Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917

UU World: The Magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Spring 2006

Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917. Angela Sorby. Univ. of New Hampshire Press, 2005; $24.95. This scholarly volume examines recitation of poetry in American schoolrooms and its effects on mass culture, community, notions of childhood, and pedagogy between the Civil War and the First World War.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Emily Dickinson are major subjects. Sorby is an assistant professor of English at Marquette University and a member of the First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.