Homer. He had at various times amused himself with renderings of
one or another passage that pleased him in foreign tongues. He was
an ardent admirer of the Greek epics. He was dissatisfied with the
versions of Cowper and Pope. It is possible that he was acquainted with
the counsels of Matthew Arnold, called forth by the Homer of Francis
Newman. The favour met by his attempts with the Odyssey encouraged
him to try his hand at the Iliad. On the death of his wife, in 1866,
he felt the need of some employment to distract his attention, and
resolved to translate the Iliad entire. By 1869 he had finished the
first twelve books, at the rate of from forty to seventy-five lines a
day. These twelve books were published in February, 1870, the remainder
of the Iliad in June. By the first of July he was engaged upon the
Odyssey; on December 7, 1871, he sent his printers “the twenty-fourth
and concluding book of [his] translation of Homer’s Odyssey, together
with the table of contents for the second volume.” To misunderstand the
repression of feeling in these simple words, with which the venerable
Bryant takes leave of his final work, is to miss the hidden fire
animating his whole existence. In a great poet there is little waste
of energy in the outward expression. The moment feeling shows itself,
it is transmuted into artistic form. The form is adequate, but it is
something different from the sentiment that gives it life.
The excellence of Bryant’s blank-verse translation of Homer is
not a theme for long discussion here. He aimed at simplicity and
faithfulness. He rejected several of the customary ornaments of modern
verse, choosing for his medium that rhythm which is most nearly
related to the cadence of everyday speech. Tested by its effect on
the layman of the present day, his attempt is more successful than
other well-known metrical versions, less than the cadenced prose of
translators, like Myers and Lang, who have profited by the advice of
Arnold with respect to diction, but in avoiding the trammels of metre
have followed the example set by the scholars of King James in the
Authorised Version of the Scriptures. However, Bryant’s rendering is
too noble a piece of imaginative scholarship to be passed over.
Bryant spent something like six years upon his Homer. He survived its
completion by six years more, full of honours, rejoicing in a hale
old age, still visited occasionally by poetical inspiration, still
influential in the political thought of his nation, able at four score
and four to make a public address in honour of the Italian patriot
Mazzini. During this address, “his uncovered head was for a time
exposed to the full glare of the sun. Shortly after, while entering
a house, he fell backwards, striking his head upon the stone steps;
concussion of the brain and paralysis followed.” He died in New York,
June 12, 1878, and was buried at Roslyn, on Long Island Sound, near the
beautiful country home where for thirty-five years his literary toils
had been “sweetened to his taste.”
Owing to his artistic reserve, Bryant had the reputation of a
temperamental coldness, a reputation that is belied both by the
tenderness of his domestic ties and by his well chosen and enduring
friendships. His patriotism also was unswerving. If he “let no empty
gust of passion find an utterance in his lay,” nevertheless he knew and
valued
... feelings of calm power and mighty sweep,
Like currents journeying through the boundless deep.
He was a devoted lover of humanity and life; he was a devoted lover of
his art. For him, art and life were one. It is easy for the uninitiated
to credit him with a lack of warmth. The fully emancipated are aware
what union of fire and self-restraint, of vigour and delicacy, goes to
the rearing of a fabric like the orderly and effective career of Bryant.
Like most, or all, great poets, Bryant wrote admirable prose. His
essays in criticism have already been alluded to. As a stylist he was
indefatigably painstaking even to the smallest detail: “He was not a
fluent nor a very prolific writer.... His manuscripts, as well as his
proofs, were commonly so disfigured by corrections as to be read with
difficulty even by those familiar with his script.” His capacity for
intense application was a partial measure of his success both as poet
and as critic. For oratory, his legal training stood him in good stead,
and his later prominence in New York and in the country as a whole
gave him many an occasion. If Bryant, as Matthew Arnold believed, was
“_facile princeps_” among American poets, this eminence arose from no
merely capricious outburst of genius; it was the natural efflux of a
noble, well rounded, and representative human life.
_Saxe_, _Melville_, _Alice and Phoebe Cary.--_After Bryant it is
convenient to speak of a few poets, very different from him, and for
the most part from each other, whose contemporaneous presence in
New York is almost the only thing that connects them. John G. Saxe
(1816-87), a native of Vermont, in his time was counted a leader
among satirists. He staggers now under the accusation of extreme
superficiality; none the less is he lively and readable. He consciously
imitated Hood; he could scarcely avoid imitating Wendell Holmes. Of
himself he had a remarkable turn for epigram and for punning in rhyme.
His burlesque adaptations of Ovid are smart and amusing. On the whole
it may be said that Saxe was at his best in “The Proud Miss MacBride,”
where he girds at an upstart aristocracy:
Of all the notable things on earth,
The queerest one is pride of birth,
Among our “fierce Democracie.”
Herman Melville (1819-91), who wrote a fascinating account (“Typee,”
1846) of his stay among the aborigines of the Marquesas, also published
“Battle-Pieces” (1866) and other poems. His verse is less objective and
sincere than his prose. Alice Cary (1820-71) and her sister, Phoebe
(1824-71), were born in Ohio, where they were locally appreciated.
Removing first to Philadelphia, then to New York, they supported
themselves by their pens. The talents of Alice Cary were manifestly
superior; yet for a time, yielding to her admiration of Poe, she
allowed the element of harmonious sound in her poetry to overbalance
that of meaning. Her hymns, one of which is almost a classic, are noble
in their purity of sentiment.
_Dana_, _Sprague_, _Hillhouse, etc._--Although his life and activity
were centred elsewhere, Bryant, as we have seen, was a product of
western Massachusetts. From him and the city of his adoption we
naturally turn to a number of writers whose careers are to be more
closely identified with New England. Many of these, like Richard Henry
Dana senior (1787-1879), of Boston, were poets only secondarily.
Dana was a journalist and politician--an admirer of Wordsworth and a
lecturer on Shakespeare. An edition of his prose and verse in 1833
contained a poem, “The Buccaneer,” inspired by Coleridge’s “Rime of the
Ancient Mariner.” His shorter poems are moral--
Oh, listen, man!
A voice within us speaks the startling word,
“Man, thou shalt never die”--
and are mostly tame and artificial. Though inferior in native talent
to his brother-in-law, Washington Allston, Dana was more widely known
as a writer, partly because of his ability as literary critic. His
verse was melancholy and his meditation not virile. As a poet he won
a smaller audience than did Charles Sprague (1791-1875), also of
Boston; yet it is not now easy to understand why Sprague’s longest
poem, “Curiosity” (1823), should have been “largely read and quoted in
this country, and grossly plagiarised in England” (Onderdonk). James
A. Hillhouse (1789-1841), who wrote a Biblical drama called “Hadad”
(1824), published “Dramas, Discourses, and Other Pieces” in 1839. He
is interesting as an early exponent of the dramatic art in America.
His style shows a strange blending of elements from Lord Byron and the
Scriptures. It would probably be fairer to judge him by “Demetria” than
by “Hadad.” A Byronic sentimentalism runs through the work of James
Gates Percival (1795-1856), whose “Prometheus” (1820) luxuriates in
the sorrows of men and the vanity of human wishes. His poetry often
belies his everyday life, since for all his facile pessimism he was a
man of genuine attainments and solid interest in science. He could not
make his own experience the fundamental thing in his verse;--unlike
his contemporary John Pierpont (1785-1866), a clergyman of Boston. In
his hymns and patriotic odes, Pierpont was masculine and sane, a good
representative of the New England abolitionist, as may be gathered from
“The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star.” “Warren’s Address
to the American Soldiers” is even better known, and still withholds
the name of Pierpont from oblivion. John G. C. Brainard (1796-1828)
died before his poetical gift could find complete expression. He dealt
with the scenery and legends of Connecticut, but is hardly remembered
outside the histories of American literature.
_Mrs. Brooks and Mrs. Sigourney._--The same generation produced several
women of note, whose poetry demands some attention; in particular,
Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865), a prolific maker of books, not to
speak of “more than two thousand articles in prose and verse” which
were issued during her long and quiet life in Hartford. Mrs. Sigourney
was no genius, albeit she passed for “the American Hemans.” She was a
person of great moral worth and the most charitable disposition. It has
been suggested that the beauty of her character was responsible for
her extraordinary vogue. More probably the attention she gave to the
legends of her own country, the not unwholesome cast of sentimentalism
in her thought, and her readiness to contribute verses for any
occasion, however slight, will in large part account for the unbounded
admiration which she enjoyed. In 1822 appeared her poem, in five
cantos, “Traits of the American Aborigines”; her “Lays of the Heart”
were published in 1848. Besides her innumerable shorter articles, she
is said to have been responsible for something like fifty volumes.
“Maria del Occidente” (Mrs. Maria Gowen Brooks, 1795-1845) was of a
different cast, less homely in her sentiments, a romantic soul, filled
with the spirit of Southey and Moore, leaning toward the sensuous and
exotic. When she bent her energies to verse, as in “Judith, Esther, and
Other Poems” (1820), and “Zophiel, or The Bride of Seven” (1833)--a
story based on the Apocryphal Book of Tobit--she showed herself far
removed from Mrs. Sigourney and “The Power of Maternal Piety” or “The
Sunday School.” On the whole, the taste of “Maria del Occidente,” as
Southey called her, was worse than that of “the American Hemans”;
and if Southey termed Mrs. Brooks “the most impassioned and most
imaginative of all poetesses,” he paid an astounding tribute to his own
acumen as a critic. Emma H. Willard (1787-1870), like Mrs. Sigourney,
was prominent as an educator, accomplishing more as the head of a
female seminary in Troy, N. Y., than by her writings. She was the
author of “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep.” In the next generation
were Sarah H. Whitman (1803-78) and Frances S. Osgood (1811-50), who
composed verse not lacking in merit, but who are recalled rather for
their championship of Edgar Allan Poe. Mrs. Whitman was at one time
betrothed to him.
_Minor Poets of New England._--Among the minor New England poets who
came slightly later, was Samuel Longfellow (1819-92)--younger brother
of Henry W. Longfellow--a hymn-writer of singular purity. Sylvester
Judd (1813-53), a Unitarian minister, wrote an epic entitled “Philo”
(1850). William Wetmore Story (1819-95), who edited the life and
letters of his distinguished father, Chief Justice Story, forsook the
bar at an early age and went to Italy to engage in sculpture. He was
a poet of refinement, touched with melancholy, intellectual rather
than passionate--yet with a fondness for the intangible--influenced
by Longfellow and Holmes, by Tennyson and Browning. In verse, his
chief works were “Poems” (1847), “Graffiti d’Italia” (1868), “A Roman
Lawyer in Jerusalem” (1870), “He and She” (1883), and “Poems” (1886).
Among his individual pieces “Cleopatra” seems to be the best known.
Theophilus W. Parsons (1819-92) shows a similar Continental influence,
whose most valuable result was his free translation of Dante’s
“Inferno” (cantos I-X, 1843, completed in 1867); this was preceded by
his fine lines “On a Bust of Dante” (1841), which are justly admired.
Henry H. Brownell (1820-72) attracted notice by a poem on Farragut, and
through Farragut’s good offices entered the United States Navy. His
“War Lyrics and Other Poems” (1866) contained a stirring piece, “The
River Fight,” on the exploits of Farragut, somewhat in the style of
Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.”
=Poetry in the South.=--The major poets of New England, Longfellow,
Lowell, Whittier, Emerson, and perhaps one or two others, constitute
the one group in America that may rightfully be dignified with the
name of school. Before approaching them, however, let us give some
consideration to the poets of the South.
Though the institution of slavery gave the dominant classes in the
Southern States a leisure comparable to that enjoyed by classic Greece,
plantation life was not favourable to a thorough and imaginative
education; nor were there great civic centres to collect, for mutual
inspiration, such individuals as showed artistic and literary bent.
Furthermore, in modern times most of the poets have been furnished by a
restless and aspiring middle class, which was virtually lacking in the
South. Among the owners of plantations, personal ambition rarely soared
much higher than local, state, or sectional politics, and political and
occasional oratory, with some noteworthy exceptions, was flamboyant
and insincere. Save for a few noteworthy exceptions, accordingly, the
career of poet languished, and literature of a high order failed of
appreciation. The leading poets of the South realised only too well the
weight of inertia against which they strove, in a civilisation where
the odds were continually against their success.
_The Forerunners._--Early and minor poets in the South need not long
detain us. William Crafts (1789-1826), of Charleston, South Carolina,
a graduate of Harvard, and an orator of repute, composed a “Raciad,”
or epic on horse-racing, and “Sullivan’s Island.” His “Miscellaneous
Writings” (1828) were published posthumously. William J. Grayson
(1788-1863), who was more voluminous, attempted in his poem “The
Hireling and the Slave” (1856) to represent slavery as a preferable
state for the negro. Richard H. Wilde (1789-1847), Edward C. Pinkney
(1802-28), George H. Calvert (1803-89), Philip P. Cooke (1816-50)
and others, show a range of imitation running all the way from Byron
through Scott and Moore to Tennyson. Cooke’s “Florence Vane” was warmly
admired by Poe. Albert Pike (1809-91), should be remembered as the
author of “Dixie,” which, “set to a popular air which has been traced
back to slavery times in New York State, became, in a multitude of
variations, a Southern Marseillaise” (Onderdonk).
_Timrod_, _Hayne_, _and Simms_.--Of a high order was the poetry of that
champion of the Southern cause Henry B. Timrod (1829-67). Denied by
fortune the sort of education that he craved, striving throughout much
of his life with poverty and sickness, and finally defeated, saddened
by personal bereavement as well as by the downfall of the South, Timrod
died before he could make adequate report of his endowments. His volume
of “Poems” (1860), issued at the beginning of the Civil War, was almost
unnoticed; and even yet he has not obtained the recognition due him.
His devotion to the South was not greater than his reverence for his
art. Few of our poets have so clearly understood themselves and their
craft. Unusual courage breathes in all he wrote. In the year of his
death, a prey to disease and sorrow, he could say to the Confederate
soldiers buried “At Magnolia Cemetery”:
Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.
In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone.
Timrod’s works were brought to light again in 1873 by Paul Hamilton
Hayne (1830-86), who, prior to the war, had united with Simms and
Timrod to erect, if possible, the drooping spirit of poetry in the
South. Hayne’s “Poems” (1855) and “Sonnets and Other Poems” (1857) had
a chance to make their way before the outbreak of hostilities; and
he survived the conflict long enough to publish “Legends and Lyrics”
(1872) and “The Mountain of the Lovers, and Other Poems” (1873). A
complete edition of his poems appeared in 1882. “The Laureate of the
South,” as he was called, was an enthusiast in sub-tropical life and
scenery, a word-painter and word-musician after the manner of Poe.
His music is more obvious than Timrod’s and not so likely to please
a delicate ear; and he did not have Timrod’s unity and clearness of
conception.
Less careful still in his workmanship, and still more lacking in
concentration, was the third of the trio, William Gilmore Simms
(1806-70). Simms was a most abundant writer, known later for his novels
and biographies rather than his poems. In his earlier poetry he was
under the sway of Byron and Moore. His scanty advantages in the way
of schooling were atoned for in part by voluminous indiscriminate
reading; yet he never overcame certain defects in thinking to which
self-taught men are prone. His first publication was “Lyrical and Other
Poems” (1827). “Atalantis” (1832), a closet-drama in blank verse, in
its general structure harks back to Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound.” His
selected works, in nineteen volumes, were published in 1859. Simms’
commanding presence, the vigour of his personality, his determination
to conquer all obstacles in his own path, and to vitalise the literary
atmosphere of the South, make him an impressive, even heroic, figure.
_Edgar Allan Poe._--The life of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) is duly
recounted in another place, where his prose fiction is handled at some
length. When Poe ran away from the ledgers in his guardian’s office,
he carried with him in manuscript the first heir of his invention,
“Tamerlane and Other Poems,” for which he found a publisher at Boston
(1827). “Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems” followed in 1829.
In 1831, the year of his discharge from West Point, appeared the
volume of “Poems” with which Poe thought to win the interest of the
cadets. Thereafter, most of his poetry first saw the light in various
periodicals; for example, “The Raven” (1845) in the New York _Evening
Mirror_, “The Bells” (1849) in _Sartain’s Magazine_, “Annabel Lee”
(1849) in _The New York Tribune_.
In the opinion of the present writer, Poe’s verse is generally
rated above its value, even for those qualities in which it is
supposed particularly to excel. Certain poetical gifts this author
unquestionably had in abundance. He had the _copia verborum_ which is
indispensable to every literary artist. His sensations were vivid, if
not numerous. He knew how to choose the symbols with which to attain
his ends. If we are to trust the substance of his remarks in “The
Philosophy of Composition,” and of those which he made regarding “The
Raven,” his choice and manipulation of literary artifice were for the
most part very conscious. He was able through the use of carefully
selected diction and imagery to produce in his reader precisely the
shade of feeling--the glimmer of the supernatural, the sense of grey
and subdued, occasionally the sense of Weird and poignant, grief--which
he desired. He never forgets the music of his words, and through
habit, almost without trying, he can write continuously in a minor key.
And yet, his music is not inevitable enough, nor does it undergo enough
variation, or variation sufficiently delicate. It is too forced, too
repetitious. His effects all lie within narrow limits, and he runs his
gamut over and over again. This is altogether aside from his failure to
make his music grow out of that strong underlying poetical good sense
which is to be confidently expected of every great imagination. People
too often forget how far Poe falls short of his master, Coleridge, in
the mere element of harmonious sound; just as they too often forget
how far Coleridge falls short of _his_ master, Milton, in the union of
ethereal as well as sonorous cadences with a finely modulated or robust
thought and sentiment. Were Poe’s appeals to the external senses more
wonderful than they are, he would still lag behind those poets--and in
the history of literature they are not after all so few--who can touch
every chord, whether sad or joyous, known to the human ear, and still
maintain that basis of firm reason without which human communication
ceases to be broadly human. The intellect also has its music, lacking
which no poetry has ever long survived.
Furthermore, all allowance being made for the tragic outcome of Poe’s
career, for the part of his fate which was not the outgrowth of his
own character, or could not, humanly considered, be attributed at
some point in his development to his own will, his poetry is not
uplifting. True, in his handling of material he is, in the ordinary
acceptation, entirely clean. That is, he is wholly free from obscenity,
as he is free also from that more perilous seeming cleanness which so
often cloaks real impurity. Nevertheless may he be dangerous food for
those whom he most readily attracts. Poe is essentially pessimistic,
hopeless, toward general human experience. His favourite topic is
death; and his vision does not pierce beyond the worm and the grave.
Nay, like his predecessors in England and on the Continent, he
luxuriates in the tomb and the charnel. As in his stories, so in his
verse, though less patently, he follows some of the most pernicious
motives in art that the older civilisation afforded his age. And it
is the lethal progeny--Baudelaire and the rest--of that movement in
European literature typified by Ann Radcliffe and “Monk” Lewis that
has been quickest to take up with Poe and exploit him abroad. We may
seek to explain and exculpate him; we may sorrow for his blighted life;
but the fact remains that what Poe wrote sprang out of his career,
hence, on the whole, was morbid. The flowers of his poetry are the
flowers of Lethe. The stimulants with which he catches the reader are
violent and exciting. His ideal of intellectual beauty was detached
and unnatural. It is little wonder, then, that he would not enter into
sympathy with the English poet by whom the normal Bryant was inspired,
and whose works, the most normalising and healthful influence that
American literature thus far has felt, were purposely reactive against
artificial and abnormal stimulation.