the modern poets indirectly, through a kind of popular-cultural mediation, as well as directly. To know what the modern poets read and in what format would enrich our conceptualization of the modernist turn. Dickinson, for example, was an important predecessor for Hart Crane, but he read the only available edition of Dickinson’s work—the collection “edited by two of her friends Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson,” which went through many printings in the late nineteenth century. Thus the archive is a valuable resource not only for American social and cultural historians but for scholars and critics who work on canonical figures.
The archive presents the big picture—a view of poetry as a mass medium. Modernist poets, in their effort to fashion a different readership, lost both the popular readers of poetry and the notion of poetry as a popular art. The Harris Collection contains work by many poets I have never heard of—poets who are no longer in print or anthologized. Yet their books went through multiple editions by major commercial publishers. There was an audience for this material that enabled the emerging masses to see themselves as reflected in the medium of popular poetry and its sentimental depiction of emotional lives and subjective, private experiences. For the generic subject matter of lyric poetry becomes a desirable commodity at a certain point in history, when the status of the individual subject and of his or her “private” experiences comes into question, and the historical moment shapes the sentimental forms that the representations of subjective experience take.
Out of the mass medium of popular verse crystallize texts that survive, are reprinted, and continue to be anthologized. For a scholar interested in how that happens, in all that is involved in the process of selection and canonization, an archive such as this would again be a valuable resource. For example, the amazing number of women poets who had access to publication at this time is a phenomenon that raises the question of canonization. Numerous women poets, now unknown, had many books that went through multiple editions, published by major publishing houses. Who gets edited out? And why? This cannot be reduced to some kind of sexist conspiracy, since women were audible and there were also a lot of male poets who were very popular in their day but did not last. With such an archive it would be possible to trace, decade by decade, how a literary culture evolves by choosing the images of itself and the spokespeople it wants to preserve, the subjects it responds to, and the language or kinds of language use that it wants to keep hearing.