One striking development in poetry of the nineteenth century is its intense idealization of poetry. Poets before and since wrote and would continue to write on the subject, but not, it would seem, with the same fervor. Particularly in the first half of the century in the United States, reverence for the muse can sometimes seem cult-like in emphasis. Unknown to prose, the exaltation of the medium pervades the theories of Edgar Allan Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who take their inspiration from High Romantic texts such as Shelley's “A Defence of Poetry.” Women poets of the time did not have occasion to issue prose manifestoes along the lines of Eureka or “The Poet,” but in laying a wreath at the shrine of Poetry they, too, were no less impassioned and ambitious in their claims for verse. In the publications of Lydia Sigourney, the country's bestselling poet through the 1820s and 1830s, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith, author of the bestselling poem “The Sinless Child,” first published in 1842, the link between poetry and a supreme Ideality is especially strong, albeit for very different reasons.

To explore such a link in these two authors is to ask, ultimately, what it is that they value about poetry. To the extent that such a question is entertained among scholars today, it tends to attract thematic considerations, as when Sigourney's commitment to republican motherhood is emphasized as a key motivation for her writing or when “The Sinless Child” is read as an attempt to reconcile Christianity and transcendentalism. But this privileging of thematic content, while not unimportant, can only take us so far in understanding the author's relationship to her writing, and, indeed, after a certain point it runs the risk of reducing the verse to an instrument for the propagation of ideas or the encoding of messages. That Sigourney and Oakes Smith had a different understanding represents a point of departure for the discussion that follows. In Sigourney's writing the glorification of poetry is hidden in plain sight, intangibly but unmistakably conveyed through a style of rhetorical address whose manner draws upon an earlier period of literary history. In Oakes Smith, born almost a generation after Sigourney, the same glorification becomes a considerably more vexed affair that dramatizes a conflicted, often anguished relation to poetic form and the promises it seemed to hold.

It cannot be said of nineteenth-century American poetry that it needs no introduction. Shifting interests and new paradigms have substantially altered the ways in which we view and value a field that for some time has indeed seemed less like a field of study in its own right than the collected works of two writers of genius surrounded by a host of lesser lights. With many of the standards and methodological assumptions associated with a modernist aesthetic now called into question, older continuities have been challenged while new ones have emerged. In short, over the past two decades a growing body of scholarship has been engaged in reconceptualizing and reevaluating a largely neglected area of study in US literary history. Each of the essays commissioned for this collection reflects and helps advance this spirit of new directions and revisionism.

Of course, the recent surge of interest in verse written in the United States during the nineteenth century has not developed in isolation from trends that have marked literary criticism elsewhere. Among these, three seem worth singling out in particular: the waning importance assigned to distinctions between high or elite culture and popular or mass entertainment; the increased appreciation for women's contribution to poetry and the various traditions from which it proceeds; and the rewriting of literary history in ways that travel outside or beyond national demarcations. When applied to nineteenth-century verse written in the United States, each of these rubrics overlaps to a considerable extent, but not so much so that, for the purposes of this overview, they cannot be considered consecutively.

In the inaugural issue of the North American Review, soon to establish itself as the country's leading voice of literary nationalism, there appeared an admiring notice of a volume entitled Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse (1815) by one Lydia Huntley. After commending the “considerable merit” of the poetry and quoting several passages at some length, the unnamed critic takes the opportunity of urging “Miss Huntley” to pursue more native themes in the future. “We have in the way of subjects,” the reviewer grandly declares, in the manner of a salesman showcasing the company wares, “a rich and varied mine that has hardly been opened.” Considering what “the genius of Scott” was able to do with the utterly “rude materials” of petty feuds and tribal warfare on the Scottish highlands, there is no reason why the American artist should not take advantage of much more attractive features closer to home. The countless stirring events surrounding two relatively recent revolutions, one against the French and the other against British, the legends of Indian history, the exploits of the early colonists, and the Puritan past are among the unexplored treasures “furnish[ing] materials at once interesting and grand … that might be rendered highly poetical.” In addition to “the magnificence of the scenery” waiting to be quarried and brought to the page in all its “diversified, animated, and picturesque glory,” there are “the many romantick adventures of individuals” such as “the polished French nobleman from the court of Lewis XIV, the dignified British governour, the hardy American colonist, and the chiefs of the Six Nations” that beckon, each worthy of the notice of any aspiring poet or novelist.

One point of departure for many of the analyses in the second volume of Tocqueville's Democracy in America concerns the way in which equality alters the relationship between part and whole. The “nearly equal, roughly similar citizens of democracy,” precisely because they regard each other as nearly equal and roughly similar, inevitably come to see themselves as more or less interchangeable on many different dimensions. Thus “in democratic societies, where all men are very small and very much alike, each man, as he looks at himself, sees his fellows at the same time.” Within every part may be discerned the whole; within the one may be seen the many. There is of course nothing mystical about democracy's power to facilitate this instant connection. It seems to follow almost trivially from the standard idea that equality places people side by side, revealing a common tie.

As we might expect, Tocqueville teases out the importance of this development by painting a vivid, highly simplified picture of the opposite condition. In aristocratic times, he suggests, “each man was conscious of only another man, whom he was bound to obey. Through that personage he was linked, without realizing it, to all the rest.” Though it may be true that “aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain,” without a special effort of the imagination neither is necessarily aware of this fact. A dim and furtive abstraction, a “general conception of human fellowship” does not come naturally to the aristocratic subject.

A BENEVOLENT DESPOTISM

It may seem strange to say that inequality could not be theorized at a time when there was no lack of Southern ideologues attempting to do just that. The figure most often mentioned in this connection is George Fitzhugh, whose Cannibals All! (1857) is dedicated to the proposition that “domestic slavery is, in the general, a natural and necessary institution.” Sounding the usual themes of Tory conservatism, his book invokes Aristotle to confute Locke (CA, 71), bows before the Great Chain of Being (CA, 68), jeers at newfangled notions of human equality (CA, 87), and denounces the triumph of laissez-faire. In doing battle with this last enemy, the chief concern of the book, Fitzhugh draws freely on the discourse of socialism in pitting the “moral cannibalism” (CA, 16) of the Northern capitalist against the benign paternalism of the Southern slaveholder. On his account, the difference between those who are free and those who are enslaved comes down to a difference between two kinds of laborers – the workers of the North “who labor under all the disadvantages of slavery, and have none of the rights of slaves” (CA, 12) and the workers of the South who likewise labor under slavery but nevertheless do enjoy those rights. Sheltered from “the false, antagonistic, and competitive relations in which so-called liberty and equality place man” (CA, 36), the “negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, freest people in the world” (CA, 18).

For some time now literary criticism has been dominated by an interest in inequality – an interest that shows no signs of diminishing. Each day, it seems, we hear fresh reports on how inequality is mobilized, legitimized, rationalized, or naturalized. In the case of antebellum literature of the United States, considerations of race, gender, and class have so transformed the field that critical studies that do not in some way attempt to add to our knowledge in these areas will be expected to explain why. Indeed, questions relating to equality and inequality not only dominate the subject matter of literary criticism but increasingly inform how that criticism is evaluated. Thus it is not uncommon to find, say, a study of race commended for its discussion of the topic but faulted for slighting gender, or a study of gender praised for its insights but faulted for neglecting class. As scholars of nineteenth-century American literature judge the past, so are they judged in turn.

Imagining Equality pursues a fundamentally different approach. Instead of treating equality as a political or social good that may be won or lost, I am interested in equality as a social norm whose presence was already well established and pervasive in the antebellum era. To think of equality in these terms is of course to follow the lead of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the sheer richness of whose insights has not yet been fully exploited by students of the period.

In Democracy in America, envy is a recurrent theme. Called at one point “the democratic sentiment,” it is distinguished from a “legitimate passion for equality which rouses in all men a desire to be strong and respected.” With the spread of democracy, envy progresses from an infirmity confined to one's own rank or caste to a genuinely public menace. Two salient features of democratic life, equality and mobility, are the perfect ingredients to insure its diffusion, for while an egalitarian culture renders comparisons among one's peers easy to make, the loosening of longstanding barriers to social mobility associated with the onset of equality also makes departures from the norm easy to see. “In democracies,” Tocqueville explains, “private citizens see men rising from their ranks and attaining wealth and power in a few years; that spectacle excites their astonishment and their envy; they wonder how he who was their equal yesterday has the right to command them today.” To ward off humiliation, the envious must concoct a plausible story to explain away the success of their rival: “[t]o attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is inconvenient, for it means admitting that they are less virtuous or capable than he. They therefore regard some of his vices as the main cause thereof” (221). The reader of Democracy in America is likely to run across envy's submerged but pervasive influence in any number of domains, whether it be in the unmistakable mediocrity of the nation's elected officials (199), the contempt visited upon free blacks in Northern cities (355), or the intolerance of nonconformity in a country that supposedly prides itself on it (436).