SOURCE: “Science and the Reception of Poetry in Postbellum American Journals,” in American Periodicals, Vol. 4, 1994, pp. 24-46.

In the following essay, Cooper traces the influence of the scientific theories of evolution and determinism on nineteenth-century poetry, explaining that the period was one of extensive experimentation in the subject matter and form of verse.

In 1870, the editor of Putnam's Magazine wrote an essay titled “Poetry Not Dead” (P 5 4/70 505).¹ In it, he argued against claims that our society no longer had any use for poetry that strives to uplift and edify. Notwithstanding his defense, the sentimental poetry he aspired to save for the most part died and was replaced in the twentieth century by a more skeptical, less unified and moralistic verse. Our literary histories seem to assert by relative indifference to the postbellum period that this new poetry sprang unheralded and fully developed in the 1890s.² But research into...