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Reality Categories in Periodical Poems

One of the larger questions hovering over scholarship in American literary realism is how certain orders of experience came to count as “real,” and, crucially, as opposed to what. Yet, ironically, most scholarship on realism has not “counted” poems as part of the evolving discourse of realism. Periodical poems about reality categories are in fact extremely common in print culture after 1866. This chapter traces the larger dialogic scene in which poems articulate an array of emergent realist and idealist positions as antitheses. Individual poems work out (or take confused sides in) these larger debates about reality categories as philosophical concepts, as artistic concepts, and as both pertain to the sphere of “poetry” in particular. The meanings of these poems are social ones, arising in public scenes of conversation, dispute, and debate.