Chapter 20 - Dialect, Doggerel, and Local Color

Summary

American popular poetry often fuses local color with dialect and doggerel. It is marked by several distinguishing characteristics. The authors address a popular audience, focusing their work on unique characters, local scenes, specific events and social issues, sometimes with an emphasis on social or political satire. Popular poetry often exemplifies the qualities associated with literary realism. The new popular tradition was born in the common regions of American life, both agrarian and urban, using language and images that were simple, earthy, local, and comic. Bret Harte's poems show local characters engaged in trivial cheating, card playing or aping their betters. His treatment of Truthful James and the Heathen Chinee is slightly more satirical than Hay's style. An epic impulse is at the foundation of much American writing, both serious and comic. Native Americans played an important role in the development of poems with characteristically American themes.