Rhapsodists and the Rat Race

This is a response to Rustykeloid's mention of American readers and writers in the time of Longfellow. R. cites Morse's description of literature as something of a "diversion" for most Americans in a time where there was "no cultural space for literature." The few who still craved that cultural space turned to the romantic poets to escape "the hurly-burly of American life." R. questions the ability of romantic poetry to appeal to the larger readership and implies that, due to the small profits earned by writers in those days, poets like Longfellow weren't in it for the money. I would like to offer an additional reason why Longfellow and others were nudged out of popular culture: modernity. Elizabeth S. Goodstein, in her 2005 book "Experience without Qualities," writes "modernization literally altered the quality of human being in time." She goes on to say that boredom, a byproduct of modernity, "epitomizes the dilemma of the autonomous modern subject" resulting in a climate of disillusionment wherein "history and religion can no longer anchor identity in the fabric of collective meaning." Goodstein later ties in the emergence of leisure culture. As trades industrualized and the pace of life sped up due to advancements in transportation, Americans found they had more time on their hands. Yet the stresses of this accelerated world resulted in ennui, "a manifestation of fatigue and mental deterioration."


Train travel is a perfect metaphor for this manifestation. The speed of a train makes it quite impossible to observe nearby nature (the microcosm) without feeling dizzy but when one focuses on the distance (the macrocosm) it appears fixed and unmoving - terminally boring. This modern way of moving "demand[ed] a level of generalized attention that [could] only be sustained at the cost of the perception of particulars." Turning from the windows to books, American readers demanded literature that was not taxing and therefore we find an infusion of middleclass novels read only to pass the time and provide mindless entertainment during cross country travel. The pace and depth of work by writers such as Longfellow did not provide the correct escape much in the way that we today are more apt to watch television rather than a complex and perhaps more demanding film to wind down.

Goodstein, Elizabeth S. Experience without Qualities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2005. (photocopied excerpt - page numbers unavailable)