The Rise of Creative Reading: Melissa Girard Reviews Catherine Robson's "Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem"

Almost immediately after receiving its copy of Catherine Robson's Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem from Princeton University Press, P&PC sent it back across the country to Melissa Girard (pictured here), a longtime P&PC contributor and intern favorite whose reviews of What Poetry Brings to Business and The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry continue to be some of the most popular postings in P&PC history. In what follows, Girard—an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University Maryland whose essays and articles have appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, the Journal of Modern Literature, and The Chronicle of Higher Education—uses the publication of Robson's book to wonder, "What are we teaching students when we ask them to memorize and recite poetry? Are our intentions better, different, or purer than our nineteenth-century counterparts?" and "What is the heart beat of twenty-first century poetry?" We here at P&PC heart what she has to say, and we think you will too.

The recent publication of Caroline Kennedy's Poems to Learn by Heart has people talking about the "lost" art of memorizing and reciting poetry. Throughout the nineteenth century, rote learning was a common feature of both American and British classrooms. Anxious schoolboys, eager to please—and, eventually, schoolgirls too—memorized and recited just about everything, not only poems but also Bible passages, speeches, and, indeed, the vast majority of their "lessons." As pedagogies advanced, rote learning fell out of educational favor. By 1920 in Britain and 1950 in the U.S., the practice of memorizing and reciting poems had ceased to be a mandatory or routine aspect of literary study.

In an interview with NPR's Neal Conan, Kennedy says, "'By rote' has sort of a negative connotation. I don't even know why."

Catherine Robson has a very good explanation for Kennedy. In her sweeping, interdisciplinary study, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, Robson charts the rise and fall of this once-dominant pedagogical practice. Heart Beats significantly deepens our understanding of the memorized poem, bringing clarity and rich historical detail to a topic that is often shrouded in a haze of cultural nostalgia.

Heart Beats is a massive undertaking, and it's hard not to be drawn in by the sheer audacity of it. Like Joan Shelley Rubin's Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, from which Robson borrows heavily in the U.S.-focused portion of her study, Heart Beats offers a bold, new way to think about the meaning and value of poetry. Traditionally, the field of literary studies has been organized around major authors, historical periods, or national geographies. Robson moves fluidly across time and place, following what she calls "the unbroken line" of poetry memorization and recitation, which remained intact from the late eighteenth century through World War I in the U.K. and World War II in the U.S. As Wordsworth gave way to Whitman and the Victorians bowed to the New Woman, generations of schoolchildren remained united by the shared rhythms of recitation. Heart Beats is a new perspective on literary history, experienced through the beating hearts and sweaty palms of poetry's most assiduous readers.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 offers an institutional history of the memorized poem in British and American public education, and Part 2 provides three case studies in the memorized poem: Felicia Heman's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." Each of these poems featured prominently in school recitations in English-speaking countries for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Afterword also contains short case studies on Rudyard Kipling's "If-" and William Ernest Henley's "Invictus," which, in recent years, have become national favorites in Britain and America, respectively. (Robson has helped me understand why, every semester, at least one of my students begs me to add "Invictus" to our poetry syllabus.)

This institutional focus, alone, is illustrative: Robson dispels some of the nostalgia surrounding the memorized poem by reminding us that it was once a compulsory classroom exercise. To Kennedy and many contemporary proponents of the practice, memorization and recitation are elective or, at least, extra-curricular pursuits. Robson recounts, for instance, how her mother paid her a penny a line to memorize poems when she was young, and, thanks to inflation, Robson paid a friend's child a pound per line to memorize all forty lines of "Casabianca." Such incentives were unavailable in the nineteenth-century classroom.

In its earliest years, poetry's role in the classroom was strictly instrumental: it served, Robson says, as an "unobjectionable" substitute for Scripture. "For many centuries," Robson writes, "verse played only a facilitating role in the learner's progress towards literacy's official goal and its sole true justification, the reading of the Bible" (41).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, in both Britain and America, poetry began to play a more primary and complex role in the "training" of children. One of the most valuable aspects of Robson's work is that she resists the temptation to generalize about the memorized poem. She shows, instead, how elastic this form has been: as pedagogies, educational technologies, students, and teachers changed, we kept coming back to memorization and recitation. They (and now we) keep falling in and out of love with the memorized poem.

Heart Beats assembles a diverse array of materials that document the contradictory experiences people have had memorizing and reciting poetry at school. Robson draws on textbooks, teacher training manuals, educational history and philosophy, students' journals and memoirs, and even classic fictional accounts of memorization and recitation like those in Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Buddenbrooks. These historical materials will be of significant interest to literary scholars, as well as those interested in the history of reading and the history of English education.

Some, like Caroline Kennedy, relish the triumph of learning by heart—of internalizing a poem and making it your own forever. In her recent The Use and Abuse of Literature, Marjorie Garber recounts how we used to speak of someone "having" literature. Samuel Johnson, for instance, said of Milton, "He had probably more than common literature." Johnson doesn't say that Milton wrote great literature, Garber emphasizes, but that he possessed it.

This is not so different from Anne Treneer, a former "scholarship girl" who became a teacher and went on to teach memorization and recitation in her classroom. In her autobiography, School House in the Wind, Treneer remarks, "A child said to me once that she liked poetry because she liked the taste of the nice words in her mouth" (qtd. in Robson 165). Interestingly, Robson argues that positive feelings about the memorized poem are more common in the U.S. than Britain. The two countries have experienced the memorized poem in "nationally distinct fashions," Robson claims, because of unique educational histories, class structures, and the ideology of individualism (234). It is perhaps appropriate, then, that Kennedy—the solitary scion of Camelot—should serve as the current ambassador for the memorized poem in the U.S.

Robson's evocative case study of "Casabianca," a version of which appeared previously in PMLA, is especially sensitive to the aesthetic, bodily pleasures of poetry recitation. Robson writes, "When we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat. We contemporary readers no longer hold poems with regular iambic rhythms at our core" (96). This is one of Robson's key insights about our changing relationship to poetry. When we look back on the nineteenth century, Robson says, it's not that difficult to relate to Victorians' love affair with the novel. We, too, enjoy "satisfyingly fat books" as a form of leisure, an indulgent retreat from our carefully measured working lives (113). However, our connection to nineteenth-century poetry reading (and, hence, readers) is more tenuous:

When we read poetry ... there are few lines connecting us to the memorizing population long ago. Because that particular technology of dissemination fell out of pedagogical favor, we now find it hard to appreciate the special relationship between body and poem that was created by a highly structured set of circumstances. (113) 

"Casabianca," like so many of the poems of the past, felt and meant something different to generations of readers who held its persistent iambic beat, "ti-dum ti-dum," in their "deep heart's core."

Before we get too nostalgic, though, it's worth remembering: we never "lost" or "forgot" the memorized poem. For a variety of complex pedagogical, aesthetic, and political reasons, we—that is, the discipline of English, the field of literary studies, English educators, literary critics, poets, and parents—abandoned it. At least as early as Emerson, thoughtful people, poetry lovers, and committed educators had serious reservations about an institution that practiced students in the art of submission. In "The American Scholar" (1837), Emerson argued against rote memorization and for what he called "creative reading." "One must be an inventor to read well," Emerson writes, and schools, he says, can only serve us "when they aim not to drill, but to create."

At the end of the century, in his "Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal" (1893), John Dewey made a similar argument on behalf of "active" or "volitional" education. Self-realization, Dewey said, "cannot lie in the subordination of self to any law outside itself." Even Ezra Pound, no champion of democracy, to be sure, concurred. As part of his famous break with the metronome of nineteenth-century verse, Pound also argued for an active, engaged educational method. "Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding," Pound writes in his ABC of Reading (84, screaming in all caps original).

For those harboring a romanticized notion of nineteenth-century schoolrooms, of students soaring freely on the "blithe spirit" of poetry, Robson reminds us that rote learning was also a powerful tool of indoctrination. Here, she builds on Angela Sorby's work in Schoolroom Poets: Reading, Recitation, and Childhood in America, 1865-1917, which shows how the recited poem helped to strengthen a culture of the school and nation.

Many students, in fact, didn't even know what the words they were repeating meant; they recited mindlessly, joylessly, desperately. For instance, Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican American "scholarship boy" who attended Berkeley, Stanford, and Columbia, and won a Fulbright fellowship to study English literature in London, has been a harsh critic of the way memorization indoctrinates working class and minority students in particular. In his autobiography, The Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez recounts how he would memorize literature compulsively "to fill the hollow within me and make me feel educated" (qtd. in Robson 184). Dutifully internalizing the words of an English aristocratic canon, Rodriguez grew increasingly alienated from his cultural roots, anxious and displaced.

In her remarkable case study on Gray's "Elegy," Robson places Rodriguez's disillusionment alongside the rage of other scholarship boys (Raymond Williams and Tony Harrison make appearances too), all of whom felt acutely the class dynamics at play in classroom recitations. Gray's famous lines acquired new significance in the minds and mouths of working class students:

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The words of the poem were eventually read and recited by the very "mute inglorious Miltons" that it had rendered silent and unstoried. "Arguably, the twentieth-century grammar school ended up teaching its free-place students more about class than about classics," Robson writes (156).

Today, we tend to think of poetry as a creative, individual, expressive form. Kennedy, for instance, claims that memorization and recitation are creative acts. "When I was growing up, the emphasis was on imitating the style of literary masters," Kennedy writes. "By contrast, today's students are more likely to write about their own lives and challenges" (Poems To Learn By Heart 13).

But Robson's rich, provocative study should make us a bit more skeptical about the creative promise of the memorized poem. (How did I not notice, until now, that Kennedy's Poems To Learn By Heart is published by Disney Press?) I keep thinking about Kamau Brathwaite and all the Caribbean poets he said couldn't get the snow out of their poetry. Part of the experience of colonialism, according to Brathwaite, is a forced poetics—for him, the artificial heart beat of the English iamb. "The hurricane does not roar in pentameter," Brathwaite famously writes.

Robson does not dwell long on the possibility of reinstituting the memorized poem. But, as I read Heart Beats, I found myself wondering if the time is not already upon us. This year, 375,000 American high school students participated in Poetry Out Loud, the national recitation contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. This dynamic, extra-curricular arts program hardly seems like "sheep-herding."

But is it an act of creative reading? What are we teaching students when we ask them to memorize and recite poetry? Are our intentions better, different, or purer than our nineteenth-century counterparts? Are our institutions?

What is the heart beat of twenty-first century poetry?

P&PC Heroes: An Interview with Stephanie Renfrow of NASA's MAVEN mission

Earlier this month, P&PC was sent, well, over the moon upon learning that one of the programs in the "Going to Mars" public outreach efforts surrounding NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter mission is a haiku-writing contest. Yep. You, too, earthling, are invited to compose and submit a "message to Mars" in haiku form, and the three most popular entries as determined by online voting will be burned onto a DVD and then shot into space. How popular an initiative has this been? Well, as of the time of this posting—barely three weeks into the contest and well before the deadline of July 1—nearly 11,000 submissions have been received.

Starstruck by the thought of so many people doing more than just looking up in perfect silence at the stars, we turned our telescopes on new P&PC hero Stephanie Renfrow (pictured here), the Education and Public Outreach lead for the MAVEN mission and the brains behind the haiku-writing contest. Renfrow, who has an MA in Science Writing from Johns Hopkins and a BA in English with a creative writing focus from Middlebury College, works at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Science, home of the MAVEN Principle Investigator. There, knowing full well, as Ray Bradbury once remarked, that "it's not going to do any good to land on Mars if we're stupid," Renfrow supports the mission's work by creating and implementing teacher development workshops, K-12 curricula, summer youth camps, and other outreach programs. Here's what she had to tell P&PC about sending poetry into space.

Poetry & Popular Culture: Poetry on a spacecraft? Far out. How did the idea come about?

Stephanie Renfrow: As Education and Public Outreach lead for the MAVEN mission, I'm always looking for ways to bring the mission into the lives of the public, and I'm especially focused on reaching people who may not usually rub elbows with a space mission. I'm also very interested in using new online technologies to generate communities of interest; crowdsourcing is a powerful way to create a two-way connection. Send-your-name efforts are a long-standing and extremely popular way to get the public onboard—literally—with a mission. But sometimes these efforts can become a one-way street that doesn't necessarily encourage participation: you enter a name, and it flies on the spacecraft. Plus the MAVEN spacecraft is not a lander—we don't have an adorable buggy running about on the surface of a far-away planet, enduring adventures and sending back pictures—so it's not as though names entered onto the DVD aboard MAVEN can be carried around and then left in perpetuity on the surface of Mars. Our DVD will be ephemeral. It will survive only as long as MAVEN survives—for a maximum of about six years, before it enters the atmosphere and burns away.

P&PC: So not exactly "To Infinity and Beyond" ...

SR: True enough! We aren't designing a time capsule for a space mission that will, like Voyager, go out into the universe and explore new frontiers through time while carrying everyone's name along for the ride. The MAVEN mission will explore new frontiers in science.

P&PC: Sorry to interrupt. 

SR: No problem! As I was saying, I wanted to create some way of growing a two-way exchange around the MAVEN send-your-name effort and also generate a thoughtful interaction with the public. I started brainstorming ways to do that; my first idea was to have a student art contest, with submissions by young people put up for public vote to determine the official art for MAVEN and inform the DVD cover's label. Public voting just closed on that effort—with 80,000 votes tallied on 377 inspired entries from young people around the world! My second idea, which led to the haiku contest, was to solicit "messages to Mars"—optional notes that people could submit along with their names. Then, the messages would be voted on by the public to crowdsource the best message in honor of the mission.

P&PC: Why solicit poetry in particular—and original poems rather than famous ones like Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"?

SR: Well, the one drawback to my "message to Mars" idea was that it seemed likely that we'd get a lot of less-than-thoughtful responses—you know, "I love Mars" or "Take me with you" or "Hi, Martians." Sometimes, people are at their most creative when they are working within boundaries—just ask a science or engineer tackling a tricky problem developing a space instrument! I wanted to get people thinking about the MAVEN mission, about Mars, about the power of space exploration, about the beauty in our universe. It was a short jump from there to poetry. I also have a personal love for poetry; I especially love the idea that, simply by labeling something a poem—thinking, as you read or write, "This is a poem"—the perception of that slip of writing changes completely. It goes from throw-away words—a text, an email, or a note scribbled on a sticky—to being a statement. Poetry lurks everywhere and in just about everyone. I wanted to bring the thoughtfulness of poetry to MAVEN and offer an opportunity to get regular, not necessarily well-known Earthlings aboard.

P&PC: So, if there's life on another planet, do you think poetry lurks there too? Or is it just an Earthling phenomenon?

SR: "Life" can mean a lot of things. It can mean a tiny microorganism, whose very existence elsewhere in the universe would be, at least in my mind, a kind of poetry. Life can also mean intelligent life—beings whose capabilities meet or surpass humanity's, and whose poetry would perhaps be beyond our ability to comprehend it. Poetry must be everywhere—it certainly is on Planet Earth—but how you define it is an interesting question.

P&PC: Where does your own love for poetry come from?

SR: My fifth grade teacher had us write poetry—she's the one who introduced me to haiku. I started writing then—an entire book of bad poetry by the time I graduated from high school—and never stopped.

P&PC: Why the haiku form?

SR: I did some research on different types of poems. I wanted something short, so people would be more likely to read the poems in the online format. I also wanted something that wouldn't scare people and that would make young people in particular think, "I can do that!"

P&PC: If anyone can submit his or her name to be burned on a DVD that will also be put on the MAVEN, why limit the number of poems to just three?

SR: That was a tough decision. Who knew that we'd already have nearly 11,000 submissions!

P&PC: What's going to happen to the 10,997 that aren't chosen for MAVEN?

SR: The entries that don't win will be online for some unspecified period as an archive of inspiration! And perhaps most importantly, I hope that all 11,000+ people who sat down to write haiku—inexperienced poets and experienced, young poets and old, science-loving poets and new-to-science poets, serious poets and goofy poets—have a spark inside them that they didn't have before. That will be more lasting than anything else about this project.

P&PC: Beyond the sheer number of submissions, what's the public response to the contest been like?

SR: The response has been beyond anything I expected. As the person talking to the media, I've gotten to hear reporters open up and talk to me about their past lives as poets. A woman wrote to us asking permission to submit a haiku on behalf of her mother, who was an accomplished poet before she passed away. Kids have written us asking how they can become scientists. The experience has reinforced, for me, the positive power of creating connections between human beings.

P&PC: Certainly you yourself must have written a haiku for MAVEN. Care to share?

SR: Of course!

Mars mysterious
Thin sky and water-lined face?
MAVEN on its way.

The Poetry of Seinfeld: George's Favorite Poet

Breaking News

News items of immediate concern to the P&PC reader:

NASA lets poets / send haiku to Red Planet / on a MAVEN's wings

"Poets, take note: NASA is looking for a few good haiku to send to the Red Planet aboard its Maven orbiter this fall.... An online public vote will be conducted beginning July 15 to select the top three haiku poems."

•

New Jersey Mayor Wrote Hilariously Unromantic Poetry to Mistress

"During the affair, he would write the assistant, Corletta Hicks, romantic poetry that wonderfully mixes the lofty and mundane."

•

Johnny Depp is Heard over heels in love again

"The actress [Amber Heard] had vowed to stay single after her split from the Hollywood star but crumbled after he sent her a handwritten poem and a bouquet of roses every day through September."

Back to The New Northwest: Suffragist Poetry in the Gold Man Review

Regular P&PC readers will remember our ongoing interest in the poetry published in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in The New Northwest—a weekly suffragist newspaper published out of Portland by Abigail Scott Duniway, a leading voice in the fight for Oregon women's suffrage. Between 2010 and 2012, we did a four part series on this poetry, which oftentimes appeared on the paper's front page, which was frequently written by Willamette Valley writers long before folks like William Stafford put Oregon on the national poetry map, and which was sometimes sourced or cut-and-pasted from other newspapers around the country (a common practice in an age when poets and their publishers didn't seem to care about regulating the circulation of verse via copyright laws). Then, in 2012 and 2013, we collated a set of these poems for use in the development of Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon, an original and experimental script produced at Willamette University earlier this year in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage.

Now Salem's start-up literary magazine, the Gold Man Review, has joined in the fun, reprinting a portfolio of seven suffragist poems from The New Northwest in its second issue—the one with the snazzy cover pictured above, which puns on the design characteristics of mass market women's magazines to transform the Gold Man pioneer who currently tops the state's capitol building into a Gold Woman pioneer. Themed around the "pioneer spirit," the issue joins the work of nineteenth-century poets with over twenty-five pieces by people writing in Oregon today, and it's also got a long interview with P&PC about The New Northwest, the history of women's suffrage in Oregon, the situation of American poetry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the poems P&PC selected for reprinting in Gold Man with the assistance of students in a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class we taught last Spring.

When you get a chance, pick up a copy of Gold Man Review for yourself. In the meantime, we're giving you a small taste of our interview here—a portion that we think displays some of the best of what an interdisciplinary liberal arts college can offer students: experience working with and using archives, in-class study, cross-departmental collaboration, research into the historical forms and genres of poetry, and engagement with social and community endeavors. We here at P&PC don't talk about the pedagogical possibilities of popular poetry all that frequently, but here's an example of what we do when we're not running the office and bringing you your weekly fix.

Gold Man Review: Why did you and your class decide to pick these poems [for republication in Gold Man Review]?

Mike Chasar: In addition to studying the poems, the most recent instantiation of my "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class also partnered with an experimental scriptwriting class in the Theatre Department that wanted to create a play about the history and legacy of women's suffrage in Oregon as one way to mark and commemorate 2012 as the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage. (See Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote 1912-2012 for other such events.) As part of the experimental nature of the script, the Theatre class thought it would be cool to start with a bunch of poems from The New Northwest, using them as raw material to collage, break up, or interlace through the script in funky and innovative ways. It can sometimes be difficult to figure out what to "do" with archival materials other than, well, archive them and study them; so we thought it would be interesting to motivate them in another way, too—toward the creation of a new piece of art.

So, our first goal was to select poems to present to that class, and toward that end we had two main priorities: 1) select poems that surveyed the different types of arguments being made at the time for extending the vote to women; and 2) select poems with varying poetic strategies, rhetorical components, and performance possibilities. We thought the former would gesture to some of the political complexities of that historical moment that get lost in a debate framed simply as "for" or "against" women’s suffrage. (As with the debate about healthcare today, people aren't just for or against it, but have different reasons for being for or against it, or partly for it and partly against it—you get the idea.) And we thought the latter would shine a light on the diversity of styles and poetic techniques of popular verse, which oftentimes gets characterized as entirely "sentimental" and generally homogenous in style, format, rhetoric, etc.; in actuality, the poetry is pretty diverse—song lyrics, persona poems, narrative poems, lyric poems, satire, dialect, etc.—so we wanted to honor that aspect of the writing.

I made the selections for Gold Man keeping these two elements in mind as well, so that we have inspir- ational song lyrics ("Campaign Song"), two very different dramatic monologues that make different arguments about women and the vote ("The Perplexed Housekeeper" and "'Siah’s Vote"), a serious narrative with children as main characters ("Reasons"), a humorous narrative ("Wife Versus Horse"), a romance ("Katie Lee and Willie Grey"), and a lyrical extended metaphor ("My Ship").

In addition to the generic diversity— all are also part of a culture of poetry that lent itself to oral delivery or performance—the poems also make a pretty wide variety of arguments for how and why women should get the vote: "The Perplexed Housekeeper" suggests that women are already excellent multi-taskers and won't be burdened with the additional responsibilities of voting; "'Siah’s Vote" argues that women already participate in voting via the advice they give to their menfolk; "Campaign Song" says women will help clean up a corrupted culture of voting, but also makes the problematic claim that "John Chinaman" can now do the work once done by women and thus free women up for public life; and "The Ship" shows us a character abandoned and forlorn because what must be the "ship of state" mentioned in Duniway's poem never comes for her. That's just a quick overview, but you get the idea: poets are using different poetic strategies to make different types of arguments about the political enfranchisement or disenfranchisement of women.

The Poetry of Al Bundy and Married... with Children

Communism for Kids: Martha Millet, the New Pioneer, and the Popularity of the Old Left—A Guest Posting by Sarah Ehlers

P&PC is thrilled to introduce our new South Dakota correspondent Sarah Ehlers (pictured here), an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota who teaches and writes about modern poetry and poetics. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly, Paideuma, and Contemporary Literature, and she is completing a book titled Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics. In the following posting about the poetics of radical children's verse, Ehlers hints at what Left of Poetry has in store and how the development of modern poetics—at least in some spheres of American life—had more to do with nineteenth century verse cultures than folks generally assume. If you want to know how communist poetry, Little Miss Muffet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mother Goose, and even the poetry of Robert Southey could come together to make poetry "modern," dear reader, then read on.

Now relatively unknown, Martha Millet was heartily involved in Left literary institutions from the 1930s through the 1950s. A card-carrying communist, she worked as a labor journalist and published politically themed verse in The New Masses, Daily Worker, and Masses and Mainstream, as well as in the 1944 volume Seven Poets in Search of an Answer, which also featured poems by Langston Hughes. In the early 1940s, she wrote political tracts and pamphlets for the New York City Central Committee of the International Workers Order. In the 1950s, she published two volumes of original poetry (Thine Alabaster Cities: A Poem for Our Times [1952] and Dangerous Jack: A Fantasy in Verse [1953]) and edited The Rosenbergs: Poems of the United States (1957). And some of her verses were published in Poetry magazine. Despite this poetic output, Millet remains relatively unknown, even among scholars of the Depression-era Left, and it's worth wondering what narrative of U.S. Left poetry—and of U.S. poetry in general—might surface if we were to take as starting points Millet's engagements with children's verse and her belief in the "popularity" of Popular Front poetry.

At age fourteen, Millet published one of her first poems, "Pioneer Pied Piper," in New Pioneer, the official magazine of the communist children's organization, the Young Pioneers. The poem—which occupied a full two-page spread in the magazine's May 1933 issue—tells how a band of gluttonous Boy Scouts took over the peaceful community of Children's Town. The Scouts forced the town's children to labor in mills and on farms with barely enough food to fill their stomachs, and the newly inducted Boy Scout mayor and his council grew fat on oysters and butter. So things went until the arrival of the "Pioneer Pied Piper"—a young man clad in a blue uniform with a red hammer and sickle sewn on the shirt pocket and a bugle hanging by his side. Immediately, the Piper announced to the Mayor of Children's Town that he had come, "To set these wretched children free." In reversing the "Pied Piper of Hamelin" legend, Millet's "Pioneer Pied Piper" uses his bugle music to organize, and ultimately liberate, the youthful working-class masses. His bugle blast sets the children on a march that forces the ruling-class Scouts out of town and to their deaths. (As the Scouts flee, the bridge they are crossing collapses, and they all drown in a river.) Finally free, the citizens of Children's Town stay to rebuild their community as a "Pioneer Commune," home to a "happy race" of "folks" bursting with "carefreeness and mirth."

In Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, Julia Mickenberg describes how the "variety of stories, articles, pictures, jokes, puzzles, book and film reviews, and letters to the editor" published in the New Pioneer worked "toward serving the goals of the Communist children's movement" (67). Through story, rhyme, and illustrations by Marya Morrow, the published version of "Pioneer Pied Piper" in May of 1933 exemplifies what Mickenberg describes as the New Pioneer editors' careful efforts "to combine child appeal with political content" (67). But while the poem survives as a significant artifact from the communist children's movement, I think it also begs to be read as something more.

When considered in the context of Old Left discourses about poetics—especially those surfacing in The New Masses readers' letters and editorials—Millet's children's rhyme might be taken seriously as (at least one version of) an ideal radical Depression-era poem. If one scans the numerous editorials, commentaries, letters, debates, etc. published in Left literary magazines during the interwar period, one sees that many readers demanded a certain type of poem—a poem that was accessible to a wide audience; simple, direct, and easy to memorize; and immediately usable for political activities like union meetings, picket lines, and May Day parades. Over and over, readers of publications like The New Masses denigrated the poetry being produced in "wastelands" (a jab at T.S. Eliot, perhaps?) and "tired intellectual towers," and they pitted a "difficult," "cerebral," or "despairing" modernist aesthetic against a more "straightforward," "populist," or "optimistic" one. In a letter to the editor, one subscriber to The New Masses, R.W. Lalley, wrote that he liked "simple, direct little verses" and disliked "the amorphous type" by writers such as Muriel Rukeyser. Millet herself penned a letter to The New Masses in 1938 ("Is Poetry Dead?"). In it, she urged that, for Popular Front poetry to stay "popular," it would have to "mean more to more Americans" and, therefore, it "should, even when representative of the Left, not be confusedly ornate, pretentiously intellectual, and 'cerebrally dull.'"

Of course, these opinions re-inscribe simplistic divides between the difficult and accessible, obtuse and direct, despairing and hopeful, modernist and not. Scholars of the U.S. literary and cultural Left like Alan Wald, Cary Nelson, Paula Rabinowitz, James Smethurst, and Al Filreis have variously parsed Left writers' complicated relationships to experimental literary modernism. And the archive of radical poems composed and produced for children returns us to historical debates about the relationship of radical poetry to modernist experimentation that raged on the Left during the 1930s, allowing us to see them from a fresh perspective that enables a new narrative of U.S. poetry to surface. This new narrative stresses the continuities—not breaks—between nineteenth- and twentieth-century verse cultures, and it resists a tendency to view the tensions between popular and modernist poetry through a focalization on the latter.

At first glance, the poetry written for young readers picking up New Pioneer seems to exemplify the ideal of an accessible political poem chock full of communism's "good news." After all, what could be more easy to read than a rhyming poem written for a child? What kind of poem is more widely understood than a nursery rhyme, even if that rhyme puts a starving Little Miss Muffet on the picket line, as in this excerpt from Harry Alan Patamkin's "Mother Goose on the Breadline":

Little Miss Muffet
Ate such vile stuff, it
Made her feel rotten inside
Black coffee, stale bread—
Miss Muffett saw Red!
She joined with the workers and cried:
"Don't Starve, Fight!
Don't Starve, Fight!"

In drawing on such popular forms, New Pioneer contributors also re-purposed popular nineteenth-century texts, versifiers, verse genres, and verse presentation contexts in order to construct a poetry that could reach a wide audience and have an immediate impact. Millet's "Pioneer Pied Piper," for instance, doesn't just adapt a familiar text but is also formatted in a way that recalls the print conventions of the ballad broadside as well as nineteenth-century newspaper verse.

Along these lines, the February 1931 issue of New Pioneer featured a poem titled "Old Father William" by Alice Hayes, which owes debts to both Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "You are Old, Father William" (1865) and the poem Carroll parodied, Robert Southey's didactic verse "The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them" (1799). All three poems begin with a youth telling Father William, "You are old, Father William," and then proceed with a dialogue in which the youth questions the older man about this condition. Carroll's poem turns Southey's Father William on his head, transforming a pious elder who always "thought of the future" and "remember'd my God" into a rotund, quick-tongued man who turns somersaults and balances an eel on his nose. (That's Carroll's illustration pictured here.)

Hayes's New Pioneer version of "Father William" ostensibly forgoes Carroll's nonsense and returns the poem to its original didacticism. However, while Southey's Father William was able to preserve his youth, Hayes's Father William loses his to a life of hard labor. When asked about his age, Hayes's Father William explains: 

"In my youth," the old fellow replied to the lad,
"I slaved every day for the boss
And while I turned out some perfect machines
My own health is totally lost."

In the subsequent dialogue, the youth slowly loses his ideals about the work world. At first, he assumes that Father William must have been paid a "handsome wage" because he worked so efficiently. When he learns this wasn't the case, the youth figures, "surely the boss has given a dole" to the old man. But Father William closes the poem with a more difficult truth:

"Well, to tell you the truth, I've been working right on
Till a stronger man for less pay
Has come to the factory to end up like me
And I just got kicked out today.

In the end, Hayes reverses the moral of Southey's poem. In the nineteenth-century original, Father William shows the youth that, if one takes care of oneself and thinks always of the future, then one can be comfortable in old age. Hayes's Father William never had such luxuries, however, and has been prematurely aged by factory work. The ultimate lesson is that, unless there is a fundamental socioeconomic change, these conditions are bound to continue and the youth is doomed to suffer the old man's fate. In addition to engaging Southey, Hayes also imparts this lesson by referencing Carroll's more familiar version of Old Father William. The last line of Hayes's "Father William" ("And I just got kicked out today") is a play on the last line of Carroll's "Father William" ("Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!").

The New Pioneer's recirculation of nineteenth-century verse culture did not go un-theorized. Mickenberg explains that, in general, "the New Pioneer's stories and articles tended to be more factual than fanciful, with a heavy emphasis on historical and scientific themes" (68). Every issue featured historical fiction, biographical essays on revolutionary figures, and series like "American History Told in Pictures," which retold major events in U.S. history from a Left perspective. The history of U.S. poetry was also recast from the standpoint of Left politics and aesthetics, as the magazine's editors and contributors ransacked the nineteenth century for a "usable past" for poetry, one that would illuminate a long tradition of "popular" poems written for the "common people." For instance, a short piece on revolutionary poet Philip Freneau by Millet, aptly subtitled "An American Poet of All the Peoples," suggests that Freneau's poetry reached a large number of citizens because it addressed important political issues of the time. According to the article, Freneau wrote about slavery and oppression "almost a hundred years before the slave issue grew into Civil War" and penned "fierce poetry with which he lashed out against the oppressive rule of the British king"; he became a national figure by writing "fiery songs" that gave "new power to popular issues."

Millet's little sketch of Freneau says a lot about how the 1930s communist Left's prescriptions for poetry were read back into earlier American poetic cultures. Left interpretations of nineteenth-century verse culture assume that poems written in the voice of the "common people" were, to borrow from Virginia Jackson, "made to be read … as if reading were self-evident," as if their artifices "were really a transparent language" ("Longfellow’s Tradition," 472). Such readings serve as productive misreadings, lending fact to the fiction that the most effective revolutionary poetry need not be read at all, for a poem's rhyme and melody would directly transmit its meanings to its readers and their lives. Children's poems—deliberately constructed, but in forms so familiar they seem natural—illuminate the slippage between the Left ideal of the ultimately accessible poem and the historical reading practices on which this ideal relies.

This slippage is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the biographical sketch of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that Millet penned for the October 1938 New Pioneer. Millet casts Longfellow (pictured here) as, above all, a social poet enraptured by "the love of literature and writing" and the uses to which such writing could be put. Over the course of the essay, she highlights his interest in the "impoverishment and oppression" of the people of Spain, his "deeper awareness" of Native American culture, and his condemnation of the "criminal institution" of slavery. Millet's narrative of Longfellow's political activism is overly forgiving, if not downright wrong. But it's also canny. In mentioning Spain, the colonization of the American West, and the antislavery movement, Millet refers to the U.S. Left's solidarity with the international anti-fascist front in Spain as well as the anti-imperialist and anti-racist discourses characterizing Popular Front politics. In so doing, she also extracts Longfellow from the conservative schoolroom, where, as Angela Sorby explains in Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, his poems served a "fantasy of universal humanity" rooted in nationalist discourses (11). Millet repurposes Longfellow for the New Pioneer schoolroom, where the ideal of a united "common people" is meant to enact an international and potentially revolutionary political community.

Millet glorifies Longfellow's politics not only so that they match her own, but also so they match what she perceives to be the politics of his poetic form. She highlights how his poems' political messages are conveyed through simple and musical verse that could be enjoyed by all and praises Longfellow as a writer who:

wrote simply and understandably. He will be remembered as the ever-musical poet of simplicity who could make people see the traditions and folklore of the much-abused Indian through his poetry, and who dealt with life and people in a manner that all could enjoy.

Millet's understanding of Longfellow's poetry is symptomatic of prevalent twentieth-century conceptions of his work that privilege its apparent simplicity as well as the promises for reception such simplicity implies. Millet does not, for example, mention Longfellow's use of classical meter (like the trochaic tetrameter lines of "Song of Hiawatha," which she eventually quotes); rather, she describes him as an "ever-musical poet" whose work reached the "people." In Millet's estimation, Longfellow, in a strange way, becomes the ideal radical poet. And, as she suggests through strategic excerpting from "Song of Hiawatha," he advocates peace and solidarity by speaking to children:

O children; my poor children!
Listen to the words of wisdom,
Listen to the words of warning,
From the lips of the Great Spirit,
From the Master of Life, who made you.
…
I am weary of your quarrels,
Weary of your wars and bloodshed,
Weary of your prayers for vengeance,
Of your wranglings and dissensions;
All your strength is in your union,
All your danger is in discord;
Therefore be at peace henceforward,
And as brothers live together.

Capitalizing on the poem's apparent popularity while foregoing its nationalist and imperialist discourses, Millet's short article makes "Song of Hiawatha" read like a Popular Front political vision of "strength in union." Her appropriation of this widely-circulating nineteenth-century poem stands as yet another example of Longfellow's continued popularity, but it also provides insight into the significance of children's poetry for understanding Old Left poetic culture. Millet's own children's poems, as well as her re-readings of popular poems like "Song of Hiawatha," illustrate the complex ways in which poets associated with the Communist and Popular Front Left attempted to make poetry "popular" and "accessible" in forums like New Pioneer as well as in more well-known publications like The New Masses. Read in this context, the radical children's poetry in New Pioneer also archives significant dimensions of Left poetic output during the 1930s. Whether these poems remain obscure (like Millet's own unread verse), and howsoever they represent political appropriations of popular texts, they index the history of a poetic Left involved in the radical re-appropriation of popular poems, generic conventions, and traditional forms. Left poets and readers of Left poetry did more than simply draw on the poetry of the past—they actively re-imagined the history of poetic forms and the discourses about the social uses that those forms might have.