Heber, Hymns, Holmes, and Holy Light: Thoughts on Poetry & Popular Culture's New Acquisition

According to some sources, it took the 36-year-old Anglican cleric Reginald Heber all of twenty minutes in 1819 to write "From Greenland's Icy Moun- tains"—a hymn that would go on from its initial composition in Wrexham, Wales, to become one of the most well known hymns in the British Empire and the nineteenth-century United States. As the story goes, Heber (1783-1826), who had won prizes for poetry writing in college and had even by then published a volume of poems and translations, was asked one evening by his father-in-law, the Vicar of Wrexham and Dean of St. Asaph, to write something to be sung the following day. Heber removed himself from company and, within twenty minutes, penned the song's four stanzas, the second of which Mahatma Gandhi would eventually call "clear libel on Indian humanity" and the third of which was printed on the illustrated magic lantern slide just acquired by P&PC and pictured above.

The hymn was sung the next day—set, like the much older "A Famous Sea Fight Between Captain Ward and His Majesty's Ship the Rainbow," to the tune of the even older ballad "'Twas when the seas were roaring." Four years later, in 1823, Heber (that's him pictured here) was appointed Bishop of Calcutta and would hold that post for three years, until 1826, when he died from a cerebral hemorrhage he suffered while taking a bath in Tamil Nadu, India. The Poetical Works of Reginald Heber was published in 1841, but Heber is most remembered for the hymns he wrote. As our new lantern slide perhaps suggests, "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" had wide circulation and appeal: it was (according to Wiki) the missionary hymn most frequently printed in nineteenth-century American hymnals; it was a particular favorite of the Methodists; it was included in the first Mormon hymnal in 1835; and it was still common enough in 1925 India for Gandhi to use it as a key point of reference in his argument against Christian missionaries who "come to India thinking that you come to a land of heathens, of idolators, of men who do not know God."

Because of their international circulation and appropriation, hymns like Heber's can frustrate narratives of national literature common to many English departments and poetry anthologies. It might be tempting, for example, to see "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" as a piece of British literature until one considers that, after its initial singing in Wales, it was (by one account) first published with music composed in 1823 by an American bank clerk and music teacher named Lowell Mason, who was living in Savannah, Georgia. Apparently, Mason wrote "Missionary Hymn" (his first published hymn tune) in just half an hour—a speed befitting Heber's own twenty-minute composition of the lyrics and making visible a pattern of fast writing (some might say "inspiration") that could make one wonder about the amount of care and reflection with which widespread Christian texts were created. When "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" is sung to Mason's tune, then, it's no longer just a British production, but a British-American hybrid. This type of cross-Atlantic collaboration isn't unique to Heber's hymn. When American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the poem that would get put to music as the hymn "Lord of all being, throned afar," for example, it would eventually move the other way across the ocean—from the U.S. to England—where it was printed on a magic lantern slide (a sort of projectable hymnal page, pictured here) that contained directions for singing. Holmes, who in 1859 imagined his Atlantic Monthly readers "singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light we all need," is only the starting point of a text that, like "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," got changed and hybridized as it was imported and exported around the globe.

All of this may help to shed some, uh, light on the somewhat perplexing nature of the magic lantern slide that P&PC just got its hands on. It's a cool little item that, like the Holmes slide, draws substantial meaning from the projection technology of the magic lantern itself; that is, the "One holy light" mentioned in the Holmes poem and the "lamp of life" in the Heber poem not only evangelize on behalf of a god but also on behalf of the lighting technology that makes the images possible in the first place:

Can we, whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high,
Can we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny?
Salvation! oh, salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation
Has learnt Messiah's name.

But beyond that McLuhan-esque "medium is the message" analysis, what also got P&PC thinking is the content of the picture itself. Who are the missionaries? Where are they? Who are they preaching to? So, in hopes of finding some answers (we're no experts in religious history), we sent a picture of the slide to our old University of Iowa friend Everett Hamner, who now teaches at Western Illinois University where he studies the intersections of literature, science, religion, and technology. He in turn sent the picture to all of his religious history friends. And this is when things started to get even more interesting.

Most everyone agreed—based on the repre- sentation of the audience, and on the fact that the bearded man is holding a book—that these are missionaries of a Protestant ilk doing their work in the Americas, and possibly South or Central, not North, America. The missionaries look like early portraits of Joseph Smith, so they could be possibly be Mormon, except for the fact that most Mormon men (as one contributor pointed out) wore beards after the 1850s as a sign of their patriarchal swag. But, curiously, the slide itself is not of New World origin; based on its size, it is most likely of British manufacture—a fact confirmed by the eBay vendor, a retired film professor living in Hertfordshire, England, who sold the slide to P&PC and said it was first purchased it in a lot of about 1,000 slides from a sale in Leicester five years ago. (There were other hymns in the lot, but this was the only one that combined a hymn and an illustration.)

So, the slide is possibly a British creation for British audiences imagining what missionaries at work in the Americas would look like. But when we factor in the British origin of Heber's hymn, its lyrics' emphasis on India and "Ceylon's isle" (in the stanza that Gandhi objected to), Heber's own connections to India, and the hymn's circulation in India and thus its role in the British imperial project more broadly, things get kind of complicated. Why aren't the American "Indians" pictured as the East Indians who would have been more on the minds of an English subject? Perhaps, in its need to picture "earth's remotest nation," the slide couldn't turn to India, because India was no longer remote enough a place in the British imagination. Or perhaps—and this is the most tantalizing possibility we've come up with—this slide (of a British hymn penned in Wales by a future Anglican missionary to India superimposed over a scene from the Americas) is a hybrid text like the hymns by Heber and Holmes eventually became. It's as if the British slide maker borrowed imagery from the Americas understanding that the British audiences for which it was intended would conceptually "set it to the tune" of British activity in India, in much the same way that Lowell Mason set Heber's words about Greenland, Africa, and India to music in Savannah, Georgia.

We here at the P&PC office can't say for sure, and we'd love for someone out there to help shed some light on the matter. If you have any thoughts as you sit there in front of your computer—our age's version of the magic lantern's "holy light" and "lamp of life"—by all means please drop us a line.

Rat On Toast—For Dinner

It has been a tough week for the P&PC Office cat Stella (pictured here). Courtesy of the SPCA of Pinellas County, Florida, where we found her the victim of two abandonments in a row and slated for, uh, disposal unless someone immediately adopted her, she's now an estimated eighteen years old and has been with P&PC since before there was a even a P or PC on the horizon. Moved from Florida to Iowa, then from Iowa to Oregon, she has done more than measure out her life in coffee spoons. But Time's winged chariot is hurrying near, and this week saw two trips to the vet, a round of oral antibiotics, the regular administration of subcutaneous fluids, and a series of pretty gross litter box-related events.

And so, to speed Stella along the road to recovery, we offer the strange 1898 "Rat on Toast—for Dinner" steroeview card issued by T.W. Ingersoll and pictured here. "Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of glass and pasteboard!" wrote the Fireside poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. of his stereoview card collection in "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," first published in The Atlantic Magazine in 1859.  Credited with inventing the "American stereoscope," Holmes imagined that the mechanism's 3-D viewing experience would produce an effect similar to bodily resurrection and that "posterity might therefore inspect us ... not as surface only, but in all our dimensions as an undisputed solid man of Boston."

Stella is certainly no man of Boston, and we're not so pessimistic that we're already viewing her from the vantage point of posterity, but maybe the quasi L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poem on the card's reverse will help in some small way to restore her to her full dimensions:

Do you see the cat?
Do you see the rat?
I see the cat and the rat. The cat caught the rat and killed it with her sharp teeth.
Does the cat eat rats?
Fat rats make fat cats.
The Chinese eat rabbit stew made of rats.

The poem itself is an odd, paratactic stew of elements taken from nursery rhymes, grammar school food chain hierarchies, and nineteenth century American nativism culminating in that bizarre non-sequitur of a last line, and that stew is made even more perplexing when paired with the surreal image on front. But after the week of needles, drip chambers, and eyedroppers we've had, not even that is enough to surprise us.

The Economic Lessons of "The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'"

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) wrote "The Deacon's Masterpiece, or The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'" in 1858. Around 1876, the noted Philadelphia carriage builders, D.M. Lane & Son, reprinted the poem inside a small cardboard pamphlet (pictured here) advertising their company's "Large Stock of Light and Heavy Carriages, of the Newest Designs and Finest Finish"—coaches, coupes, rockaways, bretts, phaetons, buggies, drags, and Jenny Lind carriages including the 1876 Centennial Road and Speed Wagon featured on front.

Holmes (pictured here) was nationally known, of course; a physician-professor at Harvard, writer of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table essays that first ran in The Atlantic Monthly, and author of "Old Ironsides," he was one of the six Fireside Poets whose picture graced the hearths of homes around the country. D.M. Lane & Son was no slouch either, as it turns out. If people were setting Holmes's picture on the mantle, then it was likely that many of them sat themselves in vehicles made or designed by the Lane establishment.

After the death of his father "Captain" Lane—who had started out as a blacksmith, had led a group of one hundred men to fight in the Civil War, and who died suddenly in 1882—son Millard (ahem) took the company's reigns and presided over a period of rapid innovation and expansion in carriage construction and design. In 1893, Millard was appointed President of the Carriage Builders' National Association, praised for his progressive attitude and business methods as well as the company's "splendid factory and spacious ware-rooms." "Mr. Lane is a man," Carriage Monthly wrote, "of fine personal appearance, with a measure of dignity in his bearing that does not interfere with his frank and genial manners." Hub magazine agreed. "He is an energetic, painstaking business man, to whom work is a pleasure ... In social life he is equally popular, and his fitness and ability have led to his connection with various local organizations."

Millard would helm the family business until his own death in 1901—the same year that Mr. Ransom Olds opened his first assembly line plant to speed up and streamline the manufacture of the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, the first mass-produced automobile in history. Of course, the carriage industry did not disappear overnight—it would take another ten or fifteen years for Henry Ford to fully refine and harness the potential of the assembly line—but the transition was a remarkably fast one nonetheless. By 1914, cars were coming off of Ford's assembly line so quickly that the painting process caused a bottleneck (only black paint would dry fast enough to keep pace with manufacturing), and the cost of a single automobile dropped to almost half of what it was six or seven years earlier. According to Wiki, by 1914 it was taking only 93 minutes to assemble a car at Ford's factories, and an assembly line worker could purchase a Model T with four months' pay.

In retrospect, then, can we read in Millard's death and the "end of the wonderful one-hoss shay" the fate of D.M. Lane's carriage business writ large—indeed, not just the fate of the particular industry that the Lanes helped to drive, but in relation to every boom-and-bust cycle since? Here are the poem's final two stanzas, in which the parson's carriage—a prescient metaphor for what happens when one puts too much trust in the modern economy's claims to flawlessness and permanence—"went to pieces all at once":

The parson was working his Sunday text—
Had got to fifthly, and stopped perplexed
At what the—Moses—was coming next.
All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet'n'-house on the hill.
—First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill—
And then the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet'n'-house clock—
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!

What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once—
All at once and nothing first—
Just as bubbles do when they burst.—
End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.
Logic is Logic. That's all I say.

It is fairly common for today's literary critics to imagine the Fireside Poets, including Holmes, to be voices of convention who were intellectually and poetically disabled by their nostalgia for a rural, religiocentric America and intense suspicion of the pace, technological invention, and changing values of modern life. "Ultimately," John Timberman Newcomb explains in Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity, for example, "their refusal to accept the idea that poetry should, or could, grapple with the sources and effects of modern emotional dispossession not only damaged their own reputations, but seriously undermined poetry's place in American life." We here at P&PC aren't going to claim that the Fireside Poets weren't invested in pre-modern values and lifestyles, but maybe—as the bursting bubble that dispossesses the parson of his carriage in "The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'" suggests—they weren't entirely blind to the character of modernity, either, nor did they refuse to have their poetry engage or analyze its dynamics. Holmes's parson, after all, is not unlike many homeowners in today's America—surprised at "the hour of the Earthquake shock" to find himself out in the cold and sitting on a rock. One can only hope he had paid off his carriage before that bubble burst.

Scraps of Literature: Poetry & Popular Culture's Back to School Edition

In his recent London Review of Books essay on Anne Carson's latest book Nox—a scrapbooky, fold-out accordion collage poem assembled in memory of her late brother Michael—Stephen Burt rightly notes that Carson's compositional method recalls the fanzines of the 1980s and 1990s and has a clear historical precedent in the poetry scrapbooks that many people assembled and maintained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We here at the P&PC home office are grateful for Burt's connections—and for the shout-out he gave P&PC in recommending the Review's readers to check out the examples of such scrapbooks that have appeared from time to time in this blog's postings and that, back when our home offices were located in Iowa City, we began making available at Poetry Scrapbooks: An Online Archive.

Given Burt's blurb and the fact that this is back-to-school season for many people, we thought it timely and appropriate to offer an example of another such album—this one assembled by a young reader, likely for a school project, and probably in the 1920s or 1930s. Titled "Scraps of Literature" and running about one hundred pages long, the collection is bound with two metal rings and contains over 130 (printed, handwritten, or typewritten) poems, assorted articles about their authors and subjects, and many illustrations cut out of magazines that the assembled poems are frequently used to gloss, caption, or otherwise engage.

There's no name in the inside cover to identify who put this album together, but the practice of making poetry scrapbooks part of—or even out of—schoolwork wasn't uncommon. Teachers kept personally-made poetry anthologies as sourcebooks for classroom reading. Children regularly converted their used composition books into poetry collections. Some people even turned their out-of-date textbooks into albums by pasting directly over the printed material of the published page; P&PC owns an old geography textbook that has been transformed in this way, making us wonder if perhaps even Elizabeth Bishop had this practice in the back of her mind when putting together Geography III. Educators were advised to harness the skills evident in such activity—finding, selecting, organizing, "publishing," and otherwise editing material—to make learning a fun and individualized endeavor.

In the process—as the album presented here perhaps suggests—poetry became part of an inter-disciplinary method of learning, as students could combine Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" with articles and pictures about Abraham Lincoln, or Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Old Ironsides" with historical accounts of the navy battle in which Ironsides participated. In the process, students not only learned about poetry and history, but also about the variety of ways poetry engaged and responded to the world around them. On a leaf not pictured in this posting, the maker of "Scraps of Literature" pastes a picture of Old Ironsides next to Holmes' poem and a newspaper article on how schoolchildren contributed to the Save "Old Ironsides" Fund, creating in the process a little triangular relationship in which it becomes visible that poetry not only matters but, contra Auden, helps to make things happen. (Holmes' verse is frequently credited with helping to save the ship from being decommissioned.)

This activity of collecting poems is not entirely a thing of the past; if you think back far enough, you can probably remember a teacher or two who made it an assignment for you to assemble an anthology of verse important to your life. During the past year, P&PC has found out that both Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass (both former poet laureates) have made this a regular part of their teaching over the years—an activity that isn't necessarily centered on, or motivated by, close, analytical readings of poems themselves for the objective values they might exhibit, but, instead, on those poems' relations to people's subjective experiences of being in the world. Reading old poetry scrapbooks today can be a frustrating experience because there is no key or record to how people paired poems up, or why they combined them with the pictures they caption, or how they mattered to their lives. It's clear that the process was frequently an analytical one, but most of what we have to go on today is the material end product of that process. When we hold Carson's Nox in our hands, we read it as a complex text in part because of her literary reputation and the fact that it was published with obvious care by New Directions, but also because of the personal experiences and relationships that motivate that care in the first place. Why shouldn't we give the benefit of the doubt to books like "Scraps of Literature" as well?

N.B. Following are a few sample pages from "Scraps of Literature" and not the entire collection, which is too long to feature here. If you are interested in helping to make this scrapbook, and many others like it, available for public reading in online or other formats, please contact P&PC with your ideas and suggestions. This public service announcement brought to you by Arbiters of Paste—Just Glue It.

A Picture of Our Poets

Awhile back, one of the P&PC office interns was reading Cane—the 1923 Jean Toomer book that mixes poems and prose to become what many people would call a "novel" but which we're going to call a collection of poems interspersed with prose—and wondered about a detail in part three of the "Bona and Paul" section (Chapter 28) where Art Carlstrom plays the piano.

In that scene, Art and his friend Paul (who is not only "cool like the dusk, and like the dusk, detached" but also the story's point of view) are picking up Helen and Bona for a double date in Chicago. While they wait for the girls, Art is asked to play the piano. Here is that passage:

"Come right in, won't you? The young ladies will be right down. Oh, Mr. Carlstrom, do play something for us while you are waiting. We just love to listen to your music. You play so well."

Houses, and dorm sitting-rooms are places where white faces seclude themselves at night. There is a reason...

Art sat at the piano and simply tore it down. Jazz. The picture of Our Poets hung perilously.

What in the world, our intern wondered, is "the picture of Our Poets"? Is it possible that at one point in U.S. history people actually purchased and displayed pictures of American poets in their homes? Or is Toomer making some sort of metaphor here—exercising some sort of, well, poetic license?

We can't say whether or not Toomer had one himself—it's not visible in the office scene above, at least—but we can say that yes, at one point in U.S. history people actually purchased and displayed pictures of American poets in their houses. In fact, we finally purchased one (pictured here) for the P&PC Home Office! It's small—just over a foot long and five inches high—and features (left to right) little oval portraits of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The existence of "Our Poets" doesn't mean that Toomer wasn't using the framed piece of home or dormitory sitting-room decor just literally, though, for when Art tears it down at the piano, the sounds of a modern African American art are enough to make the foundations of white American literary history tremble (even when—or especially when?—played by Paul's "red-blooded Norwegian friend"). And is it just us, or is Walt Whitman implicated here as well, as Toomer's "Houses and dorm sitting-rooms" sounds like a jazz riff on "Houses and rooms are full of perfumes" from the beginning of Whitman's "Song of Myself"? All in all, it's a part of Cane that makes us want to dance.

Limericks, Stereoview Cards, and Popular Precedents to Marcel Duchamp

One of the many yet-to- be-fully- explored facets of poetry's history in American everyday life is its relationship to the stereo- scope—the common entertainment device that allowed millions of people 3-D viewing experiences between the 1850s and 1930s. As with most viewing technologies, the stereoscope has a long and varied history that Poetry & Popular Culture can't rehearse in full here except to remind everyone that the most common and affordable type of hand-held viewfinder (pictured above) was in fact invented by a poet—the American physician and author of "Old Ironsides," Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

With a few very interesting exceptions (which the Poetry & Popular Culture Office is keeping under wraps for the time being), most stereoview cards had images, not poems, printed on front, so that few Americans were presented with the opportunity to read in 3-D, however tantalizing the experience might seem to us today. This isn't to say that popular poetry in general was a book-based or print-based experience. From magic lantern slides, which projected poems onto walls or screens, to poetry choruses, which featured group recitations, popular poetry was part and parcel of a range of off-page entertainment activities. For some reason, though, the prospects of viewing poems in 3-D never seemed to catch on.

Many reverse sides of stereoview cards are largely blank, perhaps containing information on the card's publisher or its position in a series. But sometimes manufacturers took advantage of the blank side and printed poetry there—a move that complicated the viewing experience in all sorts of ways. Poems asked viewers to move from 3-D viewing to 2-D reading, from poem to image and back again. They implicitly proposed a relationship between poem and image, though the nature of that relationship was never spelled out, creating an opportunity for the reader to critically assess the relationship between the two. We here at the P&PC Office have seen all sorts of poems printed on stereoview cards—everything ranging from Byron, Wordsworth and John Greenleaf Whittier to patriotic hymns and short, two-line quotations.

For example, the back of "Dreaming— A Shady Nook, A Quiet Brook" (an image of a woman in a blue dress reclining poolside, pictured above) offers a pair of linked limericks:

There was a young woman of Frisco
Who went fishing way up on the Cisco.
She disrobed by a pool
Just to keep herself cool
And fell asleep. What a risk, O!

She dreamed that each fish was a man,
That she hooked them as fast as they swam.
She awoke with a bite
(Her skin was a fright)—
Twas mosquitos, she surely said "sugar"!

Bawdy both in what they ask the reader to picture and say, these naughty limericks are an exercise in dream theory (there is a causal and thus manageable relationship between the state of the woman when she falls asleep and the content of the dreams she subsequently has) and an argument for the unnaturalness of female sexual activity (she is punished by nature, via the disfiguring mosquito bites, for what she should have been able to control). Most intriguing, though, is the relationship between the limericks and the image on the card's reverse side. For rather than ask us to imagine a naked woman in the abstract, these verses ask the viewer to mentally disrobe a specific woman—the woman in blue on the other side.

Part peep-show and part morality tale, this card is the stereoscopic version of Marcel Duchamp's 1946-66 assemblage/installation Étant donnés, which presents viewers with a peephole in a cabin door through which to view a naked woman (see the image here). In fact, if the stereoview card's title "Dreaming—A Shady Nook, A Quiet Brook" could serve as a subtitle for Duchamp's piece, it could also describe the viewer's activity too, as he or she—prompted by ten lines of poetry—peers at the woman in the blue dress and dreams of seeing her naked. Now that's what we call a naughty limerick.

Corny Verse?

Given my recent focus on the Fireside Poets Longfellow and Holmes—and given the time of year here in Iowa, when the corn is rolling in and the huskers are hard at work (at the farmers markets and the ethanol plants)—how could I not post this little gem? It's a stereoview card with an excerpt from fellow Fireside Poet John Greenleaf Whittier's "Song of the Huskers" printed on back, beginning with:

Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard!
Heap high the golden corn!
No richer gift has Autumn poured
From out her lavish horn!

Note the torn paper on the back of the card: no doubt an indication that someone pasted it inside a scrapbook somewhere along the way. Read in connection with the magic lantern slide with Holmes's "Lord of all being, throned afar" on it (see "Projected Verse" below), the Whittier stereoview card is further evidence of a 19th century multi-media poetry that anticipates the radio and digital poetries of the 20th century. Thoughts on this early 3-D poetry?

Projected Verse

Long before Charles Olsen wrote "Projective Verse" (1950), Americans were projecting their own poetry onto walls, sheets, movie screens, and other backdrops via magic lantern projectors and glass slides such as the one shown here. These lanterns and slides were precursors to the projectors that kept us hostage to family vacation shows in our childhoods or art history courses in undergraduate school; instead of hot-burning bulbs, they ran on kerosene lamp oil and an open flame, but the technology was otherwise fairly similar, offering an in-home or portable quasi-cinematic experience. In some cases, the slides were industrially manufactured, and in other cases people were encouraged to make them at home by sandwiching transparencies between two pieces of glass. "By carefully following the directions," an instruction manual from 1882 reads, "your Magic Lantern will give you much pleasure."

This pleasure included poetry as well. In an age where poetry was read aloud at home, recited in school, encountered on the lecture and Chautauqua circuits, and performed regularly as part of civic events, it's no surprise to learn that a technology enabling people to project it textually would be popular as well. The lyrics to popular songs were projected so people could follow along; cartoon verses preceded feature attractions in movie theaters; some magic lantern slide sets contained only the illustrations for poems—sometimes ballads, sometimes nursery rhymes—presuming the text itself would be read aloud. The 1882 manual I've referenced above ("Home Entertainments, or Evenings with the Magic Lantern") includes, for example, a poem called "The Lazy Ant," and another called "Crossing the Ferry." The instructions for "Crossing the Ferry" read: "Our next picture will show you a ferry scene, and while we are crossing we will relate to you the conversation between the little lovers before us. (Here let a little girl and boy take the part of the young lovers, and recite the poem.)" What would Walt Whitman say to that?!

That same brochure has a page titled "Five Popular Poets" and explains, "I will now show you the pictures of five of our most popular poets." The page no doubt served as a sort of script, containing biographical information on, and excerpts from, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and Alfred Lord Tennyson—a core of Fireside Poets that drove American poetry in the 19th century and who were familiar faces in the American home. Indeed, when Jean Toomer in "Bona and Paul" from Cane (1923) writes "Art sat on the piano and simply tore it down. Jazz. The picture of Our Poets hung perilously," he is referring to the portraits of Fireside Poets that Americans hung on the walls at home.

The Magic Lantern slides remind us that poems are not just produced, but are always used for one thing or another—for family entertainment, advertising, preaching, etc.—as well. That is, the "life" of a poem doesn't stop when the author publishes it. In fact, a poem's social life may become more interesting once it leaves the author's desk and begins to socialize with other poems on magazines pages, in anthologies, on web sites, as it gets excerpted, quoted, reviewed, so on and so forth. Take, for example, the slide I've included here: a poem written in 1848 by one of "Our Poets," Oliver Wendell Holmes, who then published it in the December 1859 Atlantic Monthly as part of his "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" column—a role he'd reprise later as Professor at the Breakfast Table and Poet at the Breakfast Table. (Holmes was not only a physician who coined the term "anesthesia" and the popular author of "Old Ironsides" [1830], but he developed what would become the most popular design for the stereoscope as well—an interest in entertainment technology that must have made him pleased to have his verse become part of magic lantern culture.) This poem concluded Holmes's contribution for December 1859, and he introduced it with the following words:

"And so my year’s record is finished. Thanks to all those friends who from time to time have sent their messages of kindly recognition and fellow-feeling. Peace to all such as may have been vexed in spirit by any utterance the pages have repeated. They will doubtless forget for the moment the differences in the hues of truth we look at through our human prisms, and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light we all need to lead us and the warmth which can make us all brothers."

No matter how much Holmes (1809-1894) wanted his readers to join him in "singing (inwardly)" this hymn, American audiences did just the opposite: they proceeded to put it to music and sing it outwardly! In so doing, they made it one of the most popular hymns of the 19th and 20th centuries. Says the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, the resulting hymn "belongs to the slender anthology of sacred songs that are indubitable poetry."

I purchased the slide shown here at Kensington's Portobello Market in London, pulling it from a collection once owned by a British church that had no doubt found it necessary to update its technology. Most of the slides were pictures—in fact, most magic lantern slides are pictures, with no more than a small percentage containing song lyrics and poems—but there were 6-8 hymns that were probably projected in front of the congretation in lieu of hymnals. (You can see cues in the margins directing certain parts of the congregation—men and women, women, chorus, pastor—when to sing.) I picked out "Lord of all being, throned afar" as a souvenir. It struck me as important, not just for the combination of poetry and singing there, but for the fact that I was finding it in England. Usually, when we think of the 19th century, we think of America importing British poetry (Tennyson especially) not the other way around, but the Holmes slide suggests how the literary trade routes ran both ways.

Magic lantern poetry seems important to me—and relevant to our current age—for another reason as well, as it helped to transition Americans' reading and entertainment practices away from from the human and domestic scene of the fireside and toward a piece of projection technology and its script. This transition heralds the age of the cinema, radio and tv, an age which would see the replacement of the 19th century hearth by projection and broadcast technologies on a colossal scale. Poetry—and especially the revered poetry of "Our Poets"—helped to provide a sense of continuity for readers encountering and no doubt struggling with the new ways of relating to each other that the new technologies required. With Our Poets at the helm, though, how could this transition be bad?