Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry

This book confronts an enduring investment in the poetic vocation. It seeks to challenge a dominant cultural logic that frames contingent labor as a sacrifice that frustrates the righteous progress towards realizing that seemingly purest of callings: Poet. Incorporating the often overlooked or excluded workaday ephemera of three canonical U.S. Romantic poets—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Hart Crane—it offers new archival insights that call for a re-examination of celebrated literary careers and questions their status as affirmatory icons of vocation. The poetry of Whitman the real estate dealer, Melville the customs inspector, and Crane the copywriter, does not constitute the formal inscription of a discrete poetic labor struggling against quotidian work towards the fulfilment of an exceptional individual career. Instead, the distracted forms of their poetry are always already intermingled with a variety of apparently lesser labors. Ousting poetic production from any sanctuary of privileged repose or transcendent focus, this book refigures the work of the poet as a living sensuous activity that transgresses labor’s conventional divisions and hierarchies. It consequently recasts the poet as a figure who unfastens and reimagines the “right of passage” vocational logic that does so much to reproduce the current political and economic paradigm.