Scholars of nineteenth-century American literature are fortunate to have two ambitious new books, one focussed on poems and the other addressing periodization. Though their goals and conceptual frameworks differ, both volumes unsettle conventional literary histories and offer transformative readings of the period.

As Michael C. Cohen's ambitious, textured volume underscores, nineteenth-century American poetry has enjoyed renewed critical attention during the last twenty years, with diverse projects encompassing recovery anthologies such as Paula Bernat Bennett's Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (1998) and Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller's Words for the Hour: A New Anthology of Civil War Poetry (2005); biographies, including Gilbert H. Muller's William Cullen Bryant: Author of America (2010); critical collections such as Meredith L. McGill's The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008); and monographs such as Angela Sorby's Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (2005) and Christopher N. Phillips's Epic in America: Settlement to Reconstruction (2012).

While appreciating this scholarly conversation, Cohen calls poetry “the open secret of American literature: so much of it, so popular, so unread, and so seemingly unreadable” (12). Part of the challenge is its diversity. Thus, rather than discuss “poetry” as an identifiable and discrete genre, he is “far more interested in nineteenth-century poems” (13, original emphasis). Because literary studies has separated poetry from prose, abstracted it into a genre that represents “pure expressiveness” and thus elevated it “into a standard for pure literariness,” most earlier American poems necessarily fail (13). Tracking what he calls a poem's “social history,” which includes both “what it is – transcendent linguistic text and immanent material thing – and what it does, [its] host of uses and purposes,” Cohen illuminates both readers’ intimate interactions with poems and how poems’ exchanges – personal as well as public – shape Americans’ ideas of nationality (88).

Social Lives, which unfolds in roughly chronological order, foregrounds topics such as how poems circulate, how they create community and conflict, and how they embody problems of authenticity and authorial control. Ballads, a form that Cohen complicates significantly as the book develops, figure most prominently. Tracking two prominent late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century figures, chapter 1 foregrounds what he calls “balladmongering” (17): the circulation of variegated poetic forms (songs, broadsides, recitations) that traveled across time and space, often via the liminal and disruptive figure of the pedlar, and were complexly consumed (rather than “read”). Cohen argues that such poems present social challenges to public order and “the legitimation of power”; they also significantly challenge literary history and criticism (59).

Chapter 2 investigates how anti-slavery verse shapes (and dis-integrates) communities. Cohen emphasizes how the diverse poems surrounding anti-slavery activism centrally enabled social transformation: “the work of abolition was borne on the wings of poetry, for … poems made reform possible as a social project” (60, original emphasis). Regarded by consumers as community property, such poems often elided individual authorship and hewed to genre conventions in order to reach the largest possible audience. Their abstractness and decontextualization allowed poems to travel, often escaping authors’ intentions and control. Whittier's poems figure prototypically here, serving as agentic forces that embody, in both their form and their mobility, reformers’ connections among free speech, free association, and free persons. Cohen moves next to “contraband songs,” a locution that encapsulates both freed slaves’ potential authorship and the unruly freedom that the texts themselves performed (100). He rejects conventional readings of Civil War-era poetry that stress literary interpretation and maps “the sociality of poems beyond reading,” most notably their “participatory, material history,” which includes how such songs transform minstrel conventions (102). Again circulation figures prominently: poems belong to communities while creating empowered belonging through affect.

Looking transnationally, chapter 4 returns to the ballad after the Civil War. Cohen explores how debates concerning authenticity dovetail with those about national identity. Associated with (disappearing or vanished) orality and “folk culture” (149), such qualities as “roughness” (141–43) and “fragmentation” (149) – characteristics, Cohen stresses, that result from editorial intervention, not from inherent structures – seemingly authorize ballads. He argues that in the United States the heterogeneous “popular” ballad enabled reconstruction via literature, while serving as a political project that reflected the country's imperial ambitions. Chapter 5 foregrounds how efforts to present Whittier as America's representative poet require dismissing his anti-slavery verse and celebrating his nostalgic later poems that feature New England-based rural life. Cohen traces readers’ responses at both the “macro” and “micro” levels. First he narrates the large cultural forces that converge to elevate Whittier's later verse, then he scrutinizes specific readers’ responses. Both literary elites and the general public lauded Whittier's ability to appeal to readers’ emotions. But his anti-slavery verse resonated only in particular contexts and temporal circumstances, while his regionalist ballads ostensibly transcended time and place, thus offering opportunities for creating American communal identity.

Cohen concludes by exploring how minstrel poems and slave songs become intermediated, rendering problematic questions of authority and authenticity as well as those of temporal priority. Emerging from earlier popular ballads that consumers, critics, and readers understood as “genuine” representatives of American national culture, such later forms reflected various constituencies’ divergent goals. They elicited such questions as how the poems reflected authentic representation of ex-slaves’ experiences, or, alternatively, appropriation, commodification, and capitulation to genteel or even racist agendas. Reading the Fisk Singers’ career, Cohen unsettles such dichotomies, instead revealing how genre slippages obscure easy generalizations surrounding race and genre. Ultimately, Cohen's book offers a densely textured, multilevel view of nineteenth-century American poems that aims ultimately to upend both critical commonplaces and contemporary (twenty-first-century) reading practices. The volume includes important archival research that not only illuminates his claims but also contributes to scholars’ collective recovery project.

Marrs's compelling book argues that how scholars and teachers construct periodization problematically links literary history with national history and thus elides what he calls the “transbellum” trajectory of nineteenth-century American literature, creating hard boundaries where the edges more often blur (3). The concept of “transbellum” incorporates several phenomena. First, it signifies how many authors’ careers begin before the Civil War and traverse, sometimes by many decades, its temporal boundaries. The second meaning references the Civil War's “literary, historical, and philosophical” durability in Americans’ imaginations (3). And finally, “transbellum” signifies “the myriad ways in which these writers [Whitman, Douglass, Melville, and Dickinson] recast the historicity of that conflict” (3).

The introduction provides an instructive overview of constricted critical practices and their consequences. Expanding on and departing from recent Americanist scholarship that has explored how literature disrupts clock time and standardization practices, Marrs argues that time figured centrally in nineteenth-century politics, that literature itself intervened in how “chronopolitics” was constructed, and that literary temporalities vary widely (6). One substantial problem, Marrs insists, is our tendency to read very narrow periods in writers’ oeuvre; he underscores how necessary it is that we appreciate a writer's entire career trajectory, because careers “enable us to read multilinearly across eras and genres that are often kept quite separate from one another” (21). This traditional approach, he argues persuasively, reprises the “story of generational succession” (8). In this narrative, the Civil War forms a decisive break between two disparate cultural moments, a break that (for example) emphasizes the loss of idealism or the emergence of innovative genre forms.

Whitman, Douglass, Melville, and Dickinson offer particularly instructive examples because of their canonization histories. The first and third figured prominently in F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941), which, with its influential precursor Van Wyck Brooke's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (1936), assured that a regional literature based in a microperiod would shape all subsequent accounts. Marrs acknowledges that periodization provides an essential tool through which we understand literary history, but he argues that we should articulate various periodic models.

In the subsequent chapters, Marrs traces how each author differentially constructs temporality as s/he contemplates the war itself. Addressing Walt Whitman's long career, chapter 1 focusses on how Drum-Taps (1865) influenced Whitman's revisions of Leaves of Grass (1891–92). Marrs suggests that Whitman's postwar encounter with Hegel's philosophy of history fundamentally informed how the poet revised these texts, as he experimented with “new syntactic forms and methods of poetic organization” (4). Whitman's reading sparks his movement from introspection to prospection. Marrs argues that before Drum-Taps, Leaves of Grass features various temporalities that “all tend to synchronize” (37), but the later project represents time as fractured. Whitman transformed Leaves from a cyclical to a progressive perspective that reckons with postwar disillusionment and social unrest (workers’ movements feature prominently) by envisioning future fulfillment.

Chapter 2 emphasizes Frederick Douglass's temporal expansiveness. Marrs argues that Douglass understood the Civil War in an extended transnational context, “as part of a much larger conflict between freedom and unfreedom that had been waged for centuries by a variety of peoples” (59). Representing what he called the Abolition War “along a lengthy and discontinuous timeline of historical progress,” Douglass's narratives express a transbellum perspective (60). The writer's later autobiographies transform the progress-oriented philosophies and histories that his reading accrues: they “beautifully translate his progressive worldview into a process of autobiographical revision” elaborated in his works’ structure, as well as content (83).

In chapter 3 Marrs joins recent critics who rebut the declensionist narrative that has structured the previous critical account of Melville's career; this account, influenced significantly by the requisites of conventional periodization, ensures that the writer fits tidily into the American Renaissance narrative and consequently elides his poetry. Marrs delineates Melville's transbellum status by emphasizing how the author repeatedly returned, directly or obliquely, to “questions that the Civil War conjured up but left profoundly unresolved: questions about the shape of history, the relationship between war and art, and the legacies of violence” (92). Battle-Pieces (1866) illuminates historical repetition but emphasizes “regress rather than progress” (97). Later works, such as John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Clarel (1876), encode the writer's belief that the Civil War reprised other cyclically repeated violent historical struggles. Timoleon (1891) represents the most metaphorical and metaphysical incarnation of transtemporal human struggle, but in that volume, as in Melville's earlier projects, the war nevertheless continues to resonate.

Marrs turns last to the writer least overtly invested in the Civil War, Emily Dickinson. Despite recent work emphasizing her engagements with that conflict, again conventional periodization mistakenly coopts her as an antebellum writer who is necessary to sustain the American Renaissance conceptual framework. Chapter 4 explores the poet's self-aware remoteness from the conflict, which generates her sense of “vast destruction that is unmoored from chronology itself” and her oblique representations of the war via her meditations on “the unperiodizability of pain … or the violence of nature” (125). Suggesting the limitations of emphasizing poems directly linked to the Civil War, Marrs highlights how some of her later poems that ruminate on “wind, poetry, and song” represent meditations on the war “and the aesthetic dilemmas that it posed,” confirming her status as a transbellum writer (125). He distinguishes between Dickinson and the other writers he discusses, highlighting her deep suspicion of a coherent historical perspective that could help explain the war's significance.

Marrs's conclusion proposes several future projects for Americanist scholarship: to move beyond national boundaries and reconfigure American literature “through new, alternative geographies” that articulate “borderlands of cultural exchange” (153); to approach periodicity with skepticism even as we invent alternative period conceptualizations that account for overlap and cross-pollination; to consider how economic history might present an alternative interpretive framework; to envision periods through the long careers of less canonical writers such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

Scholars write their own books; reviewers often have different ambitions and conceptual frameworks. Scholars of American women's writing like myself will wish that Cohen's book responded to Paula Bennett's important volume, Poets in the Public Sphere (2003), which shares many of the author's objectives. Marrs's book could explore more fully Dickinson's difference from the male writers he discusses, as well as responding briefly to the problems presented by her work's indeterminate composition dates. Such omissions do not diminish these books’ importance. Compelling and pleasurable reading, both projects aim to make field-reshaping interventions, Cohen vis-à-vis nineteenth-century American poetry and poetics, and Marrs in relation to American literary periodization. Both include macro- and micro-level analyses, developing broad, imaginative claims and grounding those claims persuasively. Together, they open rich interpretive possibilities to enliven future Americanist scholarship.