Casey at the Bat

From a contemporary perspective, American poetry after the Civil War is defined by two towering figures: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. That assessment would raise eyebrows in Gilded Age America. The “barbaric yawps” of Whitman were the enthusiasms of a relatively small, cult-like following of young brash poets. Dickinson was entirely unknown. Her poems, radical things that rejected every assumption about how a poem looks and sounds, were bound up quietly in boxes under her bed on the second floor of her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. For fin-de-siècle America, the poets of national repute were names hardly recognized any longer: Edgar Guest, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Whitcomb Riley, Phoebe and Alice Cary, John Greenleaf Whittier, Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Before poetry was relegated to the hothouse environment of classroom analysis, these poets and their works were read aloud in parlors, shared between friends, memorized and recited in schoolrooms and public gatherings; they were America’s poets.

Poetry in the Gilded Age enjoyed an unprecedented boom, thanks largely to the rise of the leisure class. Newspapers and magazines brought poetry into America’s parlors and gave poets national profiles and a kind of celebrity. For the first time in the American experiment, a generation of poets actually made a living from their writings.

These Gilded Age poets saw poetry as a chance to reach a wide audience. Their poems shared stories that offered inspirational messages about courage or love, compassion or hard work. These poems, like wisdom literature since Antiquity, counseled easy lessons that valorized home and family, God and country, in poetic lines that delighted in following conventional prosody. They were poems that rewarded dramatic recitation. These poems—“Casey at the Bat” among them—are now considered artifacts of pop culture whose appeal was wide and deep. These poets were loved, not admired; their works read and shared rather than analyzed and studied.