Newspaper poetry

[5] Blair argues that, despite their sometimes 'derivative' character, newspaper poems 'operate as sophisticated and often politically charged reflections upon current events, as well as upon the practice and purpose of poetry'.

[8] The average reader encountered literature through a journalistic middleman: as they do in the present day, 19th-century newspapers functioned as intermediaries between the elite world of letters and the popular audience.

[8] For poets, newspapers and other periodicals offered a more dependable source of income and a larger readership than standalone book publishing.

[13] Kirstie Blair said 'it is important to remember that the very existence of a ‘Poet’s Corner’ and the critical forum of the ‘Notices to Correspondents’, in almost every local paper across Scotland, in itself had a significant relationship to the franchise debate';[14] in 2016 she edited The Poets of the People's Journal: Newspaper Poetry in Victorian Scotland '', choosing 100 examples, whose 'concerns and interests often chime, more than we might expect, with issues still very much current in the modern day.

It has usually shared the doom of those fragile records of mundane matters, whose columns permitted it … an effort at immortality, and after having afforded a smile or a sneer to those who did throw their eyes over it, has commonly passed away … to the land where all things are forgotten.

[24] Lorang argues, noting William Cullen Bryant and John Greenleaf Whittier were known in their day as 'newspaper poets', that poetry was 'ubiquitous' in 19th-century American newspapers.

[23] Another popular American poet who began his career in newspapers (after being rejected from more elevated venues such as Scribner's Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly) was James Whitcomb Riley.

[30] Stein argues that the development of modernism following World War I heralded the demise of newspaper poetry's 'bourgeois … sensibility'.

T. Cholmondeley Frink, a character in Babbitt, a satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis, has a syndicated poetry column: Frink, Sinclair writes, 'was not only the author of "Poemulations," which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world, but also an optimistic lecturer and the creator of "Ads that Add"'.