William Dean Howells once mused about “that great reading world with which the small writing world is so little in touch.” It is strange, once you start to think about it, how little the two worlds know about one another — or, more precisely, how little the second cares to know about the first. The libraries are full of writing about writers; there is an endless appetite for information about their childhoods, their sex lives, even the kind of pens they use. But the whole purpose of writing, the end for which it is created, is reading. Without the love and esteem of many readers, there wouldn’t be great writers in the first place.

Yet exactly what readers do with books remains a mystery. Beyond the mechanical act of turning the pages, what does reading actually involve? Is it an intellectual process or an emotional one, a matter of concentration or relaxation, a submission to the author or a commandeering of the text? Underneath such questions lies a troubling possibility writers don’t like to think about — that most of the time, reading is actually misreading. Samuel Johnson famously said that “by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices … must be finally decided all claims to poetical honours.” But the common sense of readers is a bit like the proverbial sausage factory. You don’t want to look at it too closely, for fear of what you might find.

That, at any rate, is the impression Joan Shelley Rubin leaves in “Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America” (Harvard University Press, 470 pages, $29.95). Ms. Rubin, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, focuses on just one kind of reading — the reading of poetry by Americans between 1880 and 1950. If you define it broadly enough, that category would include almost every American who ever went to school, since in the pre-television era, the memorization and recitation of verse was a common classroom exercise. But as Ms. Rubin shows, out of those millions and millions of encounters with poetry, it is hard to find even a few hundred documents of a reader’s response. Unless a reader of poetry is also a writer — a professor, a critic, a fellow poet — her reaction to what she reads remains irrecoverably private.

This means that Ms. Rubin approaches her subject like an archeologist who must reconstruct a whole civilization from a few fragments of papyrus. The best things in “Songs of Ourselves,” standing out amid Ms. Rubin’s leaden professorial prose, are the personal descriptions of poetry-reading that she unearths, often from totally unexpected places. In a collection of diaries of Baptist missionaries and ministers, for instance, we meet Isabel Crawford, born in Canada in 1865, who spent her life delivering the Good News to American Indians. Crawford read “all the poetry I could lay my eyes on,” and created her own personal anthology of poems clipped from magazines, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edgar Guest. Most of these were worthy, uplifting texts — Crawford read the Millay of “God’s World,” not the Millay of “We were very young, we were very merry” — but she was still haunted at times by the fear of frivolity. “I read so many books not worth while … that this time I’m not going to indulge,” she wrote when confined to a sickbed.

For Crawford, and other ministers and teachers Ms. Rubin writes about, the poet retained his 19th-century role as “sage” and “seer” well into the Modernist period. Ms. Rubin’s major premise is that the conventional divisions of literary history don’t have much to do with the way people actually experience poetry. In the “small writing world,” genteel, popular poets like Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier — the so-called “Fireside” poets — were objects of ridicule even before World War I. Literary historians and makers of anthologies have maintained that judgment ever since. As Ms. Rubin points out, the amount of space granted to the Fireside poets in standard anthologies of American poetry has shrunk from decade to decade.

Yet even as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens were changing the way poetry was written, in the “great reading world,” Longfellow was still king. As Ms. Rubin surveys popular anthologies from the first half of the 20th century — books with titles like “Through Magic Casements” and “The Home Book of Verse” — she finds that the canon stayed remarkably steady. Rousingly moral recitation pieces such as Leigh Hunt’s “Abou ben Adhem,” Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” and William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” turned up again and again, creating a common fund of “memory gems” that all readers of a certain generation could share. Poetry could be found in unlikely places, too: Ms Rubin points to poems in cookbooks, Girl Scout guides, even the “American Citizens Handbook” designed for new immigrants.

In fact, one of the best sections of “Songs of Ourselves” deals with the role of poetry, and especially public recitations, in the acculturation of new immigrants. To the young Mary Antin, who arrived in Boston from Russia in 1894, composing and reciting a poem for Washington’s birthday was a momentous occasion. Being able to write “our Washington,” Antin later explained in her autobiography, was a milestone in the “miracle” of her rebirth as an American. Ms. Rubin, as is de rigueur for today’s academics, remains wary of such affirmations — she is even patronizingly alert to signs of false consciousness about race, class, and gender in her subjects. But she offers enough evidence to show that, for many young immigrants, poetry was an important doorway into American culture.

Ms. Rubin leaves no doubt that poetry, during the whole of the period she studies, remained more traditional and more popular than it is today. But when readers actually spent time with poetry, what were they doing with it? Based on the meager evidence, it is not clear that they were reading the poets as the poets would want to be read. Matthew Arnold held that the ideal of reading is “to see the thing as in itself it really is.” But for most of the readers Ms. Rubin studies, poems were too charged with emotion and association to admit of such objectivity. Especially when it comes to poems memorized in childhood, the words often mattered less than the circumstances in which they were learned. Thus Ms. Rubin quotes one man who could not remember the title of the poem he recited at a school assembly, but never forgot “the look of approval on my father’s normally stern face.”

This way of using poetry — by interweaving it into the texture of a whole life, investing it with memories and emotions, recalling it at moments of joy or sorrow — may not do full justice to the poem. But it is one of the ways that poetry sustains itself as a living art. “Songs of Ourselves” suggests that, when a culture stops using poetry in this way, the people who pay the price are not the poets, who can keep on writing and thriving in relative isolation. (American poetry was certainly better in the 1920s than in the 1870s, even if far fewer people were reading it.) Rather, the damage is done to readers, who miss the chance to experience what one poetry-reader described to Ms. Rubin as “an awareness of the universal human condition (in other words, ‘I’m not alone’).”

akirsch@nysun.com