| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. By Joan Shelley Rubin. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2007. xvi, 470 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02436-6.)

Commentary on the public state of poetry in America—when heard at all—tends to devolve into nostalgia, lament, or inept defensiveness. Even the title of the most famous recent essay on the subject, "Can Poetry Matter?" by the current chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, indicates the general sense that poetry has become marginal, at best. Joan Shelley Rubin's thorough and readable study may not change that perception much, but it does greatly clarify how poetry has mattered in America. Through careful research into anthologies, school curricula, memoirs, personal journals, diaries, and other private documents, Rubin examines how generations of Americans (especially during the period 1880–1950) made use of poetry in their public and private lives.

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