1817, president, of Yale College, in 1785 brought forth a Biblical epic
entitled “The Conquest of Canaan,” in which the narrative of Exodus is
diversified by allusions to heroes in the American War of Independence,
and by a tale of romantic love superadded. Dwight was a diligent
reader of Pope and Goldsmith, but he did not confine his interest
to the eighteenth century; he knew the enchantment of the poets’
poet, Spenser; and like Thomson he could at times, as in “Greenfield
Hill,” look with his own eyes at things about him. He was a friend
of Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow; on occasion he penned a bitter
invective. But as a writer he will be remembered for his noble hymn,
whose second stanza commences,
I love Thy Church, O God,
which is the key-note of his life.
Trumbull, though he lived to a great age (1750-1831), had completed his
remarkable mock-heroic, “M’Fingal,” prior to 1784; hence at this point
he interests us chiefly on account of his friendship with Dwight and
Barlow, and his effect on later satirists.
With Freneau the case is different. Some of his choicest verse did not
appear until 1786, when he published a collection containing “The House
of Night”; and in 1795 he brought together in another collection what
he apparently considered best in his output for twenty-five years or
more preceding. This was very uneven, including much that might better
have been left unprinted, and other work which stamps Freneau as the
one American of true poetical genius before 1800. He was not unaware
of his powers, and aimed to develop them by frequent perusal of good
models in ancient and modern literature; but he was not sufficiently
self-critical. He prolonged a career of travel and rapid composition,
in both poetry and prose, beyond the normal span of life, making
still another collection of his works in 1815. His latter years were
darkened by the thought that he was being unwarrantably neglected for
men of lesser talent. A man of great bodily vigour, he was meditating
yet another, a final, edition of his writings, when he came to his
unfortunate end. In 1832 he lost his way as he was returning home
through a snow-storm, and died from exposure. His once maligned
personality has of late been duly vindicated, and his work has received
generous praise. It is claimed that Scott and Campbell were content to
borrow lines from him. Furthermore, he has been deemed a co-worker with
Coleridge and Wordsworth in bringing about in literature the so-called
“return to nature.” The parallel might easily be carried too far.
Until literary scholarship has broadened and deepened its knowledge of
the entire period in which Freneau was active, neither the worth of
his poetry nor the possible extent of his influence can be judicially
determined. There can be no question that such poems as “The Wild
Honeysuckle,” “The Hurricane,” “The Dying Indian,” and “Eutaw Springs”
have more than a transitory value. However, it is by his satirical
verse that Freneau might seem more likely to persist; for the nature
of satire tolerates in some measure a free and easy style such as he
developed.
_Early Minor Poets._--Of the minor poetry prior to 1815 there is
little to be said by way of praise. We see in it how the influence of
Akenside and other English didactic writers of a previous age gives
ground before the newer spirit of Wordsworth and Coleridge; although
the satires of the Revolution had a lineage, in Paine and others, that
did not quickly die away; and although several other literary fashions
had their intervals of existence, as, for example, the imitation of
“Ossian” and the cult of the Della Cruscans. The intellect of Akenside
made itself felt in such work as “The Power of Solitude” (1804),
by Joseph Story (1779-1845), and the anonymous “Pains of Memory,”
published four years later. “Of much higher merit,” thinks Professor
Bronson, “are the didactic poems of Robert Treat Paine (1773-1811), a
man of versatile and brilliant parts, but dissipated character. His
lyrics, orations, and dramatic criticisms all show ability. But his
best work is ‘The Ruling Passion,’ a poem delivered before the Phi Beta
Kappa at Harvard in 1797.” This is “frankly on the model of Pope, but
so witty, vigorous, and pointed that it does honour to its original.”
William Cliffton’s “Poems” (1800), and Thomas G. Fessenden’s “Original
Poems” (1804), can only be mentioned.
A word may be added on the poetesses of the time, several of whom, for
example Mrs. Mercy Warren (1728-1814), having made themselves heard
during the American struggle for liberty, continued to find an audience
in the early years of the Republic. Mrs. Warren’s poems were collected
in 1790, Mrs. Susanna H. Rowson’s in 1804. The sentimental Mrs. Sarah
W. Morton may also be noted; she flourished somewhat later than the
others (1759-1846). She is no longer interesting as the “American
Sappho,” nor is it generally recalled that she considered Paine to
be the American “Menander.” She was an exponent of the inane “Della
Cruscan” style, which had its vogue in England until it was attacked
by William Gifford, and in the United States until Gifford’s “Baviad”
and “Mæviad” were republished at Philadelphia (1799), seconded by a
poetical epistle to their author from the pen of the young Quaker
Cliffton.
Not less pernicious than the Della Cruscans were the imitators of
MacPherson’s “Ossian,” including Joseph B. Ladd (1764-1786), Jonathan
M. Sewall (1746-1808), and John Blair Linn (1777-1804). Both schools
gave place when the Wordsworthian reaction set in against “poetic
diction” and the habit of writing verse about natural objects without
having looked at them.
When party spirit runs high, satire is likely to be thriving. Political
tension during the latter part of Washington’s presidency and during
the administrations of Adams and Jefferson gave birth to a brood of
satiric poems, many of them unacknowledged by their authors. Anonymous
or otherwise, in most of them the writer’s pen was wielded as a
bludgeon rather than a knife. Freneau himself was none too delicate in
his censure of the government, although he ill deserved the reputation
of a man lacking in love for his country; but Freneau was merely the
most gifted among a number, more partisan than he, who, according as
they were Federalists or Democrats, bitterly assailed the measures
of the opposing faction. The “Democratiad” and the “Guillotina” were
anonymous attacks in 1795 and 1796 upon the Democrats. William Cobbett,
the Englishman, and Alexander Hamilton, whose private life offered an
easy target, were pilloried as representatives of the Federalist party,
in Carey’s “Porcupiniad” (1799) and a collection entitled “Olio” (1801).
Nor was factional spleen unrelated to a variety of patriotic sentiment
which displayed itself in verse for holidays and state occasions; but,
like all the satires, most of the post-Revolutionary effusions of
patriotism have long since ceased to excite emotion. As has been noted,
Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia” (1798) is one of the exceptions. Colonel
David Humphreys (1753-1818), a large part of whose verse amounted to
eulogies on Washington, to the general public is hardly so much as a
memory; and his intention “to make use of poetry for strengthening
patriotism, promoting virtue, and extending happiness” has gone the
way of many similar purposes of great excellence unaided by genius.
_Washington Allston._--The first poet of distinction who evidently
represents the tradition of Wordsworth was the artist Washington
Allston (1779-1843), a friend of Coleridge, and declared by him to have
a genius for literature and painting “unsurpassed by any man of his
age.” Southey too was an enthusiastic admirer; and Wordsworth, who was
chary of praise for the age in which he lived, commended the American
painter ungrudgingly. In Allston’s “Sylphs of the Seasons” (1813)
there is evidence of the exact eye of an artist, and there is much
delicacy of sentiment and gentle play of fancy; but great constructive
and imaginative vigour are not present, and a certain tameness in the
rhymes and obviousness in the succession of thoughts serve to explain
why the poem has not secured a more lasting recognition. His “America
and Great Britain” was included by Coleridge in “Sibylline Leaves”
(1817), “for its moral no less than its patriotic spirit.” As an
attempt to incorporate in language the conception of abstract, so to
speak, intellectual, beauty, “The Angel and the Nightingale” reminds
one of Shelley.
Before Allston, there had been ballad-writers who dealt with themes
that are now familiar to readers of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In
particular, the motive of the young and innocent girl who has been
betrayed, and through her betrayal crazed, was a notable favourite.
Lucius M. Sargent’s “Hubert and Ellen” (1812) is described as a poor
imitation of Wordsworth, taking its cue, like Joseph Hutton’s ballad
on Crazy Jane (“Leisure Hours,” 1812) and Henry C. Knight’s “Poor
Margaret Dwy,” from one study or another of mental derangement in
“Lyrical Ballads” or the “Poems” (by Wordsworth) of 1807. Doubtless
a large number of parallels could be found in American literature
to Wordsworth’s “Ruth,” and to his sympathetic treatment of other
lowly types of humanity. In like manner, just as the same English
poet fraternises with the robin and the butterfly, and Coleridge
hails a young ass as his “brother,” and as Shelley in 1815 claims
kindred with “bright bird, insect, or gentle beast,” so Knight
addresses “The Caterpillar” (1821) as “cousin reptile.” The Puritans
had averred, Most sins, and all sinners, are equal; Rousseau and the
French Revolutionists went further, declaring, All men are equal; and
now, responsive to the doctrine of Coleridge and his Pantisocrats,
American poets were implying, All creatures are equal. Thus thrives
the principle of democracy and fraternity. Themistocles is at length
no better than the boorish islander, and the Apostles have lost their
superiority to sparrows. “Cousin reptile,” of course, is an extreme
case.
On its saner side, the new impulse set in motion several writers of
not a little promise. Such was John Neal (1793-1876), whose poem “The
Battle of Niagara” (1818) reflects Wordsworthianism at second hand
through Shelley and Keats, with a touch of Byronic grandiloquence
and tameness, but with a touch, too, of aboriginal nature, however
crude. The native powers of Neal were later dissipated in journalism,
novel-writing, and the like.
_Joseph Rodman Drake._--Of great promise likewise, but cut short by a
premature demise, was the career of Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820).
Drake was a precocious spirit, working swiftly, and valuing his easily
produced and quickly moving verses perhaps a little below their true
worth. A friend of Halleck, and like Halleck under the sway of the
novelist Fenimore Cooper, he reveals also how familiar he was with
the half-luminous, half-misty style of Coleridge. In Drake’s happiest
attempt, “The Culprit Fay” (1816), he aimed to find an utterance for
the poetry of the great American rivers, hitherto neglected, as he
and his friends decided, in the native literature. The outcome of a
discussion between Drake, Freneau, and Cooper, this fanciful story is
nevertheless replete with the cadences of Coleridge’s “Christabel”
(1816), however difficult it may be to explain the resemblance.
Needless to say, “The Culprit Fay” could not make a general appeal
like that of “The American Flag,” by the same author--a rhetorical and
manneristic piece that, up to a few years ago, was on the lips of every
American school-boy:
When Freedom from her mountain height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night,
And set the stars of glory there.
Set them where? In spite of the fact that it is grandiose and
unprecise, “The American Flag” may yet be yielded an advantage in point
of style over Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” with which one naturally
compares it.
_Fitz-Greene Halleck._--The final quatrain of “The American Flag” was
written by Drake’s associate in the “Croaker Papers,” Fitz-Greene
Halleck (1790-1867). Halleck was a witty poet, who aimed at no lasting
fame, but humorously chastised the passing follies of New York society,
much as Lord Byron scourged society in London. He wrote clearly and
gracefully, and was greatly overpraised in his time. His satiric poem
“Fanny” (1819) was highly popular. “Marco Bozzaris,” a lyric recital
of the Byronic type, portrayed with a good deal of life, but with a
suspicion of rant too, a dramatic incident in the struggle of modern
Greece against the Turk. His tribute to Burns (1827) was warmly
approved by the Scottish bard’s sister: “nothing finer,” she said in
1855, “has been written about Robert.” “Red Jacket” and the monody
on “Drake” also belong to Halleck’s early period. In fact, his main
activity as a poet was confined to the ten or eleven years commencing
with the death of Drake (1820). As Allston was the first of our poets
to arouse much admiration abroad, so Halleck was the first to receive
notable posthumous honours at home. In general, he owed a large measure
of his inspiration to Washington Irving.
_James Kirke Paulding._--So did James Kirke Paulding (1779-1860),
though his “Lay of the Scotch Fiddle” (1813) was a parody of Walter
Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” and though his title to enduring
fame, as he supposed, was an epic, “The Backwoodsman” (1818),
representing life on the American frontier. Neither the clever ballad,
nor the prosy epic, nor his second instalment of _Salmagundi_ has
outwitted the envy of time. In its own day Paulding’s effort to repeat
the first success of Irving was eclipsed by “The Croakers” of Halleck
and Drake. His “Peter Piper” still lingers.
_John Howard Payne._--A case similar to “Peter Piper” is that of a song
in “Clari” (1823), one of the dramas by John Howard Payne (1791-1852).
Payne, who tried his hand at various pursuits, was a friend of Irving,
and acquainted with Coleridge and Lamb. At one time he was United
States consul at Tunis. As an actor and a journalist he knew the temper
of his American public; hence he was able to enjoy a considerable
reputation as playwright. His “Brutus” (1818) was well received; yet he
would be totally forgotten save for a single lyric in “Clari,” “Home,
Sweet Home,” which successive generations of his countrymen have handed
down as an heirloom of the people.
_Woodworth_, _Morris_, _Hoffman_, _Willis, etc._--Two other writers
of the same period, now known chiefly through brief and homely songs
or rhetorical selections, were Samuel Woodworth (1785-1842), still
remembered for “The Old Oaken Bucket” (1826), and George P. Morris
(1802-64), whose “Woodman, Spare That Tree” and “The Main Truck”
(otherwise called “A Leap for Life”) have re-echoed from the platform
of many a village schoolhouse, and given many a young rustic his
principal conceptions of impassioned eloquence. The songs of Charles
Fenno Hoffman (1806-84), while by no means so familiar as these, are
not at all inferior. Hoffman was a student at Columbia College, bred
up in the literary traditions of New York City. So also were James W.
Eastburn (1797-1819) and Robert C. Sands (1799-1832). Under a rather
indefensible nomenclature, all three would be included with Paulding
and Halleck as members of the “Knickerbocker School,” the bright
luminary in which is Irving (“Diedrich Knickerbocker”). To these we may
add McDonald Clarke (1798-1842), “the mad poet,” irritatingly personal
in his allusions to the belles of the metropolis; Park Benjamin
(1809-64); and N. P. Willis (1806-67), whose reign of cleverness
succeeded that of Halleck. Flippant, careless how or whom he hit,
Willis made an extraordinary name at home, and was able to create a
stir abroad. In America he published where and what he pleased, for the
editors were glad to pay him well, so eager were people to read him.
But he had the reward of a lightly won popularity: when the generation
for whom he wrote had passed away he was deservedly neglected. His
championship of American literature against the strictures of Lockhart
and Marryat, and the redeeming candour of his opinions, make poor
amends for his abuse of talents that might have improved, rather than
satisfied, the taste of the garish day.
_William Cullen Bryant._--However different in aim and permanence from
the last mentioned adherent of the “Knickerbocker School,” to the same
general category may be assigned William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878),
who from 1826 until his death was an active force in the literary
life of New York. The author of “Thanatopsis” and one of the best
verse translations of Homer was born in Cummington, Massachusetts,
attended a local school, was taught Latin and Greek by private tutors,
two clergymen of ability, and studied for part of a year at Williams
College, where the standard of scholarship was then low. Leaving that
institution in 1811, he made ready to enter the profession of law.
During his preparation he had an interval of experience as adjutant in
the State militia. After that, he practised as a lawyer in his native
State, at Plainfield and Great Barrington, until 1825, when he yielded
to the strong propensity of nature, and took up literature for the
business of life.
As a mere child, Bryant showed an exceptional leaning toward poetry.
He was unweariedly studious, and an omnivorous reader. He wrote verses
before he was nine; in his youth, so he says, he varied his private
devotions from the ordinary Calvinistic models, by supplicating that
he “might receive the gift of poetic genius and write verses that
might endure.” The gift came to him through the instrumentality of
Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads” (the American edition of 1802), whose
mastery over him he afterwards acknowledged, and bore witness to in his
practice. At first, however, he was imbued with the tendencies of his
own predecessors in America. A Federalist in his political sympathies,
he opposed the aims of Jefferson’s administration--although later he
grew to be a staunch supporter of “Jeffersonian Democracy.” Encouraged
by his father, a well-known physician, who himself indulged in verse,
young Cullen, before he was fifteen, saw in print his political satire
“The Embargo” (1808), a work in the manner of Freneau and Trumbull, in
which Jefferson was invited to resign the presidency. In Wordsworth,
fortunately, Byrant had a model choicer than the satirists. He became
acquainted with “Lyrical Ballads” in 1810. Sometime in the autumn of
1811, his inward eye having been taught to see the operation of a
benign and healing spirit in the world of nature, this thoughtful
youth, now about to begin the study of law, and, as it were, to
commence the effort of life, was moved to record his sentiments on the
all-pervading fact of death: the universal debt is not an evil; to pay
it is as natural as to be born; and to obey the voice of nature, to
confide in her will, is the source of human satisfaction. That is the
burden of “Thanatopsis.”
When “Thanatopsis” was submitted by the poet’s father to _The North
American Review_ (in 1817), people would hardly believe that such an
exalted strain had been conceived outside of England. “Thanatopsis”
and “To a Waterfowl” (written in 1815) are indeed in many ways
Wordsworthian; the similarity is immediately noticeable. Yet the
similarity is not complete. In the first place, they are founded, and
very definitely founded, upon the natural scenery of Bryant’s own
New England environment; and they sprang out of a unified individual
experience to which his personal observation contributed as much as
his reading. But, as has been remarked before, the note of Bryant is
a less joyous note than that of his great English exemplar, not only
because of a difference in the selection of subjects, but through a
difference in the treatment of detail as well. It is not to be expected
that in perfection of technique a boy of seventeen could equal a
poet who at the age of thirty-two (when Wordsworth first became at
all generally known in America) was virtually master of his craft.
Moreover, “Thanatopsis” as we now have it is actually an immense
improvement upon the version that came out in _The North American_; yet
in finality of expression it cannot vie with the “Lines” associated
with Tintern Abbey, not to speak of certain portions of “The Prelude”
or “The Excursion” written in the zenith of Wordsworth’s power. Still,
“Thanatopsis” was the first great American poem; in its ultimate
form it bids fair to please most readers in all ages. The majesty of
Thucydides is borrowed in the conception that the whole earth is the
sepulchre of famous men; there is Homeric splendour of epithet in such
expressions as the “all-beholding sun.” The “healing sympathy” of
nature, of course, is Wordsworthianism pure and simple; but the poem as
a whole is tinged with a pantheism much more stoical than the pantheism
of Wordsworth, and curiously out of keeping with the touch of New
England moralising toward the end. This touch is even more pronounced
in the verses “To a Waterfowl.”
“To a Waterfowl” was published with several other poems, including
“Thanatopsis,” in 1821. According to that wayward genius Hartley
Coleridge, it is the best short poem in the English language; a
perilously sweeping judgment, like Shelley’s on “France,” the
magnificent ode by Hartley’s father. At all events, “To a Waterfowl”
is hardly surpassed by any of Bryant’s later work, and probably
unsurpassed by anything of comparable subject and scope ever written in
America.
In 1821, Bryant, then practising law at Great Barrington, was married
to Miss Frances Fairchild. In 1825, he gave up the law and a secure
livelihood, and, removing to New York, assumed the editorship of
_The New York Review_. After a brief connection with _The United
States Review_, he became assistant editor of _The Evening Post_; in
1829 he was made editor-in-chief. His lifelong guidance of this most
influential paper is briefly touched upon elsewhere. It may be readily
thought that Bryant’s prolonged editorial labours interfered with his
subsequent development as a poet. Yet his partial ownership of _The
Post_ finally gave him abundant means for travel and a widening of his
experience in his own and foreign lands; and his habits of industry,
supported by a temperate bodily régime, enabled him to achieve during
his extended career a noble literary monument outside of journalism.
By 1832 he was ready to publish another edition of his “Poems,” adding
more than eighty pieces that were new--notably, the “Forest Hymn,” the
“Song of Marion’s Men,” and “The Death of the Flowers.” At intervals of
a few years (1834, 1836, 1842, 1844, etc.) other editions or volumes
followed; giving evidence that his imagination was not dormant, for
they contained in each case material in part or wholly fresh. Thus the
“Poems” of 1854 included “O Mother of a Mighty Race” and “Robert of
Lincoln,” the latter a favourite with many, though inferior to Bryant’s
general standard. Of the “Thirty Poems” issued ten years later (1864),
twenty-seven were new; the presence of selections, in English, from
Book V of the Odyssey is worthy of particular remark. They had already
appeared, a few months before, in _The Atlantic Monthly_.