Who Killed American Poetry?: From National Obsession to Elite Possession

Who Killed American Poetry?:
From National Obsession to Elite Possession

University of Michigan Press, 2019

Also available on Amazon

Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War–era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating “authentic” poetry for intellectuals from “popular” poetry for everyone else.\

Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal.

Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.

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Praise / Awards

• “In its historical sweep, Kilcup’s original and important book reveals just how catastrophic ‘gender-based standards’ can be when they ‘demean emotional responses to literature.’ … Essential.”
  — CHOICE
• A 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

The title of Karen Kilcup’s new book, Who Killed American Poetry? , calls to mind a murder mystery à la Agatha Christie. The mystery in this case has to do with the disappearance of poets writing in the United States over the course of the nineteenth century – the disappearance, that is, of all but two, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. A form of writing that dominated the literary landscape at the time has now vanished. The most common explanation for this eclipse is the revolution in taste we associate with the modernism of the twentieth century, with its valorizing of the lyric for its verbal difficulty, use of irony, radical metrical experimentation, and other qualities that remain influential to this day. Kilcup’s argument doesn’t necessarily dispute this diagnosis, but it does deepen and extend it in unexpected ways. As with any good whodunit, the culprit identified by her book turns out to have been hiding in plain sight all along. . . .

Making good on her project’s own claim to originality, Kilcup supplements her interpretations of the critical discourse surrounding poetry with valuable readings of primary texts; especially rewarding in this regard are the discussions of Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Larcom, and Sarah Piatt. A final chapter on Emily Dickinson not only illuminates the different ways in which newspaper and magazine reviews served as a foil for Dickinson’s poetic but provides a fascinating account of early responses following her death. Even readers initially skeptical of the book’s central thesis will acknowledge that, like any good detective, Kilcup has marshaled an impressive amount of evidence in making her case. More generally, those who wish to learn about the formation and transformation of taste in nineteenth-century United States or in the work of many forgotten figures whose work nevertheless remains of interest, both esthetically and historically, will find Who Killed American Poetry? a lively, informative, and provocative work of scholarship.

–Kerry Larson, in Women’s Studies

© 2021 Karen L. Kilcup. All rights reserved.