Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America
Mike Chasar
Abstract
This book casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers and shows how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century helped set the stage for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today. The book draws on a diverse range of unconventional sources, including poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives and Hallmark greeting cards. It argues that poetry, in the first half of the twentieth century, was part and parcel of American popular culture, and that it spread rapidly at that ti ... More
This book casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers and shows how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century helped set the stage for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today. The book draws on a diverse range of unconventional sources, including poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives and Hallmark greeting cards. It argues that poetry, in the first half of the twentieth century, was part and parcel of American popular culture, and that it spread rapidly at that time as the consumer economy expanded and companies exploited its profit-making potential. The book also shows how poetry offered ordinary Americans creative, emotional, political and intellectual modes of expression, whether through scrapbooking, participation in radio programs or poetry contests. Re-envisioning the uses of twentieth-century poetry, the book provides the reader with a better understanding of the innovations of modernist and avant-garde poets and the American reading public's sophisticated powers of feeling and perception.
Keywords:
American poetry,
old-time radio,
Hallmark greeting cards,
popular culture,
scrapbooking,
modernist poets,
avant-garde poets
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231158657 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231158657.001.0001 |
