This study of nineteenth-century US poetry positions itself in critical relation to the “historical poetics” advocated by Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson. The central question of their “historical poetics” is whether the practice of “lyric reading” – that is, treating a poem as a private and isolated expression of an abstract self rather than a public and social communication among living persons, and attending minutely to the texture and density of a poem's language rather than to the poem's functional role in the social context in which it initially circulated – is appropriate to poems written in the nineteenth century, a time before modernist-influenced critical theories had normalized “lyric reading” as literary criticism's disciplinary standard. To view “lyric reading” as a valid approach to nineteenth-century poems like those of Dickinson, Poe, and Whitman is, according to Prins and Jackson's argument, to be guilty of anachronism. At stake in this debate is a question about historical method: should critics bring a twentieth-century aesthetic associated with modernism and its consequences to bear on all poems, treating each one as if it were a fine-art object on a museum pedestal, or should critics aim to recapture the distinctly nineteenth-century poetic practice associated with these poems in particular, treating them as artifacts of social history that are properly understood only when situated within a diorama reconstruction of their contextual functionality as public expressions of social engagement? In siding with the former view, and thus treating poems as transhistorical occasions for lyric reading, Michael also seeks to trouble the divide in this debate by revising its central terms. He replaces modernism with modernity, and his modernity is not constituted by literary-critical assumptions instituted by early twentieth-century modernists but is associated more broadly with what – following Charles Taylor – he calls “secularization.” In a secularizing context, Michael argues, poets shift their attention away from expressing the naive and consoling beliefs that religious skepticism has troubled and toward interrogating the very means of expression as such. Thus the modern poem, for Michael, is concerned less with what a poem means and more with how a poem means – or, indeed, how it fails to mean: “It is … to aspects of this disruption of communication – the ways rhythm, rhyme, and trope draw the reader's attention from the conveyance of meaning and focus it on the means by which meaning might be conveyed – that modern readers most often refer when they identify something as poetic” (19). Understood in these terms, a modern poem could be written at any time as long as it elevates self-conscious interrogation of its own meaning strategies above semantic content:

With this understanding of “the modern” as “an old tradition” (13), one in which Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson likewise participate (but their contemporaries, “more conventional poets like Longfellow, Bryant, and Whittier” (12), do not), Michael replaces the Prins–Jackson separation of nineteenth- from twentieth-century poems (and the modernist innovation of “lyric reading” effecting that separation) with a separation between, on the one hand, premodern nineteenth-century poems that unself-consciously embrace meaning, and, on the other hand, modern nineteenth-century poems that self-consciously and indeed skeptically interrogate how poems achieve meaning at all. Although Michael distinguishes among the various poetic techniques each poet uses to these skeptical ends (thus, he finds, “If Poe twists metaphors and Whitman enchains metonymies, Dickinson self-consciously practices the negating tropes of irony and catachresis” (178)), all of these poets’ various techniques ultimately converge upon the same key idea: “lyric offers Dickinson, as it did Poe and Whitman, a means of engaging with and resisting the discourses of the world on the fundamental levels of signification and significance, on the fundamental level of language and the materiality of the sign” (161). This convergent focus on “the materiality of the sign” is ultimately historical for Michael (“What I offer here,” he concludes, “is in an important sense a historical reading” (203)), but it also closely resembles earlier forms of ahistorical post-structuralist formalism that likewise celebrated moments of self-consciousness about the “materiality of the sign” in texts from various historical periods, moments that signaled to post-structuralist critics not a text's modernity (as Michael asserts here) but its literariness (as Paul de Man asserts in “The Resistance to Theory”). If Michael's book indeed provides what is “in an important sense a historical reading,” its opposition to “historical poetics” raises important questions about what kind of poetry criticism – his own or Prins's and Jackson's – ultimately warrants the name “historical.”