Lullaby Logics: P&PC Reviews Daniel Tiffany's "My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch" for Poetry Magazine

P&PC comes to you this week from the pages of the May issue of Poetry magazine, where, under the title "Lullaby Logics," we've reviewed Daniel Tiffany's great book My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Johns Hopkins University Press). Here's a teaser:

In Brian Selznick's 2007 Caldecott-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the orphaned main character, Hugo, spends his time trying to repair a broken automaton in the hope that, restored to working order, it will transcribe a message from his dead father. "I'm sure that if it were working," Hugo's father once explained, "you could wind it up, put a piece of paper on the desk, and all those little parts would engage and cause the arm to move in such a way that it would write out some kind of note. Maybe it would write a poem or a riddle. But it's too broken and rusty to do much of anything now."

Hugo's father was right—sort of.

To find out how Hugo's father was sort of right—and to find out what Selznick's novel and automaton poetry have to do with the history of kitsch, check out the rest of "Lullaby Logics" here.

"Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem": Bonus Features & Extra Extras

If you pick up your copy of the January 2015 issue of Poetry magazine, you'll find in the monthly "Comment" section an essay titled "Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem"—a piece that P&PC was asked to write in part to reflect on the total coolness of Catherine Robson's great new(ish) book Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, which tracks the history and literary and cultural impact of poetry memorization and recitation in British and American schools. You might recall that one of P&PC's favorite writers (and recent National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship recipient) Melissa Girard reviewed Heart Beats in these very, uh, pages a year and a half ago.

To think about Robson's book in a different but related way for the Poetry article, we took a little bit of The Outsiders and a little bit of Robert Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" at Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, mixed both with some thoughts about the oral/aural experiences of poetry in non-print media formats, and came up with a piece about how we value poems in relation to what Robson calls "the particular circumstances of [their] assimilation into a culture"—that is, whether we encounter and experience them orally, aurally, in print, or via other media. In an age where poems are circulated and remediated by film, tv, audio formats, and digital platforms of all types in addition to print, the effects of media on poetry—and poetry's effects on media and its audiences—is a conversation in which we love to take part. A particular hallmark of popular verse (and of verse encountered in popular contexts) is, after all, its refusal to stay obediently on the printed page of the book or little magazine, and if we're invested in assessing the cultural impact of poetry on a broad scale, we'd do well to extend our attention (and in some cases our admiration) to what poetry is doing in and for non-print media and what non-print media are doing for (and to) poetry. We know you all know this, or that you've at least heard us say it before, so forgive us if we sound a little bit like the metaphorically-apt but nonetheless dated broken record; we're just taking our cues from the larger media landscape and trying to make it new, dig?

One of the things that Poetry noted when first contacting P&PC about reviewing Heart Beats was the fact that in 2013—a year after Robson's study appeared—Caroline Kennedy published Poems to Learn by Heart, a kid-friendly collection issued by Disney's Hyperion Press and featuring colorful watercolors by Jon J. Muth. Was this book a sign, Poetry wondered, that poetry memorization was on an upswing? That some cultural nostalgia for days long past was finding new expression? That the age of the internet—fueled in part by things like Disney's "A Poem Is..." video series that premiered during National Poetry Month in 2011 featuring celebrities like John Leguizamo, Jessica Alba, and Owen Wilson reciting poems—was perhaps, unexpectedly and surprisingly, participating in if not prompting this upswing?

Unbeknownst to Poetry, Girard was already writing her P&PC piece and had also made the same connection between the Robson and Kennedy books, so how could we ignore that correspondence, coincidental or not, when writing our essay? That's when we thought of John F. Kennedy's inauguration and how, flustered by high winds and bright sun, Robert Frost was unable to read the verse he'd composed specially for the event and, instead, recited from memory "The Gift Outright"—perhaps the most famous recitation of a poem in U.S. history and a moment when the values of the memorized poem trumped the values of the printed or written poem on a national stage. Born in 1957, Caroline Kennedy—the only living child of President Kennedy and current U.S. ambassador to Japan—wouldn't have even been four years old at the time. (That's Jackie reading to Caroline in the picture here, taken before 1961 but published by Time on the occasion of Kennedy's inauguration.) But is it possible that something from that day about the durability and reliability of the memorized poem stuck with her?

It's hard to say for sure (we haven't yet contacted Caroline's people to ask), but there's no denying Caroline's advocacy for poetry and especially the incorporation of poetry into children's lives where it is often memorized. She has published The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (2001); A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children (2005); A Family Christmas, which incorporates poems (2007), and She Walks in Beauty—A Woman's Journey Through Poems (2011), in addition to Poems to Learn By Heart. She hasn't been especially shy about this either. For example, check out her 2013 appearance on The Colbert Report where she plugged Poems to Learn By Heart, explained why one would memorize poems, defended the merits of poetry in the age of Twitter as "the language of the human heart," and along with Colbert did a tag-team recitation of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" as well as a thoroughly entertaining memorized-poem back-and-forth tennis match with him.

Lest ye think that poetry is a recent, new-millennial interest of Kennedy's, check out the curious book (pictured here) that the P&PC interns got their hands on recently: The Caroline Kennedy First Lady Dress-Up Book, published by Rolton House Publishers in 1963. Illustrated by Charlotte Jetter (whom we think did lettering for Marvel comics in the 1960s and 70s), the book features colored drawings of Caroline dressing up in period-appropriate First Lady attire accompanied by extensive runway-like captions about those costumes. "When I make-believe I am Martha Washington," the first caption in the book explains, "I wear a beautiful eighteenth century gown. It is made of finest taffeta with a big full skirt and a tight-fitting bodice which laces down the back. The material was purchased in London and it is salmon pink in color. The dress is hand-painted with white ribbon chains all over it. Violets, buttercups, daisies and morning-glories are embroidered beside ladybugs, wasps and grasshoppers. I wear a lace cap on my head, lace mitts on my hands and a lace shawl over my shoulders. Don't you think Martha Washington is pretty? I do."

But the Dress-Up Book is more than just a fashion show: it's also an anthology of children's poems! Many are little ditties about presidents; others (some written by Alene Dalton) appear to have nothing to do with fashion but are almost cut-and-pasted, scrapbook-like, into the book. Take, for example, the page-spread pictured here: a picture of Caroline dressing up as Florence Harding, a poem written about "Warren Harding," and three poems ("The Grasshoppers," "The Chickens," and "The Apple Tree" that are linked to each other in theme but that appear to have little or no connection to the roaring twenties, Harding, or a time when "clothes were tight and hats were high." It's kind of a bizarre assemblage—one that connects dress-up play, sanitized versions of history ("We danced and played without a care / Laughter and joy were everywhere," reads "Warren Harding"), and rhymes and metered language. P&PC comes away from it all feeling like childhood, history, and poems are all exercises in pretending and, in the process, poetry emerges from this mix as the language of childhood naivete. Far from the memorized poem, which the grown-up Caroline values for its durability and longevity in the human mind, the verse in the Dress-Up Book appears to feed a discourse in which poetry is the language of childhood—something precious, yes, but ultimately something that we leave behind for the more serious (and prosaic) endeavors of adulthood and "reality." Most of the Dress-Up Book, in fact, is about the past: past presidents, past first ladies, American history, and a fantasy world rooted in farms, apple trees, and ponies.

For this reason, the most interesting page of the Dress-Up Book is the last one, which pairs "The Old Frontier" (about Columbus, who "sailed and found our land, / The one we love 'cause it's so grand") with "The New Frontier" (pictured here and featuring a little space-person pointing up at, what, the moon? the sun? some other heavenly body?). That final poem in the book reads as follows:

When history books open up
In future years
They will show that Kennedy's plans
Were called The New Frontiers.

Astronauts blasted off
In shining silver missiles
Sounding like explosions
From a billion giant whistles.

And, who can deny it?
Maybe one day soon
We may see a New Frontier
Staked out upon the moon.

This is the most "adult" poem in the book, one where the activity of dressing-up takes on new and different implications. Here, history is in the making. Evoking the space race admits into the Dress-Up Book for the first time the subject of the Cold War, as does the comparison of rockets to "silver missiles" in line six—a line that, months removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, couldn't be read as naive or innocent. Anticipating the moon landing—line 9 even seems to anticipate conspiracy reports denying the landing ever took place—makes this poem about the future, not the past. And even the dress-up taking place here is different; it's a gender-neutral space suit freed from the taffeta, satin, and ruffles of earlier pictures in which all markers of gender are disguised. Boy or girl, you can imagine yourself inside that suit, and it's a moment that caps off a narrative of American history by looking forward from childhood, beyond the corsets of bygone eras, and into new frontiers where pretending (like pretending to be an astronaut) is still in play but leads to actualization—to history making. Even the voice of the poem is different; while retaining the rhyme and meter of previous poems, line 9 contains the only unanswered question in the entire book.

There's a much darker side to the history in which the Dress-Up Book is embedded, of course. It was published in 1963, and Caroline's father would be shot and killed in November of that same year—a moment so seared into the American memory that we here at P&PC can't but imagine it in some type of relationship with the history of the memorized poem, the decline of memorizing poems in American classrooms that Robson pegs to the 1960s, the made-up histories in the Dress-Up Book, the loss of American innocence that many people attribute to the moment of Kennedy's assassination, and Caroline's advocacy of poetry memorization now. As Frost demonstrated at Kennedy's inauguration, and as Caroline argues in Poems to Learn by Heart, the memorized poem is always with you and something that—for better or worse—you can't forget.

Meeting Alice Corbin Henderson (1881-1949) at Willamette University's Zena Farm

One of our favorite parts of Willamette University is Zena Farm—a five-acre, student-operated farm that is part of a larger, 305-acre property that includes a forest and a small observatory located in the Eola Hills about ten miles west of Salem proper. (Pretty awesome, right? How many other liberal arts universities do you know that can boast both a farm and a forest?) Overseen and managed by W.U.'s Sustainability Institute, the farm is a laboratory for all sorts of cool learning experiences. It sells tasty eats at the campus farm stand on Jackson Plaza during the school year. And it's also the site of the Summer Institute in Sustainable Agriculture—a residential, credit granting program that mixes hands-on learning with field trips, independent projects, and academic study in the theories and philosophies of sustainable agriculture.

We were out at the farm yesterday having lunch with students (including Shayna and Lori from last semester's Introduction to Creative Writing class) and the summer program leader Jennifer Johns, and we happened to notice the handwritten poem (pictured here) tacked to the side of the refrigerator. It's called "Kristen's Grace" and reads:

The silver rain, the shining sun
The fields where scarlet poppies run
And all the ripples of the wheat
Are in the bread that we now eat.

And when we sit at every meal
And say our grace we always feel
That we are eating rain and sun
And fields where scarlet poppies run.

For us, the poem's "scarlet poppies" immediately recalled John McCrae's famous World War I poem "In Flanders Fields," and so, intrigued by the apparent distance between World War I and what's going on at Zena, we set the office interns to work. Who was "Kristen," and was this her poem or her grace—or both? Might the poppies really link back to McCrae and World War I? And, if so, how does that affect how we read the poem today, especially in relation to the farm's mission? Well, we haven't found out who Kristen is, but the interns have discovered that while this is her grace, Kristen isn't the actual author of the poem. Indeed, it's a verse not uncommonly cited and used by sustainable foodie types—and sometimes by feminist types who see in the scarlet poppies a figure for menstruation—and it's usually titled "The Harvest" and attributed to Alice Corbin Henderson.

So who, you might be wondering, is Alice Corbin Henderson? Well, if it's the Alice Corbin Henderson we think it is, "Winter Harvest" not only links us to McCrae but also to Poetry magazine, where Henderson (1881-1949) was an editor and close associate of Harriet Monroe in the magazine's early years, co-editing with Monroe three editions (1917, 1923, 1932) of The New Poetry anthology. Henderson graduated from high school in Chicago and entered the University of Chicago, but due to her susceptibility to tuberculosis, she relocated to Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans for the completion of undergraduate school. (Henderson's mother died of tuberculosis when Alice was three.) Upon graduation, Alice moved back to Chicago where she took classes at Chicago's Academy of Fine Arts, in the process meeting and subsequently marrying William Penhallow Henderson, an instructor at the Academy and a notable Arts and Crafts artist who, among other things, was working on Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens Project. Alice worked with Poetry and she also wrote poetry (her first book Linnet Songs was published in 1898 when she was seventeen years old).

Because of Alice's persistent health concerns, however, the Hendersons relocated to the more lung-friendly climes of New Mexico, where they settled in Santa Fe, becoming central figures in the area's art scene that included Witter Bynner, D.H. Lawrence, and eventually Georgia O'Keeffe. By 1925, at least, poets were meeting weekly at the Henderson residence to read and discuss their work, and it's quite likely that Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, and W.H. Auden dropped by for one or more of these meetings over the years; we'd bet a considerable sum that on his cross-country travels—some on foot—Vachel Lindsay did too. (As we know, New York and Chicago weren't the only centers of modern art activity in the U.S.)

Alice continued to work for Poetry from Santa Fe, but that work—and her own poetry—became less and less the focus of her attention, as she and William became increasingly interested in Native and Chicano cultures and histories. She and William were cofounders of the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs (1922) and the Indian Arts Fund (1925). Many native artists visited their home. William produced and acted in plays to support Indian drought relief efforts in the 1920s. Alice helped organize the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, and she became a librarian and curator for the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art—housed in a building designed by William. (Alice, btw, was also the editor of New Mexico: Guide to the Colorful State [1940], one of the American Guide series books sponsored by the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression.)

That's all very interesting stuff, you might be thinking to yourself, but what about those scarlet poppies in "The Harvest"? Well, we can not only make a good argument that Henderson's poppies do, indeed, directly reference the poppies that McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" made synonymous with World War I, but that this reference also makes "The Harvest" a stunning poem about our relationship to food sources and one of the most surprising poems that we've come across in a while. During World War I, Alice worked as publicity chair for the Women's Auxiliary of the State Board of Defense and, like many poets whom we don't typically view as "political" today (Sara Teasdale most immediately comes to mind), Alice wrote about the war as well. Here is her poem "A Litany in the Desert," for example, which first appeared in the April 1918 issue of the Yale Review:

I.

     On the other side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains there is a great welter of steel and flame. I have read that it is so. I know nothing of it here.
     On the other side of the water there is terrible carnage. I have read that it is so. I know nothing of it here.
     I do not know why men fight and die. I do not know why men sweat and slave. I know nothing of it here.

II.

     Out of the peace of your great valleys, America, out of the depth and silence of your deep canyons,
     Out of the wide stretch of yellow corn-fields, out of the stealthy sweep of your rich prairies,
     Out of the high mountain peaks, out of the intense purity of your snows,
     Invigorate us, O America.
     Out of the deep peace of your breast, out of the sure strength of your loins,
     Recreate us, O America.
     Not from the smoke and the fever and fret, not from the welter of furnaces, from the fierce melting-pots of cities;
     But from the quiet fields, from the little places, from the dark lamp-lit nights—from the plains, from the cabins, from the little house in the mountains,
     Breathe strength upon us:
     And give us the young men who will make us great.

From one perspective, it's kind of amazing to think that the same person who wrote "The Harvest" also wrote "A Litany in the Desert" and that a "modern" poet was moving back and forth between the rhyming quatrains of the former verse and the long, Whitman-like, Sandburg-like lines of the latter. But the spirit linking them—the faith in the local (what Vachel Lindsay called "the new localism"), the connection between the social and environmental, the suspicion that modern urban life separates the human being from her food source and leads to environmental and social catastrophe—comes from something of the same place, does it not?

So here's the kicker. Setting "The Harvest" in its historical context (World War I), authorial context ("A Litany in the Desert"), and philosophical/ethical framework reveals "The Harvest" to be a much more sobering poem than it initially appears, and much less optimistic than "A Litany in the Desert." In fact, it's a downright gruesome couple of quatrains, probably written after the war, about what we eat and where our food comes from. Indeed, Henderson invests the bread of the poem not just with natural phenomena ("rain and sun"), but also—as represented by the "scarlet poppies" that McCrae's verse made so famous—with the blood of modern war. This is not a poem about menstruation. Rather, it is a poem about how the bread that we eat "at every meal" contains the the war's dead, both way back then and in the present moment of the poem in which, as line four says, we "now eat." The "harvest" of the poem's title thus refers to the wheat mentioned in stanza one and to the harvest of death (see Timothy H. O'Sullivan's famous Civil War photo of that same title). If you compare this view of nature with the view of nature and its purifying forces in Whitman's "This Compost," you'll get a sense of just how shocking we find "The Harvest" to be. Indeed, when we now read "The Harvest" in the P&PC Office, we aren't finding ourselves saying grace. Rather, we find ourselves asking for some.

P&PC at MLA: Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism

P&PC is busy getting its parkas and long underwear out of storage in preparation for everyone's favorite-slash-least-favorite event of the year—the Modern Language Association's annual convention, being held at the end of this week (Thursday-Sunday) in balmy downtown Chicago where thermometers currently read a Windy-City-bracing negative nine degrees Fahrenheit. 

Things stand to warm up a little bit, though, especially on Saturday, January 11, when P&PC will be part of a panel titled "Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism," scheduled for 5:15-6:30 pm in the O'Hare conference room of the downtown Chicago Marriott. Unlike many conference activities, which require an official badge and paid-up elbow patches for entry, "Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism" is being made free and open to the public. Liesl Olson of Chicago's Newberry Library will be moderating and commenting, and the panel's speakers include Erin Kappeler and Sarah Ehlers, both of whom should be familiar voices to faithful P&PC readers. If you're in town, why not escape the cold and ice and stop on by? Here's a preview of what's in store.

The panel's first paper, Erin Kappeler's "Harriet Monroe's Museum," reconsiders the canonization of modern poetry by examining how Monroe's curatorial practices extended beyond the poetry she published to the readers Poetry addressed. In Poetry’s promotional materials, Monroe argued that the art form lacked an audience because it had no organized institutional support, but Poetry's editorial files tell a different story. In a series Monroe labeled her "museum" files, she singled out correspondence from lay readers and disgruntled would-be contributors not as evidence of poetry's missing audience but, rather, as evidence of the outmoded aesthetic paradigms Monroe intended Poetry to replace. The sheer volume and diversity of these letters show that, far from bringing poetry to readers who had been ignoring it, Monroe sought to discipline readers out of their promiscuous habits of consumption. This paper focuses especially on Monroe's gendered response to these "bad" readers to consider how modernist ideals of print circulation shaped the presentation of modernism to popular audiences in the 1910s and 1920s.

In "Set Vivid Against the Little Soft Cities: Outsourcing Chicago Modernism," Mike Chasar uses the relationship between Poetry magazine and poetic communities in Portland, Oregon, to argue that Poetry's early success depended upon the production of new verse around the country. Just as the railroads brought livestock to Chicago, so Poetry routed regional new verse movements through the city and used that verse to forward Chicago's profile as a modern center. Like a venture capitalist, Monroe visited Portland in 1926, establishing relationships with an active and coordinated modern poetry scene that was working out what modernism meant for the Pacific Northwest. Tracing circuits between Portland and Chicago, and following the new verse as it circulated far outside the sphere of Poetry in unexpected places such as church bulletins and funeral home brochures, Chasar argues that focusing on Poetry as a product of Chicago's modernism obscures how widespread the new verse movement was.

Building on Chasar's consideration of Chicago and Poetry's relationship to other geographic sites, Sarah Ehlers's "The Harriet Monroe Doctrine: Poetry's Interwar Internationalism" contextualizes changes in Poetry during the 1930s by looking at two significant archival sources: Monroe's unpublished letters and journals from the 1936 P.E.N Conference in Buenos Aries, and the collection of unpublished letters, tributes, and elegies sent to the Poetry office after Monroe's untimely death in South America. While at the conference, Monroe was consistently annoyed that conversations about poetry turned to "politics and split-hair metaphysics," and her responses to debates about poetry at the international writers conference provide insight into how she framed transnational literary histories of modern poetry in relation to U.S. cultural institutions. The events of the P.E.N. conference also reveal how discourses about the role of art amidst global political turmoil relate to how Poetry was conceived in Depression-era Chicago.

In "A Chicago Institution: The Harriet Monroe Collection and the Rise of the Modern Poetry Archive," Bart Brinkman compares Monroe's initial fundraising venture for Poetry to the formation of the Harriet Monroe Collection, willed to the University of Chicago upon Monroe's death in 1936. When Monroe initially sought funding for what would become Poetry, she pitched the magazine to potential donors as a Chicago cultural institution, not unlike a museum or an opera house. This institutionalization of Poetry would become more tangible upon Monroe's death. The Monroe Collection provides a detailed portrait of poetic modernism from the perspective of one of its key figures, housing thousands of rare books and magazines along with corrected proofs and strings of correspondences that illuminate authorial and editorial intention. Beyond having particular importance for investigating Poetry's role in modern poetry, the collection also illuminates the institutionalized collecting of modern poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century more generally. 

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday!

Harriet Monroe's Museum: The Boosts, Knocks, and Crank Letters of Poetry Magazine—A Guest Posting by Erin Kappeler

Editor's Note: In Chapter Two of Everyday Reading, P&PC studies an archive of fan letters written in the 1930s and mailed to the popular, nationally-broadcast poetry radio show Between the Bookends, which received upwards of 25,000 such letters per month at the height of its popularity. These letters are oftentimes movingly (perhaps embarrassingly) confessional, make large and sometimes (it would seem) exaggerated claims for the importance of poetry in listeners' lives, and sound almost bizarre to our ears today for those very reasons. 

Who knew that the venerable Poetry magazine also received the same types of letters—and that editor Harriet Monroe didn't just pitch 'em into the trash but collected them in a special file she labeled as her "museum" file? In the following guest posting by one of the most provocative new voices we've encountered on the modernist studies scene, Erin Kappeler—currently a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow at Tufts University and pictured here and above—ruminates on the implications of these letters (and the poetry they reference) for how we think about their writers, Monroe's aesthetic, Poetry's role in shaping the landscape of American poetry, and American poetry criticism in general, which has frequently bestowed upon Poetry a privileged, even messianic, place in the rejuvenation of American verse in the twentieth century. This material comes from the final chapter of Kappeler's dissertation, Shaping Free Verse: American Prosody and Poetics, 1880-1920, other segments of which are forthcoming in Critical Rhythm (ed. Jonathan Culler and Ben Glaser, Fordham University Press). We love what Kappeler has to say about Monroe's Museum, and we think you will to.

In her autobiography, published two years after her death, Harriet Monroe (pictured here) reflected on why she founded Poetry magazine in 1912: "[T]he well of American poetry seemed to be thinning out and drying up, and the worst of it was that nobody seemed to care. It was this indifference that I started out to combat, this dry conservatism that I wished to refresh with living waters from a new spring" (250). By most accounts, Monroe succeeded. As the poet A.R. Ammons once noted, "[T]he histories of modern poetry in America and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable" (qtd. in "The Moneyed Muse"). Poetry has come to stand for an experimental strain of American poetry that supposedly revitalized a dying art form. While the mouthpieces of genteel culture such as Scribner's, the Atlantic, and Century "policed Parnassus" and enforced a "restrictive standard" of aesthetic value that stifled public interest in poetry, as Andrew DuBois and Frank Lentricchia argue in the Cambridge History of American Literature, Poetry, with its promise "to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach," seemed to open up a new world of poetic possibilities that widened the audience for poetry. The genre that had become extraneous to the American reading public was suddenly brought back into contact with the currents of "living waters," saving poetry from cultural irrelevance.

This is a compelling story, and, to paraphrase Hemingway, it would be pretty to think that it was so. But rumors of poetry's demise were sparked by a particularly narrow view of poetry's role in cultural life. Any number of sources can dispel the idea that the poetry of the 1890s, 1900s, and early 1910s was stagnant, out of touch, and unread, but one particularly useful (and surprising) source of evidence is the archives of Poetry itself. Monroe donated her editorial files to the University of Chicago in 1931, including a series she labeled "museum" files (now boxes 42-46), which house an impressive array of fan letters, poems, complaints, and appeals, identified variously as "boosts," "knocks," "crank letters," and "amusing letters." The curious thing about these files is the way they group seemingly outré exchanges with letters from poets who simply seem too lowbrow for Poetry. The ramblings of an isolated crank or religious visionary, for instance, are given as much credence as the protests of Ella Wheeler Wilcox or the entreaty of an amateur poet. This grouping reflects Monroe's tendency to dismiss as uniform in character any aesthetic paradigms that did not mirror her own. If none of the hundreds of unsolicited letters she received on a monthly basis (Monroe claimed that at one point Poetry received roughly 2,500 poems from 500 would-be contributors every month; only a small percentage of these letters are represented in Poetry's official archive) reflected her own self-avowedly modern poetic vision, then it proved that American poetry was going through a particularly arid phase, and "needed stirring up" (249). But the sheer volume of these letters gives the lie to the story of poetry's stagnation. A closer look at Monroe's "museum" files shows that, far from bringing poetry to readers who had been ignoring it, Monroe sought to discipline readers out of their promiscuous habits of consumption.

Maurine Halliburton of Milan, Missouri, was one of the hundreds of people who sent poems to Monroe in March of 1919. Halliburton's letter, like many of the "crank letters" in the Poetry archive, testifies to how integral poetry was to her daily life, both as an aesthetic form and as a social force. (Page one of her letter is shown here; page two appears below.) Halliburton wrote to Monroe to express her enthusiasm for the March issue of Poetry—not for the seventeen William Carlos Williams poems leading off the issue, but for Florence Snelling's "March in Tryon" and Frances Shaw's "World Lullaby." Halliburton noted that she enjoyed these poems especially because "the metre of the verses keeps them in my mind even if I forget the happily chosen words." She was able to appreciate the finer points of versification because she had been born a poet, she explained, thanks to the prenatal influence of the wildly popular Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

In your correspondence department I find that you are really interested in the poets who contribute to or read your magazine. Maybe you will be interested in hearing how I happened to be born a poet. For that it was. Before my birth my mother was given a copy of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poem, "Maurine," with some other of her verses. She enjoyed it so much and read it over and over, with no thougth [sic] however as to prenatal influence on the child to which she was to give birth. When I came and proved to be not the boy that was wanted but a girl instead, I was named for the poem that had been so enjoyed by my mother. Before I could write them I was composing verses. When I learned to write I wrote short poems to all members of the family, including numerous poets of which I was fond. I kept this up through all my school days. The product was, of course not at all remarkable as literature but I enjoyed it. I have only a few of the many poems I wrote during my growing up although at one time I had about thirty or more all together in a note book. I lost it and only have those I could remember and re-write. I am twenty-one. In the last five years I have completed one hundred and seven poems, all of which I have. The last year has been the one in which most of my writing was done. Probably this was die [sic] to the fact that I was compelled to remain at home with my mother and thus had more time than I had had before. The other day I read a copy of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's life and was surprised to find that she attributed her talent to the prenatal influence of her mother's reading of poetry and literature. However this is not uncommon but it interested me as Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poems had been the direct cause of my having the talent she claims came to her in a similar manner. 

Halliburton's oeuvre may not have been "remarkable as literature," but the hundreds of poems she composed testify to the way that poetry suffused her life, even before she was born. No dry well here—for Halliburton, poetry flowed in and out of her body in a quite literal way, constituting both her personal history and her sense of self. One can only conjecture how Halliburton's mother used Maurine to make sense of her own experience as a pregnant woman (Did she fear succumbing to Helen's fate, dying in childbirth? Did she dream of another life like Maurine's, where she could be a creative woman and a mother?), but it is clear that to Halliburton, Wilcox's poetry helped to give her life meaning. She was not the boy her parents desired, but by taking on the name of a poem her mother cherished, she was able to ease some of her mother's disappointment. Her collection of "one hundred and seven poems" attests to how common it was for Halliburton to think in verse—to process her experiences by putting them into poetic form. Her syntax in describing these juvenile poems is telling; she wrote poems to members of her family, "including numerous poets of which I was fond." She did not simply admire the poets she read, but went so far as to include them in her inner circle, assimilating them into the Halliburton clan. The simplicity of her admission that she had been "compelled to remain at home" with her ailing mother shows that her daily sphere of action was restricted, and that she used the reading and writing of poetry to enlarge the scope of her world. Wilcox is thus a doubly significant figure for Halliburton, as she was a highly public woman who had been able to create a successful literary career outside the home. Halliburton's affective bonds with Wilcox allowed her to reach beyond the confines of her role as her mother's caretaker, and to justify her identity as a "born poet." Halliburton added that a few magazines had begun to confirm this identity, mentioning:

I have had two poems published in THE AJAX, a poetry magazine of Alton, Illinois, and have not long ago received a check from LIFE for a short poem. Aside from that I am quite obscure. But the writing of poetry is a pleasure and, altho [sic] one desires to be recognized, the lack of recognition does not discourage a writer. I hope sometime to have something in your pages, so will continue to send verses at times... P.S. Just as I finished this the postman brought me another check from "Life." I'm rather elated.

For Halli- burton, getting published in Life was proof that she was a poet. She recognized that Poetry was a step up from The Ajax and Life in terms of prestige, but she underscored the continuity between commercially successful popular poetry and prestigious "literary" poetry. There was no reason why a popular poet such as Wilcox could not inspire a poet to create both light verses for mass-market magazines as well as "high" literary work that would be worthy of Monroe's notice. Life confirmed her talent, and this success encouraged Halliburton to do something more "literary" that would belong in Poetry. For Halliburton, as for so many other Poetry subscribers, modern poetic practices were capacious enough to include both the Monroes and the Wilcoxes of the world, and this capaciousness was poetry's strength rather than a sign of its decline.

Wilcox herself had tried to say the same thing to Monroe in 1913. After Monroe dismissed Wilcox as a "milk-and-water" poet in one of her editorials, Wilcox sent a sharp rebuke, explaining that, "There are as many kinds of poetry as there are intellects in men," and that Monroe's "assumption that 'lovers of the art resent my kind of work' is only true when these lovers chance to be of your special make of mind. There are other kinds!" (Pages one and two of Wilcox's letter are shown in the paragraph above and the one here.) As proof, Wilcox included a letter she had received from an admiring reader named Jessie A. Hill (see the following two pictures) who wrote to Wilcox to say that, "I should like to tell you how much I love your poems, & what a help & pleasure they have been to me, in a long & lonely illness.... I want you to know that 'you have performed the mission of the poet in helping one sad heart to bear its pain.' Please write as many more as you possibly can, for they are bound to do good to all who read them."

Wilcox added a note to this enclosure (the final image of this posting below), explaining that it was "a sample of letters which come to me by the thousands. I confess it is a kind of 'popularity' which appeals to me." For Halliburton and Wilcox alike, holding out a single aesthetic standard for poetry would result in a misreading of much of the poetry available to readers at any given time and would fail to do justice to the multiple roles that poetry could play in social life. If "milk-and-water" poetry failed on an aesthetic level, it remained vitally connected to the everyday life of thousands of readers who found in it ways to cope with the personal and existential disappointments of modern life.

Monroe was unswayed, of course. As the marketing materials for Poetry attest, Monroe was interested in the prestige value of poetry and how cultural capital could be converted to actual capital via officially-sanctioned prizes, societies, and institutions. Wilcox and Halliburton had as much place in this vision of poetry as did "Her Grace—the Almighty God, Human Name Grace C. Wright," who wrote to warn Monroe that the poems she submitted to Poetry were "Divine, they bear an inspired message" and that "in two years time all art, science, culture ... will kneel at the feet of the Almighty God the writer of the trash you rejected and find in that God, that Life, a Science, an art above all sciences."

Monroe filed Halli- burton's letter right next to Wright's in her "crank letters" series, implying that all affective uses of poetry were at best foolish and at worst crazy. Monroe's version of aesthetics won the day, which has made it difficult for us to hear Halliburton's and Wilcox's voices as anything other than naïve and a little embarrassing. But these are the voices that remind us that poetry before modernism was not at all out of touch with the daily life of an average American. If anything, it was too much a part of it, which prompted Monroe and other modernists to stake a claim for poetry as a purely aesthetic concern.

How Popular Is Popular? The Case of Vachel Lindsay

In 1913, Springfield Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay published "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" in Poetry magazine, and the poem quickly become a popular hit on the day's poetry-reading circuit. Audiences clamored for Lindsay's half-sung dramatic performance so much that Lindsay wrote to friend and Davenport, Iowa, lawyer Arthur Davison Ficke, "I have recited the General til my jaws ache—4444 times."

Here's the beginning of the poem (to be sung, Lindsay instructed, to the tune of "The Blood of the Lamb" with instrumental accompaniment):

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said: “He’s come.”
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale—
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:—
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

The publication of Lindsay's "The Congo" in Poetry a year later, however, earned Lindsay more fame than he'd ever bargained for. Response to "The Congo" was sensational among literary and popular audiences alike. Biographer Eleanor Ruggles reports that when Lindsay read "The Congo" at a Poetry event celebrating William Butler Yeats' visit to Chicago, "The audience burst into applause ... and there were bravos from Lindsay's fellow midwesterners, persuading him into reciting General Booth."

Around the same time, in the booming coal-mining metropolis of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1915, 1,500 people—nearly 5% of the population of what was then the 94th largest city in America—turned out to hear Lindsay read.

How popular is that, you might ask?

Well, for Lindsay to find a popular turnout nowadays, he would have to go to Chula Vista in San Diego County, California, now the nation's 94th largest city with a population of 210,000. To match, percentagewise, the size of the crowd that saw Lindsay perform in Wilkes-Barre in 1915, an audiences of about 10,000 people—10,000!—would have to turn out. Earlier this year, when Mary Oliver sold out a 2,500 seat venue in Seattle (consistently ranked as the most literate large city in the U.S. and much larger than Chula Vista), the event made national headlines. "Poet-mania," read one report headline, "Mary Oliver's sold-out appearance sparks a ticket frenzy on Craigslist."

Just imagine what the press would do if 10,000 people turned out in any city for a poetry reading today—or what the frenzy would have been like if Craigslist was around back in 1915.