The Song of Hiawatha, Snow-Bound, "Barefoot Boy," "Rock Me to Sleep," "It Snows," and others were part of the schoolroom canon, poems learned by rote, a tradition that went beyond the classroom that brought poetry to the mass culture's everyday. Angela Sorby's Schoolroom Poets traces how popular poems accrued cultural power through repetition; as they circulated and established bonds between individuals, institutions, and the nation.

The schoolroom canon presents work that most Americans educated in the United States between 1865 and 1917 (and well into the twentieth century) would recognize. From a cultural studies perspective, these poems are key because they circulated so widely: never before or since have so many ordinary Americans known so much poetry and much of it by heart. Sorby approaches the schoolroom canon through its readers, discovering how people encountered schoolroom poetry and how the terms of its social transmission affected its meaning.