'The Public Life of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, Longfellow, and Their Contemporaries presents the work of poets who believed themselves to be speaking to and for a vast number of Americans. As critics have pointed out, the American literary milieu was dominated until the early nineteenth century by writers who were effectively dilettantes and could not hope for large readerships. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, with the example of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the professional poet was born. Longfellow’s books could be found on parlor tables across the country.
But, in fact, nineteenth-century Americans found poetry in print all around them—not only in their private homes, but also in the public sphere—and this exhibit also presents some of the “disposable” or “ephemeral” poetry that circulated during this period alongside the work of respected literary lions. Printed verse appeared in advertisements, in schoolbooks, at monument dedications, and on the covers of periodicals. Readers, in turn, produced and reproduced poetry in parodies, scrapbook collections, and even samplers. An overlooked segment of nineteenth-century American print culture, public poetry occupied an important sociocultural role, helping readers to make sense of war, death, love, separation, and other transformations of and challenges to emotional and spiritual life.'
