Poetry and public discourse, 1820–1910

Shira Wolosky
 preface: the claims of rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of making claims. As such, it has often been suspected
of being narrowly strategic and interested, if not distorting. But it can also
be claimed that, instead of only putting forward some particular argument,
rhetoric broadly structures experience in so far as this is mediated by language
and expressed through language. To study rhetoric is then to study funda-
mental patterns in a culture, as made evident and pursued through its varied
discourses. In this sense, 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 rhetorical matrices, but in ways that are more self-conscious,
self-reflective, and directed to its own ends.
The study of nineteenth-century American poetry confirms the mutual ref-
erence between literary work and other modes of rhetoric. In the nineteenth
century, poetry had a vibrant and active role within ongoing discussions defin-
ing America and its cultural directions. The notion of poetry as a self-enclosed
aesthetic realm; constituted as a formal object to be approached through
more or less exclusively specified categories of formal analysis; conceived as
meta-historically transcendent; and deploying a distinct and poetically “pure”
language: these notions seem only to begin to emerge at the end of the nine-
teenth century, in a process which is itself peculiarly shaped in response to
social and historical no less than aesthetic trends. Within the course of the
nineteenth century itself, such an enclosed poetic realm seems not to have
been assumed, except as an anxiety and as a looming threat within American
culture itself. Instead, poetry directly participated in and addressed the press-
ing issues facing the new nation.
The second part of this book, “Poetry and Public Discourse,” approaches
poetry as a distinctive formal field on which the rhetorics of nineteenth-century
American culture finds intensified expression, concentration, reflection, and
command. The literary force, not to say genius, of a writer often entails a mas-
tery of the rhetorical constructions widely available in his or her surrounding
culture. Poetic representation reflects, but also gives a heightened definition
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and self-consciousness to general rhetorical constructions, in ways that may

both reinforce and critique them. It is one argument of this study that poetry
gains not only historical grounding but also aesthetic coherence and illumi-
nation through study of its transformative relationship to the rhetorics that
surround it. This is not to collapse or deny all aesthetic difference. Distinctions
remain between greater and lesser poetic mastery, itself illuminated through
an investigation of how each situates the other and provides a necessary matrix
for reading the other. Nor is it to reduce literature to historical or ideological
reproduction of social experience. It is rather to claim that literature has its ori-
gins and its reference in a broad range of historical and cultural experiences, as
mediated through rhetorical practices among other factors. Values, attitudes,
interests, and cultural directions at large in the society are expressed through
rhetorical tropes, which in turn reemerge in poetry, marking such specifically
poetic structures as voice, imagery, setting, self-representation, and address.
Conversely, poetic representation foregrounds and sharpens the terms of a
culture’s rhetorical configurations. Thus, far from negating the specifically lit-
erary nature of a poetic text, rhetorical context illuminates and affirms poetry’s
cultural importance and aesthetic power.
Walt Whitman of course figures as the outstanding example of poetry as
participating in American public and cultural life. But he is only the greatest
exemplar of a fundamental impulse in nineteenth-century poetic enterprise. At
the same time, anxiety over the place of art within evolving American cultural
commitments is a recurrent pressure on many of the writers of the period, as
a feared deformation of American promise. In the face of this pressure, poets
offer a range of responses. These invariably, however, devote poetic vision to
political, social, religious, and moral, as well as aesthetic concerns. Poetry is
conceived as actively participating in the national life; and this also profoundly
shapes the poet’s conception of himself and herself and his and her role in
society.
In this study, rhetoric provides a site where literature intersects with var-
ious public discourses. I have focused on a set of rhetorical topics that cross
literary and cultural-historical forces. In each case, a vital American concern
is approached through a rhetorical mode shared by both poetry and its sur-
rounding social worlds. The first topic investigates the rhetoric of modesty
as this situates nineteenth-century American women poets. It is a given of
much nineteenth-century historical and literary study that women’s lives were
circumscribed within a domestic world, in ways that extended into almost
every aspect of their social roles and personal definitions. The gendered divi-
sion between public and private is therefore seen to be stark, enforced through
many of the norms controlling political, social, and personal conduct – as
 preface: the claims of rhetoric 149

expressed specifically in the burgeoning literature of conduct-books through-

out the period, instructing ladies on appropriate manners in a world of extreme
social change where these were becoming increasingly unclear.
Yet the poetry produced by women undermines and complicates the division
between public and private as these categories have been applied to female (and
male) experience. A large number of the poems written by women address
public issues. Indeed, the very conception of what is public and what private
is challenged in light of the work of women poets, as these categories apply to
both women and men. In this, the poetry reflects historical ambiguities that
complicate the accepted paradigm of women’s lives as private. In historical
terms, women were in fact widely engaged in activities and issues beyond
their domestic spaces. These activities have been generally conceptualized as
extensions of the woman’s sphere, rather than as challenges to it. Yet, even
while some activities women conducted outside the home were rather like
those performed within it – care for the sick, the elderly, the poor, immigrants,
children – other activities were not. These include direct political activism in
abolition, Indian rights, urban-planning, sanitation, and women’s suffrage.
Indeed, throughout the century, most social services (as we would call them)
were performed by women. Calling this “private” while reserving the term
“public” for the activities of men – who were overwhelmingly engaged in
economic pursuits that, while taking place outside the home, ultimately served
personal interests and private economic ends – is a use of the terms “public”
and “private” in ways that are already gendered. That is, it is only because
and when women performed certain activities and community services that
these are categorized as private. It is only because men were engaged in and
controlling economic production that these are categorized as public.
These public engagements are reflected in women’s verse. Besides the many
verses addressed to social concerns, including care of children (which can itself
be seen as a social and not merely private commitment), a good deal of verse
explicitly concerns public issues and political disputes. And poetry particularly
served as an important avenue for women to address issues and events of central
cultural importance – a role, it can be argued, that poetry has never simply
abandoned in any case. At its best, this women’s poetry is one of rhetorical
reflection, capturing and structuring the languages and rhetorical patterns
around it. Often these rhetorics appear as gendered voices, interestingly posed
against each other, as figures for those cultural values each is shown to represent
in their increasing alienation or disturbance. The poetic topics are often those
of women’s activism: slavery, poverty, prostitution. More broadly, they engage
overarching questions facing American society as, through the course of the
century, economic interests increasingly seemed to challenge, and curtail, the
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earlier call to republican commitments and the value of community as against

private concerns. There is in this women’s verse a pressing sense of a double
standard – itself a recurrent image in the sexual sense, but also as a broad figure
of America’s bifurcating worlds and conflicting values.
This poetry is valuable as representations of women’s lives, but also raises
aesthetic issues that need not be merely dismissed. Much of this women’s poetry
is no worse than minor male poetry that remained continuously in circulation –
anthologized, reprinted, and included in literary histories. While the poetry
often does not offer self-reflective language and self-conscious forms (as also
most male poetry does not), what it does powerfully do is re-present, expose,
and manipulate the rhetorics of its surrounding culture, bringing them to view
and to self-consciousness. These poems belong more to literary history than to
monumental art. But this is to say – as is the case with minor male poets also –
that they reveal the conditions, in both language and history, which shaped
the aesthetic and cultural experience of their period.
Women’s verse is not unique in this participation of poetry in wider cul-
tural discourses. Religious rhetoric stands as another field in which poetry
crosses with public expression, where religious discourse addresses not only
theological but also political and sectional, gendered and ethnic interests. 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 foundational text of American national iden-
tity, provided terms for articulating and arguing many different aspects of
American commitments. Here the outstanding feature is the way the Bible in
particular, but also a variety of religious traditions and understandings, became
a rhetorical base shared even by quite violently opposing interests. Among a
very wide range of disputants, each asserts its own contrasting visions and
claims against the others within a religious rhetoric that remained nonetheless
common. In one sense, this mutually contrastive deployment of Biblical and
religious justification made the intensity of disputation more severe. How-
ever, in another sense religious rhetoric permitted diverse viewpoints and even
violent disagreements to confront each other in a common language, out of a
shared cultural inheritance. Religious language similarly penetrates the poetry
of the period, fashioning it into a territory of claim and counter-claim, where
words pull in conflicting, yet also common directions understood by all: con-
servative and liberal, religious and secular, South and North, white and black.
To a remarkable degree, religious impulses in America take their place within
a tradition of open discourse and anti-authoritarian individualism, making
religion part of a cultural heritage that retains varieties of liberal experience.
As a mode of poetic expression, religious language comes to register diverse
 preface: the claims of rhetoric 151

meanings: in slave spirituals, in women’s poetry, and even, as in the work of

Herman Melville, as a mode of refusal to claim absolute certainties altogether.
This diversity of meanings within a common language is strongly felt in
poetry written by men throughout the century – a poetry in many ways focused
upon the very question of what an American poetic language might be, what
claims it can make, on the one hand, against England whose language it
fundamentally shared, and on the other, in a society apparently concerned
with practical and not aesthetic production. Here sectional strife, but also
cultural division is strongly registered, with the question of American identity
itself highly unsettled. This is the case both in the North and the South. The
poetry of these regions almost hauntingly provides an image of the divided
nation, as each inherits a revolutionary discourse that each then claims in
contradictory ways. But both before and after the Civil War, in the poetry
of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stephen Crane, the
question of an American poetic language is seen in anxious contest against
the materialist-commercial trends emerging with increasing stridency. Poe in
particular constructs a poetic of negation directed against the conditions of
America (as of reality in general), a poetic of extremity showing the obverse
side of American possibility. By the century’s end, a fearful distrust and sense
of displacement by the riotous turn to material prosperity as the defining
American value becomes the basis for a new aesthetic, centered at Harvard and
especially in the figure of George Santayana, bent on defending poetry from
public space. The redrawing of poetic lines as a boundary against the active
world, such that the poem comes to be defined as a self-enclosed aesthetic
object, finds its origins in an emerging turn-of-the-century formalist aesthetics.
The post-Civil War world witnesses new senses of identity and new poetics
engaging, expressing, and shaping them. As in fiction, there emerges a poetry
of regional and ethnic diversity, as these reflect and attempt to formulate shifts
in the relationships between geographic distribution and federal definition. A
new sense of post-war geographic, ethnic, racial, and religious pluralism can
be felt, alongside gender identity. Women’s writing is not in fact a separate
subgroup more or less marginal to American literature, but an integral part
of America’s poetic enterprise, even while gender introduces specific textual
questions and expressions. At issue in this poetry are both new conceptions of
America as a national framework and new conceptions of the individual’s place
within it. Yet, rather than emphasizing group identifications as determinative,
with pluralism measured through the interactions between groups, this poetry
suggests a possibility of multiple participations in a number of groups, with a
relatively high degree of voluntarism and permeability. Identity in this sense
itself becomes multiple. The self represents a site where different associations
152 poetry and public discourse, 1820–1910

may be variously negotiated. In poetry, what becomes of central structural

importance is how several different identities achieve expression, emerging
textually as an orchestration of voices. Differentiated senses of the self are
invoked and deployed in mutual relation and collision, with dialect, region,
gender, ethnicity, and social class all significant factors. The text itself becomes
a pluralist site, and pluralism becomes a mode of negotiating not only between
diverse groups, but between diverse elements, identities, and commitments
within the individual as he and she participates in a larger, complex polity.
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson emerge from the nineteenth-century’s
cultural and rhetorical matrices as the two master figures: yet in ways that seem
dramatically opposed. For these two seem to be, and in some ways are, the
most public and private of poets. Regarding Whitman, my argument questions
readings that emphasize enormities of the self, and instead situates Whitma-
nian selfhood within a vision of political individualism that Whitman himself
rigorously explored. In this model, the individual remains a founding site; and
Whitman’s greatness as an American poet surely inheres not least in his pas-
sionate devotion to the individual’s endless possibility, creative energy, infinite
potential, and pursuit of happiness. Whitman calls to each reader to recognize
and actualize these resources of the self – which would be, in his project, to call
to each reader to himself and herself become a poet. Yet Whitman does not
do so as a solipsistic, self-directed apotheosis of unlimited individuality. He,
on the contrary, insists on individual self-realization as inextricably connected
to, and grounded upon, a sense of place in an ongoing political and social
realization. Without the contribution of each individual, without the active
commitment and participation of each towards creating a polity in which
just such individual potential can be realized, the American experiment will
founder. Both poet and reader serve as a figure of the potential citizen, where,
however, the poet summons other citizens to this right and responsibility, in
a role of service that itself truly defines leadership.
The imagined possibility of such a community of individuals is for Whitman
the figure of America and the promise of America. If America is to him the
greatest poem, it is because it represents that creative individual potential
which can find expression on every level of experience, yet whose multiplicities
intersect in a common venture. Whitman inscribes such multiple levels of
meaning in his own poetic conduct, which offers intensely complex figures for
the variety of experiences, individual and communal. Whitman, however, is
also deeply disturbed by the obvious failures of America to be true to its own
promise. His poetry is born from, and reflects, a profound misgiving and alarm
at the dissolution of America’s varied constitutive forces: most explosively in
the Civil War, and in the slavery which contradicts the American commitment
 preface: the claims of rhetoric 153

to freedom, but subsequently in the War’s aftermath, as American promise

threatens to shrink to a narrow, flat, and restrictive material prosperity and
exclusionary self-interest.
Emily Dickinson in uncanny ways presents an obverse face to Whitman.
This does not mean that her concerns are restricted to a private world. On the
contrary, Dickinson gives strong voice to Whitman’s anxieties and suspicions
regarding the fulfillment of an American promise. Her work, like his, reflects
back on diverse elements of the American experience. These include gender,
religion, history, and economic orders. Dickinson’s peculiar poetic posits and
challenges the variant claims of each of these spheres. Under her scrupulous
investigation, the cultural assumption that these differing spheres are concor-
dant and mutually supporting becomes undermined if not exploded. Her texts
become a site for the confrontation and often the conflict between orders of
experience that prove to be contradictory rather than mutually affirming. This
confrontation can be described in terms of her own identities, which similarly
contradict or subvert each other. Her roles as woman, as poet, within religious
tradition, and as American each finds expression in her work, but in ways that
open and dramatize fissures between them. Particularly her status as woman
complicates her possibilities of participation in American culture. The very
privacy of her work – unpublished in a lifetime spent largely in reclusion and
structured through obscurity – is a critical reflection on the options open to
women and the expectations of them within her society. Here, the work of
other women’s poetry becomes a vital context for interpreting the high art
of Emily Dickinson, not only in terms of women’s domestic confinement, as
has been mainly emphasized, but also in terms of women’s distinctive voices
in critique of the fantasies of autonomy and self-reliance increasingly com-
mensurate with American identity itself – models of identity that Dickinson’s
work at once deploys and disrupts. In Dickinson’s poetry, the cultural norm of
modesty acquires intensified and eruptive expression, exposing models of both
male and female selfhood. The result is a critique of many fundamental Amer-
ican assumptions, undertaken in a densely figured language whose multiple
meanings and implications collide with complex and explosive force.
Throughout this study, poetry retains its specific status and is interpreted
through its own characteristic structures, its language uses, and its self-
reflective impulses. Yet, I treat these literary modes as they order, shape, and
give expression to the vital concerns of culture, through intersecting rhetorics
which poetry then addresses, employs, critiques, and transforms. Literature
as an art and a discipline itself thus participates in, and reflects, history as
it has been shaped by rhetoric, and rhetoric as it has been shaped by history.
Within the body of nineteenth-century verse, I pursue poetry as it represents
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and reflects such cultural norms and concerns as gender structures; religious
commitments and national identity as these mutually inform each other; eth-
nic and regional conflicts and claims; and claims to the national heritage. My
subject is poetry’s role in the nineteenth century of investigating and artic-
ulating, within its own unique terms and through its own unique modes of
self-reflection, issues fundamental to the definition of American life.