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Untimely Verse: Distressed Publishing and Exemplary Circulation In Untimely Verse: Distressed Publishing and Exemplary Circulation in Antebellum America A dissertation submitted by D. Leif Eckstrom in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Tufts University May 20, 2018 © 2018, D. Leif Eckstrom Adviser: Virginia Jackson Untimely Verse treats Phillis Wheatley, Rufus Griswold, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman as major authors, but it takes a narrower interest in recovering how their work circulated, as material texts and as a developing set of ideas about American poetry and authorship within antebellum periodical and book formats. Thematically, the dissertation is organized around issues of print temporality and the project of reading the contemporary practice of American verse as an at once historical and yet- still-emergent category of poetry. It traces how Wheatley, Poe, and Whitman developed and reflected a growing interest in exemplary and untimely circulation in antebellum America, while the labors of the indefatigable anthology czar, Rufus Griswold, came to embody the all-too- timely values of an American poetry written and published for its day, eventuating in the twentieth-century notion of an obsolete poetry synonymous with a graveyard of forgettable and largely forgotten poets. ii For Eleanore iii Acknowledgements Thanking the friends, family, and colleagues who supported this work is a pleasure long anticipated. My first thanks goes to Virginia Jackson who read every word of this project, and in most instances read these words and ideas many times over. Her work on the lyricization of poetry, as well as the histories, theories, and lineages of reading (c19 and c20) poetry that she has developed and fostered, inspired the lines of inquiry that I wanted to pursue in Untimely Verse. I’m equally grateful for her generosity of spirit, which set the highest standard for being a gracious and generative scholar. She introduced me to so many wonderful colleagues, books, and conferences, as a matter of course, and no less significantly, she made sure I had an outstanding meal or two each semester. Thank you, Jennie. Radiclani Clytus was an early and crucial interlocutor on this project. I’m grateful for his friendship and for his help in realizing the greater interests of the Wheatley chapter, particularly with respect to William J. Wilson and his inimitable “Picture Gallery” of 1859. Meredith McGill and her work on the culture of reprinting, as well as the circulation, formats, and media of nineteenth-century poetry and literary history, fundamentally shaped the interests of each chapter. In addition to inspiring a sharper accounting of the figures and claims of Untimely Verse, she was an enthusiastic and supportive presence at conferences. I’m very grateful for Joseph Litvak’s contribution to this project and for his iv mentorship throughout my first years at Tufts. Nathan Wolff graciously served as a reader on this project without really knowing me. His thoughtful comments and suggestions were very much appreciated. The first section of my Whitman chapter was published in Whitman among the Bohemians (Iowa University Press, 2014). I’m grateful to the editors, Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley, for their contributions to this essay; I also thank the Iowa University Press for permission to reprint this essay as part of my extended dissertation chapter on Whitman. Another generous and collegial English department helped give Untimely Verse its start. The English department at Loyola University of Chicago provided a wonderful introduction to graduate study and nineteenth-century studies, in particular. Jack Kerkering’s seminar on nineteenth-century American poetry was a revelation for me, and his teaching and mentorship were equally inspiring. Jack and Chris Castiglia fostered an Americanist reading group that made a compelling case for thinking that everything interesting actually happened in the nineteenth century. I’m happy to say that I haven’t been disabused of this notion. Finally, Bill Jolliff set a model for teaching, writing, and thinking that I’d be pleased to live up to every once in a while. He also introduced me to one of the most beautifully distressed objects of the twentieth century—Bill Monroe’s invention of the Bluegrass genre. Jacob Crane, Erin Kappeler, and Greg Beckett were the readers I depended upon when sifting through the roughest bits of writing and thinking about this project. They always improved my work and brought a v joy to the process that I will cherish and carry forward to future projects. I’m grateful for these friendships and many others that developed through and alongside the work of writing this dissertation. Britt Rusert, Rachael Nichols, Doug Guerra, Barbara Orton, Luke Mueller, and the Medford School Writing Group—Caroline Gelmi, Mareike Stanitzke, Jackie O’Dell, Laurel Hankins, Seth Studer, Nicole Flynn, and Nino Testa—all contributed to this project and the joy I found in it. My family also made this work possible in countless ways. Thank you, Katie Jean, Mary Jean and Keith, Dan and Marg, Ginger, Julie and Rich, Aaron, Tristan, Tom and Helen, Justine and Matt, Starr and Zach, Catherine, Sangini, Froilan, Elizabeth and Rory, Josh, Nora, Sara, and, of course, my three dearest ones, who have filled my life with wonder and delight: Eames, Lucinda, and Eleanore. Eleanore, this is for you. We did this together. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Untimeliness at Mid-Century: The Distressed Tradition of Printing and Reading American Verse 1-40 Chapter 1: Phillis Wheatley’s Antebellum Itineraries and the After-Lives of Occasional Verse 41-129 Chapter 2: Colonial Minstrels, American Poets: Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Distressed Tradition of American Verse 130-176 Chapter 3: Whitman, the Saturday Press, and the Distressed Print History of the Whitman Poem 177-259 Bibliography 260-266 vii Untimely Verse: Distressed Publishing and Exemplary Circulation in Antebellum America Introduction: Untimeliness at Mid-Century: The Distressed Tradition of Printing and Reading American Verse I. Amidst the American Renaissance: Augustine Duganne’s Poetical Works In 1855 Philadelphia, a book of roughly contemporary verse was published with a curiously “antique” design. The book, as an appreciative North American Review essay described it, had achieved an “antique style of singular beauty”: “even the ink has the intense and burnished jetty hue of the best English books a century old, while the paper of the entire work bears a slightly yellow tint, as of decorous age. As a mere specimen of art, the edition by its elegance attests [to] the taste and liberality of the publishers, while its costliness bears witness to their practiced sense of the intrinsic worth of its contents.”1 As I argue at greater length throughout Untimely Verse, the attention to and celebration of the design of this book, The Poetical Works of Augustine Duganne, mark a crucial turn in the history of valorizing American poetry. The anonymous review reveals a 1 See Anonymous, “[Review] Article IX: The Poets and Poetry of America (1855) and The Poetical Works of Augustine Duganne (1855),” North American Review, January 1856, 236-48. 1 readership deeply invested in an idealization of the American literary past, and yet, decidedly unfazed by a superficial and commercial relation to U.S. literature’s actual past. But why would this reading and printing culture— in the midst of the American Renaissance, the very moment that twentieth-century critics would later consider the first great flourishing of literary development—insist that their idealized version of American poetry lay in the past? In designing and printing this book, Duganne, his publishers, and printers conspired not to dupe readers into thinking that they held an authentic, eighteenth-century book in their hands, but instead to produce the frisson of a pointed literary anachronism, to establish an untimely relation between those contemporary readers and the book, its verse, and author. How exactly Duganne and his contemporaries came to think of this curiously anachronistic mix of material, authorial, and readerly effects as simultaneously commercial, literary, and historical values is the larger story that I recover in Untimely Verse. Indeed, the mid-century printing of Duganne’s book makes visible—in provocatively material and immaterial ways—the peculiarly mid-nineteenth-century understanding of American literary history as an always-already malleable and commercial abstraction, an antique that could be ready-made and, as was especially the case with Duganne’s Poetical Works, project the weight, distinction, and value of history from the tinted color of its paper and the “burnished jetty hue” of its ink. When we look closer at the page images of Duganne’s book (Figures 2 1-3, reproduced below), we see some of the ornamental print elements highlighted by the anonymous reviewer, but we also see in the front- matter of this book Duganne’s explicit engagement with what Meredith Martin has termed the “ballad-theory of civilization.”2 2 Meredith Martin, “‘Imperfectly Civilized’: Ballads, Nations, and Histories of Form,” ELH 82.2 (Summer 2015): 346. 3 Figure 1: Title Page to The Poetical Works of Augustine Duganne (1855) The inset verse on Duganne’s title page comes from the second stanza of his poem “The Poet and the People,” which reads in ballad meter: Songs are a nation’s pulses, which discover If the great body be as nature will’d; Songs are the spasms of soul, 4 Telling us
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