PREFACE
_The Civil War—and After_
The end of the Civil War marked the end of a literary epoch. The New
England group, containing (if Poe could be added) all the great names of
the ante-bellum period, began to disintegrate. The poets had outsung
themselves; it was a time of surrender and swansongs. Unable to respond
to the new forces of political nationalism and industrial
reconstruction, the Brahmins (that famous group of intellectuals who
dominated literary America) withdrew into their libraries. Poets like
Longfellow, Bryant, Taylor, turned their eyes away from the native
scene, rhapsodized endlessly about Europe, echoed the “parlor poetry” of
England, or left creative writing altogether and occupied themselves
with translations. “They had been borne into an era in which they had no
part,” writes Fred Lewis Pattee (_A History of American Literature Since
1870_), “and they contented themselves with reëchoings of the old
music.” ... Within a single period of six years, from 1867 to 1872,
there appeared Longfellow’s _Divina Commedia_, C. E. Norton’s _Vita
Nuova_, T. W. Parson’s _Inferno_, William Cullen Bryant’s _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_, and Bayard Taylor’s _Faust_.
Suddenly the break came. America developed a national consciousness; the
West discovered itself, and the East discovered the West. Grudgingly at
first, the aristocratic leaders made way for a new expression; crude,
jangling, vigorously democratic. The old order was changing with a
vengeance. All the preceding writers—poets like Emerson, Thoreau,
Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes—were not only products of the New England
colleges, but typically “Boston gentlemen of the early Renaissance.” To
them the new men must have seemed like a regiment recruited from the
ranks of vulgarity. Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, John Hay,
Joaquin Miller, Joel Chandler Harris, James Whitcomb Riley—these were
men who had graduated from the farm, the frontier, the mine, the
pilot-house, the printer’s shop! For a while, the movement seemed of
little consequence; the impact of Whitman and the Westerners was
averted. The poets of the transition, with a deliberate art, ignored the
surge of a spontaneous national expression. They were even successful in
holding it back. But it was gathering force.