J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

________

Historically informed auditors could have understood the chaplain's reference to "The Present Crisis" as addressing the politics of the impeachment trial and all that led up to it.⁶ Lowell opposed the annexation of Texas primarily because it extended the territory of slavery in the United States and expanded the power of the proslavery interest in Congress. He probably objected to President John Tyler's pursuit of annexation as a means to gain popular support. Additionally, given the uncertainty of the Texas border, he may have worried about a war with [End Page 150] Mexico. The issues that concerned Lowell—expansion of the proslavery interest, abuse of presidential authority, and uncertainty over US relations with Mexico—thus resonate with three obsessions of Trump's political base: white supremacy, unchecked executive power, and border security.

Yet Chaplain Black takes very seriously his charge to provide nonpartisan guidance to all senators.⁷ He did not have the poem's original occasion in mind as he addressed the Senate. Rather, he drew these lines from a vast reservoir of poems and hymns that he has memorized, beginning during his childhood in Baltimore when he spent summers reading in the public library. He believed that these lines, which had been quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. and others before him, were appropriate to address some senators' "ethical obtuseness" on the occasion of the trial.⁸ Unlike Black, the numerous others who evoked "The Present Crisis" to address various present crises did not labor under the constraint of nonpartisanship—rather the reverse, in most cases. Like Black, however, these other speakers and writers seldom depended on the poem's original reference to the annexation of Texas. After the Civil War, this reference became virtually invisible while the poem retained its moral force in public discourse.

Those who took up "The Present Crisis" on public occasions did not engage in historical interpretation, as I did by bringing the poem's original context to the case against Trump. Rather, they used Lowell's lines, bearing the cultural capital and aesthetic appeal of literary language, for instrumental ends. They did so through the use of excerpts, a practice that bears further examination. Of course, poetry is not the only source of such excerpts. Biblical quotation functions similarly and shares with the literary excerpt the purpose of bringing authority from another domain into a present situation. In some cases, these two kinds of quotation may verge into one another, as in the chaplain's opening prayer for the second day of the impeachment trial, when he called on God to "use [the senators] to cause justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."⁹ Although the quotation's origin is biblical (Amos 5:24), most of the audience probably heard it as an echo of King, specifically his "I Have a Dream" speech.¹⁰ Poetic quotation thus calls attention to a key feature of literary excerpts: they are memorable phrases that elicit aesthetic response. Many biblical quotations share that quality. The excerpt generally gains its authority through the name of the author under which it circulates (in the case of the Bible, the ultimate author)—at least until it becomes an aphorism or a cliché [End Page 151] (we have forgotten, for example, that a cloud's silver lining originated in Milton's Comus).

The excerpt may be considered a distinct genre, instances of which are constituted through repetition in print, public speech, and other media. From the perspective of literary taxonomy, the excerpt may not look like a genre, for no one sets out to write an excerpt as they would a prayer, a speech, a short story, or a Romantic fragment poem.¹¹ On these terms, we may not see the inscribing of an excerpt as creating something new—unless we are reminded of Derrida's point that "iteration alters, something new takes place."¹² If we think more dynamically in terms of rhetorical genre studies (RGS), which casts genres as types of communicative actions that constitute recurrent social situations, we can see that the excerpt functions as a means for a writer or speaker to bring the cultural authority of the literary domain into nonliterary or marginally literary domains such as the US Senate, a church service, or a newspaper. For the moment, I would like to assume a rough-and-ready distinction whereby speeches, prayers, and newspaper reports are nonliterary and poems are literary. There will always be borderline cases, as for example King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which has in effect become literary in its own right and thus a source of excerpts. Such borderline cases do not, however, change the excerpt's genre function of bringing cultural authority from one domain to another.

RGS is oriented toward pragmatics, whereas literary genre theory has been primarily oriented toward taxonomy or hermeneutics. Hans Robert Jauss, for example, theorized "a historical systematics" of literary taxonomy in which genres serve as indexes of "historically distant cultures and life-worlds" as revealed in horizons of readerly expectations.¹³ More broadly, Alastair Fowler's thoroughgoing taxonomic approach to literary genre turned, in the conclusion, to the matter of interpretation.¹⁴ Mary Poovey's more recent exploration of the social function of genres focuses on hierarchies of prestige rather than communicative action.¹⁵ Some theorists of literary genre, however, have moved in the direction of pragmatics.¹⁶ For Thomas Beebee, "a texts's genre is its use-value," that is, its capacity for particular compensatory satisfactions such as the Trauerspiel's glimpse of the possibility of redemption in godless modernity.¹⁷ Janice Radway finds that readers experience the romance genre as a "compensatory literature" that offers "an important emotional release that is proscribed in daily life."¹⁸ Such explorations of pragmatics remain primarily concerned with the meanings [End Page 152] of literary texts and genres, however. RGS, by contrast, is concerned less with meaning than with use.

RGS understands all genres, literary and nonliterary, as forms of social action, to borrow the title of a frequently cited essay by Carolyn Miller.¹⁹ From this perspective, genres are understood as "types of rhetorical actions that people perform in their everyday interactions with their worlds"—actions that can include, but are by no means limited to, writing and reading literary texts.²⁰ Where Foucault posited the author function as structuring the organization and circulation of literary texts, Anis Bawarshi proposes the genre function as a subsuming category that structures literary and nonliterary kinds of social action.²¹ RGS has thus come to focus less on genres in themselves and more on the "interconnections, translations, and pathways between genres" as they are taken up to enable and structure social actions.²² The chaplain made one such pathway explicit in moving from prayer to poetic excerpt and back again to prayer: he posited that "the New England poet James Russell Lowell" (emphasis added) has ongoing cultural value and retains the capacity to bring "perspective" to the impeachment trial. Yet in choosing those particular lines from "The Present Crisis," the chaplain also gestured toward an implicit, well-trodden pathway through the history of progressive activism. These two pathways converged in the moment at hand, as the chaplain imported a literary genre into a nonliterary genre, poem into opening prayer. The first pathway (the ongoing cultural value of old-canon New England poetry), but not the second (a history of progressive activism), was evident on another occasion during the trial itself, when Trump's defense counsel David Schoen quoted the last thirty-five lines of Longfellow's 1849 poem "The Building of the Ship" in a summary speech.²³ While Schoen's quotation of Longfellow is not without interest as an example of the excerpt genre—the poem circulated prominently during the Civil War era—Black's quotation of Lowell opens onto a history that seems more pertinent to our present crises.²⁴

Since we know that nonliterary domains such as the US Senate, a newspaper, or a church service are constituted by familiar genres such as speeches, news reports, or sermons, we might ask why the excerpt should count as a genre in itself, rather than as an optional feature of these and other constituting genres. Here we might consider Mikhail Bakhtin's account of the relation of primary or simple genres to more complex, secondary genres such as the novel.²⁵ Refining Bakhtin's approach, Anne Freadman construes speech acts as genres that function [End Page 153] by signaling intertextual memory: genres come into being in the interactions between texts, as in the interaction between the chaplain's prayer and Lowell's poem.²⁶ That interaction, while unique, took place in a typical and repeated rhetorical situation: invocations that open institutional proceedings. In this rhetorical situation, quoting a literary excerpt is a frequent but not a required practice. Thus prayers, speeches, sermons, news stories, and the like, while perhaps not as complex as novels (in Bakhtin's understanding, at any rate), are similarly secondary genres composed of primary genres such as quotation, exhortation, reportage, witness, explication, and so on. In terms of Bakhtin's scheme, the excerpt functions at the primary level in relation to secondary or complex genres.

I would thus characterize the literary excerpt genre not primarily in terms of formal features, as taxonomic or hermeneutic accounts of genre would do, but rather in terms of purposes. In bringing memorable bits of language into nonliterary domains, the literary excerpt enables two purposes. One is to bring external authority to affirm the writer or speaker's point and give it additional value. Another purpose is to participate in a tradition through repetition. I might have accomplished the first purpose by quoting Emily Dickinson in a conversation with my mother about why I'd rather walk in the woods than go to church: as the nature-loving poet said, "instead of getting to Heaven, at last – / I'm going, all along."²⁷ Although my mother did not read much poetry, she would have recognized Dickinson's name if I had mentioned it. In any case, the alliterative, contrastive play of "getting" and "going" would have added an aesthetic dimension to my prosaic explanation. But I would not have accomplished the second purpose, because I did not take up an earlier use of this excerpt to account for someone's Sunday behavior.²⁸ A series of such uptakes, to borrow a term from speech-act theory, would accomplish the second purpose, fulfilling the public potential of the literary excerpt genre.²⁹ While every excerpt has the potential to be taken up in turn by others in similar rhetorical situations, only a small number do in fact get taken up repeatedly, thus creating an excerpt as a familiar quotation. Such series of uptakes can be traced, to a much greater extent than previously possible, through full-text databases as well as hard-copy sources.³⁰

________

Although Lowell had been writing prose pieces regularly for abolitionist newspapers such as the Liberty Bell, the National Anti-slavery [End Page 154] Standard, and the Pennsylvania Freeman, he sent "The Present Crisis" to a more mainstream Whig newspaper, the Boston Courier, presumably to reach a broader audience interested in issues beyond slavery, such as executive and congressional power and the shape of the US territories.³¹ Even so, the poem first circulated prominently among abolitionists, who found memorable not only its message but also its meter (as I will discuss later).³² Theodore Parker quoted a stanza to conclude his remarks at an 1850 rally against Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, who had recently given a speech supporting the compromise bills concerning the extension of slavery in territory acquired by the Mexican War, among which was the Fugitive Slave Act.³³ William Lloyd Garrison interwove five stanzas from the poem, including the lines quoted by Black, in an 1847 essay on "the Spirit of Reform" that he saw sweeping the age.³⁴ Garrison closed with Lowell's concluding stanza, which revised what he took to be New England's complacency regarding its Puritan heritage. "New occasions teach new duties," affirmed Garrison quoting Lowell:

… we ourselves must Pilgrims be,Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate    winter sea,Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted    key."³⁵

Beyond New England, however, other lines resonated more forcefully, while remaining attached to Lowell's prestige as a man of letters.³⁶ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., another now de-canonized poet, once advised Lowell that "when the school-children learn your verses they are good for another half century."³⁷ "The Present Crisis" appeared in collections of best-loved poems into the twentieth century, although less often in anthologies assembled by noted critics.³⁸ While it did not feature as prominently in school recitation culture as did Lowell's medievalist moral vehicle "The Vision of Sir Launfal," it was excerpted in some recitation and school program books.³⁹ Yet unlike many schoolroom standards such as Longfellow's "Psalm of Life" or Song of Hiawatha, "The Present Crisis" was not subject to parody.⁴⁰ In 1932, Mary White Ovington cited the ostensible decline of school recitation culture as a rationale for including a stanza from the poem in a reflection on the naming of the Crisis in 1910—the same stanza from which the chaplain drew his quotation: [End Page 155]

Every schoolboy ought to know this poem with its last verse, starting, "New occasions teach new duties." But as, probably, not one in a million does, I give the verse which we quoted when the magazine was named:

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, on [sic] the good or evil    side;Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the    bloom or blight,Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the    right,And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that    light.⁴¹

It seems likely that in that moment, the magazine's founding editor, W. E. B. Du Bois, would have remembered that he had used another quotation from "The Present Crisis" as an epigraph to chapter 2 of The Souls of Black Folk (as I will discuss later).

The first two lines of the stanza quoted by Ovington was one of two excerpts from "The Present Crisis" that circulated widely during the nineteenth century and beyond. The inclusion of this stanza in the seventh edition of John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations confirmed its cultural prominence by 1879.⁴² The lines were taken up, sometimes with additional stanzas from the poem, by suffragists, socialists, labor activists, temperance crusaders, US anti-imperialists, and Irish revolutionaries, among others.⁴³ In the latter case, the Irish Free State minister for home affairs Austin Stack used the lines to conclude his argument against signing the 1921 peace treaty that retained Ireland as a dominion of Great Britain (the ratification of which would lead to civil war): "If you don't believe it in your hearts, vote against it. To-day or to-morrow will be, I think, the most fateful days in Irish history. I will conclude by quoting two of Russell Lowell's lines:—'Once to every man and nation comes a [sic] moment to decide, / In the strife 'twixt truth and falsehood for the good or evil side' / (Applause)."⁴⁴ Stack invoked these lines as a means of moral and political introspection, eliciting action according to one's "heart." With the possible exception of Americans arguing against the forcible annexation of the Philippines, none of these activists thought about, probably did not even know, Lowell's original purpose of protesting the US annexation of Texas—not even Stack, who used his words to resist another form of imperialism.⁴⁵ Rather, [End Page 156] they tapped the excerpt's genre function, counting on these rhythmic lines, invoking powerful abstractions, and bearing the cultural capital of literary language as signaled by Lowell's name to ennoble their causes through the condensation of argument—whatever the argument was—into a call for action.⁴⁶

Bartlett printed another excerpt from "The Present Crisis" in the third (1858) edition of Familiar Quotations: a single line from the eighth stanza, "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne."⁴⁷ Quoted somewhat less frequently overall, this line circulated among some of the reform interests that found inspiration in "Once to every man and nation."⁴⁸ The line was taken up prominently by African American activists beginning in the late nineteenth century.⁴⁹ While "Truth forever on the scaffold" might have invited an audience to fill in Lowell's abstract image with a scene of lynching, the second half of the line speaks more generally to a pervasive experience of injustice: "Wrong forever on the throne." The line is not a call to action like "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide" but a statement of witness.

Du Bois used it as such, printing the entire eighth stanza, identified by Lowell's name, as an epigraph to chapter 2 of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which tallies the successes and failures of the Freedmen's Bureau:

Careless seems the great Avenger;    History's lessons but recordOne death-grapple in the darkness    'Twixt old systems and the Word;Truth forever on the scaffold,    Wrong forever on the throne;Yet that scaffold sways the future,    And behind the dim unknownStandeth God within the shadow    Keeping watch above His own.

Lowell⁵⁰

Du Bois lined the stanza as a song or hymn rather than using the original's long lines, perhaps for greater musical resonance with the chapter's second epigraph, a few bars from the score of the Sorrow Song "My Lord, What a Mourning!"⁵¹ Chapter 2 was originally published as an essay in the Atlantic Monthly without any epigraph.⁵² Attaching both poetic [End Page 157] and musical epigraphs as he collected previously published historical or sociological essays in Souls, Du Bois developed an antiphonal structure, as Eric Sundquist has argued.⁵³ In each chapter's epigraphs, except for the last, the collective voice of enslaved Blacks, as manifest in a Sorrow Song, responds to the individual voice of a white American or British poet. In the last chapter, on the Sorrow Songs, the position of poet is occupied by "Negro Song," in effect naming the collective Black voice as an author on par with the English canon.⁵⁴ Thus the antiphonies throughout the book among poetic excerpt, song excerpt, and prose essay recapitulate Du Bois's complex authorial position, established in the "Forethought" to Souls, as a Harvard- and Berlin-trained sociologist who "ha[s] stepped within the Veil" of Black life—as registered, for example, by the Sorrow Songs—yet retains the authority of a writer who knows the English poetic canon and publishes in the Atlantic, the Dial, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.⁵⁵ In the case of chapter 2, the apocalyptic narrative of "My Lord, What a Mourning," with its vision of the biblical resurrection, responds to the gradualist message of Lowell's stanza on "History's lessons," which posits an avenging God keeping watch in the distance. As Du Bois demonstrates, Reconstruction promised a resurrection but did not fulfill its promise. Even so, the chosen stanza from Lowell is consistent with the long-term hope that Du Bois found in all the Sorrow Songs: "faith in the ultimate justice of things … sometime, somewhere."⁵⁶ On this point, poem and song would seem to speak in unison.

Thus, the poem was taken up on numerous occasions in the Black press beginning in the 1920s.⁵⁷ For example, a 1923 editorial in the Chicago Defender, protesting segregation in the Harvard University dormitories, addressed Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, noting his kinship with James Russell Lowell, to say, "Wendell Phillips, first American orator after Douglass, moved your country with that Lowell verse that goes so: 'Truth forever on the scaffold; / Wrong forever on the throne.'"⁵⁸ In 1958, the Norfolk (Va) New Journal and Guide employed the excerpt more broadly in a warning regarding police departments' extrajudicial means of enforcing segregation. The piece used short lines, as printed by Du Bois, to conclude on hopeful note: [End Page 158]

Time is always on the side of the just, or those who seek justice at the hands of the law.

"Truth forever on the scaffold,        Wrong forever on the throne;Yet that scaffold sways the future,        And beyond [sic] the dim unknownStandeth God within the shadows [sic]        Keeping watch above His own."⁵⁹

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, these two widely circulated excerpts were brought together in another genre: a hymn, "Once to Every Man and Nation," with Lowell's name attached as author. The poem's meter, as well as its message, invited such adaptation—and as we have seen, some quotations had already broken each of Lowell's long lines into two short lines. In terms of conventional foot prosody, the poem's meter could be described as trochaic heptameter with an amphimacer substitution in the final foot.⁶⁰ Yet it seems likely that Lowell wrote the lines not by counting obscure metrical substitutions but rather by feeling a meter that was familiar from his Sundays at Boston's West Church, where his father was pastor. The hymn meter 8.7.8.7, typically rhymed abcb, maps perfectly onto the couplet of fifteen-syllable lines that opens each stanza of "The Present Crisis."⁶¹ A distinct caesura after the eighth syllable in most lines reinforces the feeling of 8.7.8.7 hymn meter. While the triplet that concludes each stanza of Low-ell's original is preserved in some hymn adaptations, most cut a line or splice lines to produce stanzas of two quatrains rhymed abcbdefe. Often the stanza that contains "Truth forever on the scaffold" begins with a line from another stanza of Lowell's poem, "Though the cause of evil prosper, / Yet 'tis truth alone is strong."⁶²

First adapted in various versions by activists, a standard version eventually found its way into the hymnals of many denominations.⁶³ The first print record of the hymn adaptation was by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1892. This version begins with "Once to every man and nation," but for the second and final stanza opts not for "Truth forever on the scaffold" but rather for Lowell's final stanza, with its Pilgrim and Mayflower imagery, which had appealed to New England abolitionists.⁶⁴ The version in the Christian socialist Labour Church Hymn & Tune Book (1912) omits the New England imagery but includes "Once to every man and nation," "Careless seems the great Avenger," and "Truth forever on the scaffold" among its five stanzas.⁶⁵ [End Page 159] This is the pattern of most subsequent hymn adaptations, some later versions opting for the gender-neutral "Once to every soul and nation." It is quite possible that "Once to Every Man and Nation" was sung in Black churches in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, although the limited evidence available through Archive.org and Hymnary.org does not confirm this.⁶⁶ In any case, as musical settings of the poem became widely disseminated, they evidently became popular enough to be performed outside of church as well, for example, in a college benefit concert given by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1960.⁶⁷

Whether he knew it first as a poem or as a hymn, Martin Luther King Jr. quoted frequently from "The Present Crisis"—more frequently than from any other poem.⁶⁸ King's first recorded excerpting of the poem was in a term paper for a philosophy of religion class at Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951. Here King's unattributed paraphrase, rather than direct quotation, suggests the free circulation of the excerpt: "Jesus on a cross and Caesar in a places [sic]; truth on the scaffold and wrong on the throne."⁶⁹ Subsequently, however, King always attributed the excerpts to Lowell. Often he often used the affirmative continuation of the stanza, sometimes altering the original lineation to indicate a shift in rhythm, as in the following example, which pauses for emphasis on "God":

Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne,Yet that scaffold sways the futureand behind the dim unknown stands GodWithin the shadow keeping watch above his own.⁷⁰

In other instances, he quoted Lowell's long lines directly.⁷¹ King used "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne" together with excerpts from William Cullen Bryant's 1839 poem "The Battle-Field"—"Truth crushed to the earth will rise again"—and Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution—"No lie can live forever"—to inspire hope.⁷² For example, these excerpts in sequence set up King's memorable line, "the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," a line that has itself been excerpted on occasion.⁷³ King's affirmation here echoes the hope that Du Bois heard in both Lowell's poem and the Sorrow Songs.

By 1967, however, King was joining the moral affirmation of "Truth forever on the scaffold" to the call to action voiced in "Once to every man and nation." For example, he concluded his address to the Clergy [End Page 160] and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam at New York's Riverside Church with two stanzas from the hymn version:

The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment in human history. As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation …Though the cause of evil prosper …⁷⁴

In the service at which King preached his last Sunday sermon, at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, the congregation sang "Once to Every Man and Nation," and his sermon text echoed the hymn text.⁷⁵ Lowell's poem thus became an important component of King's call to action.⁷⁶

________

Chaplain Black knows "The Present Crisis" in several ways. It was among the many poems that he memorized as a child from collections of best-loved poems and similar volumes. He knows the hymn version and can sing it from memory. He also knows some of the history of prior quotation by King and other activists that I have discussed here.⁷⁷ Of the two widely circulated excerpts, "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne" would have been too pointed for the occasion of the impeachment trial and Black's duties as Senate chaplain, whereas on the face of it, apart from its circulation history, "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide" reads as politically neutral, except for the gender bias that is reflected in the Senate's roster. While the poem in its original context can teach a historical lesson that speaks to Trump's presidency, that was not the chaplain's intent—nor was such a lesson heard by most of the audience. Rather, the key to the excerpt's resonance is its genre function. This genre function consists of two features, the excerpt's capacity to bring literary authority to public domains and its capacity to evoke a tradition of prior citation. In this second capacity, an excerpt gradually takes on a fuller identity as a familiar quotation as it is repeatedly taken up. Garrison's 1847 excerpting of the New England-exceptionalist lines from "The Present Crisis" gained only minimal uptake, as we have seen. "Truth forever on the scaffold" and "Once to every man and nation" enjoyed much more frequent uptake, and it was the latter excerpt that the Senate chaplain found appropriate to the occasion of the impeachment trial. [End Page 161]

These two widely circulated excerpts remained available from 1845 to the present for speakers or writers as they addressed various crises for three reasons. Lowell's name as a man of letters originally invited the circulation of his poetry as a form of cultural capital in nonliterary as well as literary domains, adding value to arguments and exhortations. Particular lines from "The Present Crisis" were taken up for their memorable, abstract imagery and resonant language. The poem's satisfying rhythm and rhyme scheme—its familiarity as 8.7.8.7 hymn meter even before it was adapted as a hymn, as I have suggested—moved speakers or writers to repeat it. Chaplain Black's own language was drawn, for one line, into this rhythm. After the invocation following the quotation, he asks, "Could it really be that simple? Could it really be just truth?" Although metered language soon gives way to prosaic speech, for these fifteen syllables we feel a continuation of Low-ell's poetic lines and may be moved to google their source.

Although English majors may be more likely than others to undertake such a Google search, it does not require any training in literary study. "The Present Crisis" in itself would seem to offer little to academic readers. While there may be an aesthetics in all things, as Samuel Otter argues following Melville, to date no critic has found it worthwhile to do an extended reading of the poem.⁷⁸ Its stanzas are somatically pleasing, but the overall form is not especially complex and does not invite explication. Its relation to its original historical context is easily excavated. Its place in Lowell's career hardly matters after his fall from the canon. A critique of the poem's New England- or American-exceptionalist conclusion, with its Mayflower imagery, would be all too predictable. The poem becomes more interesting in its uses than in itself.

Attending to those uses by approaching the genre of the literary excerpt from the direction of pragmatics rather than taxonomy or hermeneutics is a means of bringing the question of instrumentality (back) to literariness. Far from Kantian purposiveness without purpose, "The Present Crisis" was written and published purposefully—in this case, to comment on governmental affairs—as was a great deal of poetry during the nineteenth century, including Longfellow's "The Building of the Ship." It was meant to move readers through imagery, rhythm, and rhyme to act. While the writers and speakers I have discussed used lines from the poem for aesthetic reasons, they did so in hopes of making something happen in the world. [End Page 162]

Such considerations of instrumentalism thus enable me to refine the distinction between literary and nonliterary domains and genres that I assumed in my introduction. We might characterize the excerpt genre as neither literary nor nonliterary but rather paraliterary, although not quite in the sense in which Merve Emre has recently used the term. For it is not a matter of literary versus nonliterary readings of literary texts, as these modes of reading have come to be differentiated following the consolidation of academic literary study in the mid-twentieth century.⁷⁹ Rather, as we have seen, the history of excerpting long antedates academic literary study and taps into poetry's capacity for aesthetic effects and its value as cultural capital.

The aesthetic effect of the poetic extracts that King quoted evidently mattered to him, for he otherwise made his points eloquently in his own style. The extracts' value as cultural capital evidently mattered as well, or King would not have bothered to retain the attribution to "that noble bard."⁸⁰ In this question of attribution, the literary excerpt may verge into another similar paraliterary genre, the allusion. When Black remarked, in another opening prayer, on the protests following the killing of George Floyd, he alluded to Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem" but did not name the author or title. "We weep," the chaplain explained, "because of the explosive impact of deferred dreams."⁸¹ Whereas a fully marked literary excerpt retains its author's name, an allusion does not—and depends on this absence for part of its effect, the audience's knowing recognition. Allusions may, as they circulate widely, turn into clichés shorn of authorial attribution, as in "marching to the beat of a different drummer" (originally Thoreau) or they may retain their original authority—even if, as in the case of King's quotation of Amos 5:24, the authority most readily recognized is that of the popularizer rather than the originator of the phrase. All such genres are paraliterary insofar as they evoke literariness even as they are deployed for instrumental ends in nonliterary genres such as abolitionist tracts (Garrison and Parker), historical and sociological analyses (Du Bois), journalism (the Crisis, the Chicago Defender), speeches (some of which may come to be considered literary in themselves, such as King's), and so on. In the circulation histories I have traced, chaplain Black takes his place as one reader/speaker among many who have taken up a memorable excerpt and kept it before the public. [End Page 163]