With reviews in the New York Times, the New York Sun, and the Wall Street Journal, Songs of Ourselves has received more mainstream press attention than most academic studies of poetry ever do. Part of the reason for this is that, as a cultural historian, Rubin does something that most poetry scholars avoid: rather than focus on significant authors and literary “masterpieces,” she concentrates more democratically on the at-large culture of poetry in modern America and specifically on the ways that “average” readers consumed that verse in their everyday lives. From classrooms to living rooms, civic events, church services, naturalization proceedings, and outdoor recreation activities, poetry of all types, Rubin reveals, was a central part of Americans' public and private lives. In tirelessly remapping the genre's social presence, Songs not only rebuts the tired claim that modernism somehow killed poetry but portrays the genre as a living, useful, and popular discourse quite at odds with the rarified one many people imagine it to be.

In contradicting poetry criticism's conventional wisdom – that “modern” poetry extinguished “genteel” verse in the US, that average people did not encounter much of either in the twentieth century, and that “cultural studies” concerns do not or should not influence how we think about the genre – Songs is more like a quiet version of Cary Nelson's 1989 study Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 than any other work. However, whereas Nelson focusses on in-your-face radical labor and leftist poetries, Rubin centers on more institutionally sanctioned uses of the genre – a mainstream orientation that possibly emerged from her 1992 book The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Rubin's are poetries that tend to follow the law but, as Songs amply demonstrates, they are no less interesting – and are perhaps even more ideologically and culturally complex – for doing so.

In studying what book historians call “actual readers” rather than the “ideal readers” championed by New Criticism, Rubin reveals that audiences regularly used and interpreted poems in ways that would aggravate today's English teachers and poetry critics alike; in many cases the context surrounding a poem appears to have generated far more meaning than the specific words on the page. Current custodians of “literary culture” have thus far been uncertain how to process the fact that so many people were reading poetry but misreading it – or not reading it “closely” – at the same time. The Times, for example, frets about “what happens to literary value” when one studies such uncritical audiences, and the Sun retreats into a corner insisting that, contrary to all the evidence Rubin presents, “far fewer people were reading” poetry in the 1920s than in the 1870s. Invested in traditional concepts of literary greatness and in poetry's remove from everyday life, these reviewers suggest, finally, the challenge that Songs might pose for poetry scholarship more broadly: if literary critics are not willing to engage and study the full range of poetry in US culture, other critics from other departments most certainly will.