Negative image: Fictions of the speaker in American poetry and poetics, 1866-1915

This dissertation articulates an untold history of the poetic speaker, a figure who has come to occupy a central, and largely ahistorical, position in critical readings of poetry. By exploring the permutations of this figure throughout a variety of texts, I argue that the speaker developed in this period as a way to anchor the racial and social fantasies of an authentically American poetry. Arising amid a matrix of discourses on the popular ballad and attendant anxieties about the social relevance of verse genres, these fantasies envisioned the fictive speaker as the representative of a lost folk community. In this way, the speaker served as the negative image of the folk, marking the perceived absence of racial groups while helping writers and readers imagine poetry's new social functions. This project complicates the normative part the speaker now plays in how we read and teach poetry.;I lay the theoretical groundwork for this study by examining the modes of ballad reading exemplified by John Greenleaf Whittier and Francis Barton Gummere. In my second chapter, I use an analysis of Paul Laurence Dunbar's Poems of Cabin and Field (1899) to show how a folk speaker developed from these ballad readings. I then follow this figure into the New Poetry, exploring how Edgar Lee Masters deployed it to imagine a new national poetics. Finally, I turn to Vachel Lindsay's Higher Vaudeville poems, tracing how the speaker supported and limited his utopian visions of poetry. By examining the development of this figure in texts that have remained outside of our standard critical narratives of this period, from historical poetic scholarship to archives of periodical reviews to first editions, I show how the speaker represented the fractures, gaps, and contradictions that attended the cultural labor of imagining national communities. Ultimately, this work highlights the crucial intersections between poetic and social thought that have been obscured by our literary histories of the period.