Dramatic Poetics and American Poetic Culture, 1865-1904
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DRAMATIC POETICS AND AMERICAN POETIC CULTURE, 1865-1904 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Matthew Giordano, M.A. The Ohio State University 2004 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Elizabeth Renker, Adviser Professor Steven Fink Professor Elizabeth Hewitt _____________________________ Adviser Department of English ABSTRACT This dissertation offers a reassessment of American poetic culture from 1865 to 1904. Beginning with E. C. Stedman in 1885 and extending throughout the twentieth century, critics of American poetry have considered this period a poetic wasteland, and thus have almost totally neglected it. In recent years, however, there has been an increased scholarly interest in improving current formulations of nineteenth-century poetic history. To that end, I illuminate the function of meaning of poetry in the late nineteenth century, and particularly the range of ways poets conceptualized their roles in American culture. I uncover a tradition of late-nineteenth-century poetry steeped in dramatic forms and techniques, including dialogue, characterization, and the dramatic monologue. I use the term “dramatic poetics” to refer to this pervasive aesthetic, and I demonstrate how it intersects with performative culture more broadly. Most specifically, I argue that a range of poets used this aesthetic to perform the terms of their authorship. These performances make legible the professional and cultural roles these poets assumed, the audiences they wrote for, and the political and cultural work they pursued. The Introduction explains the dramatic poetic tradition and diagnoses the reasons why scholarship has overlooked it. Arranged chronologically, the chapters explore the dramatic poetry of individual authors to illustrate particularly significant and representative brands of late-nineteenth-century ii poetic authorship. Chapter 1 analyzes Walt Whitman’s role as a national poet, Chapter 2 Sarah Piatt’s role as a periodical poet, Chapter 3 Herman Melville’s role as a coterie poet, and Chapter 4 Elliott Blaine Henderson’s role as a local poet. The Coda gestures towards the continuities between the twilight interval and modernism. This dissertation reaches three conclusions that provide a new framework for understanding late-nineteenth-century poetry. First, poetry was a popular, performative, and public form of literary discourse. Second, poetry was produced and received in various sites, from nationally distributed magazines to self-published books disseminated to small groups of readers. Third, the concept of dramatic poetics presents an alternative to dominant literary histories, revealing an American poetic tradition that does not conform to those that have been studies and canonized. iii Dedicated to Jen iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am greatly indebted to my adviser, Elizabeth Renker, whose unrelenting enthusiasm, support, guidance, and intellectual engagement has helped sustain my confidence in this project and has enhanced it in more ways than I can enumerate. I thank Beth Hewitt for her astute commentary on my work, and Steve Fink for his careful reading of this document and for his invaluable mentorship throughout the last six years. I would also like to express my gratitude to Susan Williams and Jared Gardner for their encouragement and assistance, and I thank them, along with Steve, for the opportunity to work on American Periodicals. I am grateful to the Department of English for awarding me several fellowships that have provided the time necessary to complete this dissertation. I am especially thankful to Susan Williams, Debra Moddelmog, and Kathleen Gagel for answering all of my questions over the years. This project could never have been completed without the companionship and support of many friends, particularly Scott, Theresa, and Jimmy. The Desiderio family has encouraged and supported me in every way possible, and I am grateful. My brothers and sisters, Tony, Tom, Ann, Sarah, and their families, v have given me unrelenting friendship, guidance, and love, keeping me grounded and providing a necessary haven away from graduate school. My gratitude to my parents, Al and Nancy, is beyond words. Their unwavering love and support has brought this project to completion. They have stood by my side for each accomplishment and setback, never losing faith in me and helping me to overcome every hurdle. I thank them immensely. And finally, this dissertation is dedicated to my wife, Jen, who has seen me through every moment of this process. You have been my strength and inspiration. We began this journey together, and you share in every word. vi VITA October 14, 1975 ………………………….. Born—Rochester, NY 1996 ……………………………………….. B.A. English and Philosophy Binghamton University 1998-2004 ………………………………… Graduate Teaching Associate The Ohio State University 2000 ………………………………………. M.A. English, The Ohio State University 2003-2004 ………………………………… Assistant Editor, American Periodicals PUBLICATIONS None FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ………………………………………………………………………. ii Dedication ……………………………………………………………………. iv Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………….... v Vita ……………………………………………………………………………vii Introduction: Dramatic Poetics …………………………………………………1 Chapters: 1. Whitman’s “Many-Threaded Drama” …………………………………36 2. “A Lesson from the Magazines”: Sarah Piatt and the Periodical Poet ……………………………………………………..79 3. Melville’s Public Privacy ……………………………………………. 127 4. Elliott Blaine Henderson, Race, and the Local Poet ………………… 172 Coda: Dramatic Poetics and the Emergence of Modernism ………………… 218 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………… 226 viii INTRODUCTION DRAMATIC POETICS On April 14, 1879, in New York City’s Steck Hall, Walt Whitman delivered the first of his Lincoln lectures. Consisting of reflections on the night of Lincoln’s assassination and its repercussions for American history, the presentation concluded with a recitation of his 1866 Drum-Taps poem “O Captain! My Captain!” At this time in his life, hampered by a series of health problems, Whitman, according to Jerome Loving, “needed something new” and expressed his determination to “make a small living as a lecturer and a reader of poetry” (389). Fulfilling what was his life-long aspiration to be an orator, Whitman would go on to give his Lincoln lecture at least ten times over the next eleven years, performing for hundreds of listeners including Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain, James Russell Lowell, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Silas Weir Mitchell. Unequivocally patriotic, the lectures, in conjunction with the poem—perhaps, at the time, his most popular, and certainly his most conventional—aided in reconciling Whitman with the broader American public and helped effect his transition from salacious rebel to the Good Gray Poet. In the same decades that Whitman was making these occasional public appearances, the 1870s and 80s, another poet, James Whitcomb Riley, was carving out an immensely successful career by traversing the country and presenting hundreds of readings of his Hoosier poetry. Following the example of Will Carleton, he gained an 1 audience for his poems largely through these performances on the lyceum and lecture circuits (Van Allen 135). A true literary star, unquestionably the most popular poet of his era, Riley performed his verse in front of sold-out audiences at local town halls and civic auditoriums “from Kokomo, Indiana to Concord, Massachusetts,” according to Angela Sorby, “providing a mass-entertainment context for poetry” (199). By the end of the nineteenth century, just as Riley’s career was slowing down, Paul Laurence Dunbar was achieving notoriety not only as the author of several books of poems but as a successful and entertaining expositor of his work. Joanne M. Braxton observes that from 1898 to 1902 Dunbar “enjoyed wide popularity on the lecture circuit” (xv), and Jean Wagner argues that “No one previously had combined all the talents of the poet, musician, dancer, and actor to the same degree. This made Dunbar the first truly great interpreter of the popular Negro temperament” (115). In the words of Dunbar’s friend and fellow poet James Weldon Johnson, “Dunbar’s success on the platform, and it was great, was due not only to his fame as a poet, but also to his skill as a reader. His voice was a perfect musical instrument, and he knew how to use it with extreme effect” (Along 159-60). Though their positions in the American literary tradition have varied greatly over the last century, and though their individual reputations, particularly in the cases of Dunbar and Riley, have fluctuated wildly from period to period, critic to critic, Whitman, Riley, and Dunbar have endured as three of the most important American poets of the late nineteenth century. Public performance was an essential aspect of each of their careers, a fact reflected in scholarship on their work. A continuing strain of Whitman criticism, for example, investigates the influence of oration, theater, opera, and other types of performing arts on the formal construction and rhetorical stances of Leaves of Grass. 2 Like Sorby, many readers understand Riley’s verse as a type of mass entertainment that overlapped with vaudeville and burlesque acts. And almost every Dunbar scholar acknowledges the undeniable importance of both the minstrel tradition in theater and African-American tradition in storytelling as critical components of his work. Yet as useful