The nineteenth century, up to its last quarter, had been a period of new
vistas and revolts: a period of protest and iconoclasm—the era of
Shelley and Byron, the prophets of “liberty, equality and fraternity.”
It left no immediate heirs. In England, its successors by default were
the lesser Victorians.[1] In America, the intensity and power of men
like Emerson and Whittier gave way to the pale romanticism and polite
banter of the transition, or, what might even more fittingly be called
the “post-mortem” poets. For these interim lyrists were frankly the
singers of reaction, reminiscently digging among the bones of a
long-dead past. They burrowed and borrowed, half archaeologists, half
artisans; impelled not so much by the need of creating poetry as the
desire to write it.
From 1866 to 1880 the United States was in a chaotic and frankly
materialistic condition; it was full of political scandals, panics,
frauds, malfeasance in high places. The moral fiber was flabby; the
country was apathetic, corrupt and contented. As in all such periods of
national unconcern, the artists turned from life altogether,
preoccupying themselves with the by-products of art: with method and
technique, with elaborate and artificial conceits, with facile ideas
rather than fundamental ideals. Bayard Taylor, Thomas Buchanan Read,
Richard Henry Stoddard, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Thomas Bailey Aldrich-all
of these authors, in an effort to escape a reality they could not
express and did not even wish to understand, fled to a more congenial
realm of fantasy. They took the easiest routes to a prim and academic
Arcadia, to a cloying and devitalized Orient or a mildly sensuous and
treacle-dripping Greece. In short, they followed wherever Keats, Shelley
(in his lesser lyrics) and Tennyson seemed to lead them. However, not
being explorers themselves, they ventured no further than their
predecessors, but remained politely in the rear; repeating dulcetly what
they had learned from their greater guides—pronouncing it with little
variety but with a vast and sentimental unction. In their desperate
preöccupation with lures and legends overseas, they were not, except for
the accident of birth, American at all; all of them owed much more to
old England than to New England.