Listen to a short interview with Joan Shelley Rubin Host: Chris
Gondek - Producer: Heron & Crane
In the years between 1880 and 1950, Americans recited poetry at
family gatherings, school assemblies, church services, camp
outings, and civic affairs. As they did so, they invested
poems--and the figure of the poet--with the beliefs, values, and
emotions that they experienced in those settings.
Reciting a poem together with others joined the individual to
the community in a special and memorable way. In a strikingly
original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Joan
Shelley Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry
influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a
poet's words.
Emphasizing the cultural circumstances that influenced the
production and reception of poets and poetry in this country, Rubin
recovers the experiences of ordinary people reading poems in public
places. We see the recent immigrant seeking acceptance, the
schoolchild eager to be integrated into the class, the mourner
sharing grief at a funeral, the grandparent trying to bridge the
generation gap--all instances of readers remaking texts to meet
social and personal needs. Preserving the moral, romantic, and
sentimental legacies of the nineteenth century, the act of reading
poems offered cultural continuity, spiritual comfort, and
pleasure.
"Songs of Ourselves" is a unique history of literary texts as
lived experience. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and
"popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it
creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic
language and ourselves.
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