THE LATER POETS
Although prose forms, especially the novel and the short story,
dominated the period, yet the amount of poetry published from 1860 to
1899 surpasses, in mere bulk at least, all that had been produced in
America before that date. In quality also it is notable. Stedman's _An
American Anthology_ has 773 pages of selections, and of this space 462
pages, or almost two-thirds, are given to the poets who made their
first appearance during these forty years. Very many whom he mentions
were only incidentally poets. A surprising number of those who are
known to-day only as novelists or short story writers began their
career with a volume and in some cases with several volumes of verse.
Few indeed have been the writers who have not contributed poetical
material. Among the poets are to be numbered writers as inseparably
connected with prose as Thoreau, Burroughs, Howells, Mrs. Stuart
Phelps Ward, S. Weir Mitchell, Miss Woolson, Lew Wallace, Mrs. Wilkins
Freeman, Harris, Page, Mrs. Cooke, Ambrose Bierce, Alice Brown, Hamlin
Garland, and A. S. Hardy.
Those who may be counted as the distinctive poets of the era, the third
generation of poets in America, make not a long list if only those be
taken who have done new and distinctive work. Not many names need be
added to the following twenty-five whose first significant collections
were published during the twenty years following 1870:
1870. Bret Harte. _Plain Language from Truthful James._
1871. John Hay. _Pike County Ballads._
1871. Joaquin Miller. _Songs of the Sierras._
1871. Will Carleton. _Poems._
1872. Celia Thaxter. _Poems._
1873. John Boyle O'Reilly. _Songs of the Southern Seas._
1875. Richard Watson Gilder. _The New Day._
1877. Sidney Lanier. _Poems._
1881. Ina Coolbrith. _A Perfect Day and Other Poems._
1882. John Bannister Tabb. _Poems._
1883. James Whitcomb Riley. _The Old Swimmin'-Hole._
1883. George Edward Woodberry. _The North Shore Watch._
1884. Edith M. Thomas. _A New Year's Masque._
1884. Henry Cuyler Bunner. _Airs from Arcady._
1884. Louise Imogen Guiney. _Songs at the Start._
1886. Clinton Scollard. _With Reed and Lyre._
1887. Eugene Field. _Culture's Garland._
1887. Madison Cawein. _Blooms of the Berry._
1887. Robert Burns Wilson. _Life and Love._
1888. Irwin Russell. _Dialect Poems._
1889. Richard Hovey. _The Laurel: an Ode._
John James Piatt, Emma Lazarus, Emily Dickinson, and E. R Sill, whose
first volumes fall outside of the twenty-years period, complete the
number.
I
For the greater part these later poets were children of the new era who
with Whitman voiced their own hearts and looked at the life close about
them with their own eyes. The more individual of them, the leading
innovators who most impressed themselves upon their times--Whitman,
Hay and Harte, Miller, Lanier and Russell--we have already considered.
They rose above conventions and rules and looked only at life; they
stood for the new Americanism of the period, and they had the courage
that dared in a critical and fastidious age to break away into what
seemed like crude and unpoetic regions. Not many of them could go to
the extremes of Whitman, or even of Harte and Hay. Some would voice the
new message of the times in the old key and the old forms; others would
adopt the new fashions but change not at all the old themes and the old
sentiments.
Of the latter class Will Carleton perhaps is the typical
representative. By birth and training he belonged to the Western group
of innovators represented by Mark Twain and Eggleston and Miller. He
had been born in a log cabin in Michigan and he had spent all of his
boyhood on a small, secluded farm. He had broken from his environment
at twenty, had gained a college degree, and following the lead of
his inclination had become a journalist, first in Detroit, then in
Chicago, Boston, and New York. From journalism, especially in the
seventies, it was but a step to literature. He would be a poet, and led
by the spirit of his period he turned for material to the homely life
of his boyhood. He would make no realistic picture--no man was ever
less fitted than he to reproduce the external features of a scene or a
region--he would touch the sentiments and the emotions. "Betsey and I
Are Out," published in the _Toledo Blade_ in 1871, was the beginning.
Then in 1873 came _Farm Ballads_, with such popular favorites as "Over
the Hills to the Poor-House" and "Gone with a Handsomer Man," a thin
book that sold forty thousand copies in eighteen months. No poet since
Longfellow had so appealed to the common people. At his death in 1912
there had been sold of his various collections more than six hundred
thousand copies.
His poetry as we read it to-day has in it little of distinction; it
is crude, for the most part, and conventional. It made its appeal
largely because of its kindly sympathy, its homeliness, and its lavish
sentiment. The poet played upon the chords of memory and home and
childhood, the message of the earlier Longfellow cast into a heavily
stressed and swinging melody that found a prepared audience. With E. P.
Roe, his counterpart in prose, Will Carleton is largely responsible for
prolonging the age of sentiment.
A singer of a different type was John James Piatt, born in Indiana in
1835 and joint author with W. D. Howells of _Poems of Two Friends_,
1859. He was a classicist who caught the new vision and sought to
compromise. Everywhere in his work a blending of the new and the old:
the Western spirit that would voice the new notes of the Wabash rather
than echo the old music of the Thames, that syren melody that had been
the undoing of Taylor and Stoddard. In an early review of Stedman,
Piatt had found, as he characteristically termed it, "a too frequent
betrayal of Tennyson's floating musk in his singing-garments," and
he had noted as his chief strength that "his representative subjects
are American."[140] In making the criticism he touched upon his own
weakness and his own strength. In all his volumes conventional work
like "Rose and Root," "The Sunshine of Shadows," and "The Unheard"
alternates with more original poems, native in theme and to a degree
native in spirit, like "The Mower in Ohio," "The Pioneer's Chimney,"
"Fires in Illinois," and "Riding to Vote." There is no dialect, no
straining for realistic effect, no sentimentality. In all that makes
for art the poems have little for criticism: they are classical and
finished and beautiful. But they lack life. There is nothing about them
that grips the reader's heart, nothing that fixes itself in the memory,
no single line that has distinction of phrase. Even in the Western
poems like "The Mower in Ohio" there is no sharpness, no atmosphere,
no feeling of reality. It is art rather than life; it is a conscious
effort to make a poem. The case is typical. With the criticism one may
sweep away once for all great areas of the poetry of the time.
Far stronger are the vigorous lyrics of Maurice Thompson, whose work is
to be found in so many literary fields of the period. His poetry, small
in quantity, has a spirit of its own that is distinctive. It is tonic
with the out-of-doors and it is masculine. One stanza from the poem "At
Lincoln's Grave," delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in
1893, voices the new Western soul:
His humor, born of virile opulence,
Stung like a pungent sap or wild-fruit zest,
And satisfied a universal sense
Of manliness, the strongest and the best;
A soft Kentucky strain was in his voice,
And the Ohio's deeper boom was there,
With some wild accents of old Wabash days,
And winds of Illinois;
And when he spoke he took us unaware,
With his high courage and unselfish ways.
II
The successor of Carleton is James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana, the
leading producer during the later period of platform and newspaper
balladry. The early life of Riley was urban rather than rural. His
father was a lawyer at Greenfield, a typical Western county seat, and
after sending the boy to the village school he sought to turn him to
his own profession. But there was a stratum of the wayward and the
unconventional in Riley even from the first. The professions and the
ordinary occupations open to youth did not appeal to the imaginative
lad. He learned the trade of sign-painting and then for a year traveled
with a patent medicine "doctor" as advertising agent. Following
this picturesque experience came three or four years as a traveling
entertainer with a congenial troupe, then desultory newspaper work,
and finally, from 1877 to 1885, a steady position on the Indianapolis
_Journal_. His recognition as a poet came in the mid eighties, and
following it came a long period on the lecture circuit, reading his own
productions, at one time working in conjunction with Eugene Field and
Edgar W. Nye,--"Bill Nye."
His earliest work seems to have been declamatory and journalistic in
origin. "I was always trying to write of the kind of people I knew
and especially to write verse that I could read just as if it were
being spoken for the first time." And again, "I always took naturally
to anything theatrical."[141] For years the newspaper was his only
medium. He contributed to most of the Indiana journals with pseudonyms
ranging all the way from "Edyrn" to "Jay Whitt" and "Benjamin F.
Johnson of Boone," and it was while writing under the last of these
for the Indianapolis _Journal_ that he first became known beyond the
confines of Indiana. The device of printing poems that ostensibly were
contributed by a crude farmer from a back country was not particularly
original. Lowell had used it and Artemus Ward. Moreover, the fiction of
accompanying these poems with editorial comment and specimen letters
from the author was as old at least as _The Biglow Papers_, but there
was a Western, Pike County freshness about the Benjamin F. Johnson
material. The first poem in the series, for instance, was accompanied
by material like this:
Mr. Johnson thoughtfully informs us that he is "no edjucated
man," but that he has, "from childhood up tel old enugh to
vote, allus wrote more or less poetry, as many of an albun in
the neghborhood can testify." Again, he says that he writes
"from the hart out"; and there is a touch of genuine pathos in
the frank avowal, "Thare is times when I write the tears rolls
down my cheeks."
The poems that followed,--"Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer," "When
the Frost is on the Punkin," "Wortermelon Time," and the others--were
written primarily as humorous exercises just as Browne had written
his first Artemus Ward contributions. There is a histrionic element
about them that must not be overlooked. The author is playing a part.
Riley, we know, had, at least in his youth, very little sympathy with
farm life and very little knowledge of it: he was simply impersonating
an ignorant old farmer. The dialect does not ring true. There never
has been a time, for instance, when "ministratin'" for ministering,
"familiously" for familiarly, "resignated" for resigned, and "when the
army broke out" for when the war broke out, have been used in Indiana
save by those with whom they are individual peculiarities. He is simply
reporting the ignorance of one old man in the Artemus Ward fashion.
Dialect with him is the record of a town man's mimicry of country
crudeness. It is conventional rather than realistic. It is a humorous
device like A. Ward's cacography. The first Johnson annotation will
illustrate:
Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone County, who considers the _Journal_
a "very valubul" newspaper, writes to inclose us an original
poem, desiring that we kindly accept it for publication, as
"many neghbors and friends is astin' him to have the same
struck off."
He issued the series at his own expense in 1883 with the title _The
Old Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven More Poems by Benj. F. Johnson, of
Boone_, and he continued the masquerade until after the publication
of _Afterwhiles_ in 1887. After the great vogue of this later volume
he began to publish voluminously until his final collected edition
numbered fourteen volumes.
Riley not only inherited Will Carleton's public entire, but he added
to it very considerably. He too dealt freely in sentiment and he too
wrote always with vocal interpretation in mind. Undoubtedly the wide
vogue of his poems has come largely from this element. People have
always enjoyed hearing the poems read with an appropriate acting out
of the part more than they have enjoyed reading them for themselves.
The poems, more over, appeared in what may be called the old homestead
period in America. Denman Thompson first brought out his _Joshua
Whitcomb_ in 1875 and his _The Old Homestead_ in 1886. Riley found a
public doubly prepared. He revived old memories--the word "old" is
almost a mannerism with him: "The Old Swimmin'-Hole," "Old Fashioned
Roses," "The Old Hay-Mow," "The Old Trundle Bed," "Out to Old Aunt
Mary's," "The Boys of the Old Glee Club," "An Old Sweetheart of Mine,"
etc. Especially did he appeal to those whose childhood had been spent
in the country.
Finally, he added to Carleton's devices a metrical facility and a
jigging melody that is perhaps his most original contribution to the
period. More than any one else Riley is responsible for the modern
newspaper type of ballad that is to poetry what ragtime is to music.
There is a fatal facility to such a melody as,
Old wortermelon time is a-comin' round again,
And there ain't no man a-livin' any tickleder'n me,
Fer the way I hanker after wortermelons is a sin--
Which is the why and wharefore, as you can plainly see.
Or this,
I ain't, ner don't p'tend to be,
Much posted on philosofy;
But thare is times, when all alone,
I work out idees of my own.
And of these same thare is a few
I'd like to jest refer to you--
Pervidin' that you don't object
To listen clos't and rickollect.
In his preference for native themes and homely, unliterary treatment of
seemingly unpoetic material he continued the work of the Pike County
balladists. As the _Nation_, reviewing his _Old Fashioned Roses_,
expressed it, he finds pleasure in "some of the coarser California
flavors." His own standards for poetry he has given clearly, and they
are in full accord with the spirit of the period:
The poems here at home!--Who'll write 'em down,
Jes' as they air--in Country and in Town?--
Sowed thick as clods is 'crost the fields and lanes,
Er these-'ere little hop-toads when it rains!--
Who'll "voice" 'em? as I heerd a feller say
'At speechified on Freedom, t'other day,
And soared the Eagle tel' it 'peared to me,
She wasn't bigger'n a bumblebee!
What We want, as I sense it, in the line
O' poetry is somepin' Yours and Mine--
Somepin' with live-stock in it, and outdoors,
And old crick-bottoms, snags, and sycamores:
Putt weeds in--pizen-vines, and underbresh,
As well as Johnny-jump-ups, all so fresh
And sassy-like!--and groun'-squir'ls,--yes, and "We,"
As sayin' is,--"We, Us and Company!"
But one cannot be sure of him. He is an entertainer, an actor, a
mimicker. Does his material really come "from the hart out" or is he
giving, what one always suspects, only excellent vaudeville? Even in
his most pathetic moments we catch for an instant, or we feel that we
do, a glimpse of the suave face of the platform entertainer.
Once in a while his childhood lyrics ring true. A little note of true
pathos like this from _Poems Here at Home_ is worth a library of _The
Flying Islands of the Night_ and of his other voluminous echoes of
_Alice in Wonderland_:
Let me come in where you sit weeping,--aye,
Let me, who have not any child to die,
Weep with you for the little one whose love
I have known nothing of.
The little arms that slowly, slowly loosed
Their pressure round your neck; the hands you used
To kiss.--Such arms--such hands I never knew.
May I not weep with you?
Fain would I be of service--say some thing,
Between the tears, that would be comforting,--
But ah! so sadder than yourselves am I,
Who have no child to die.
Despite his enormous vogue, Riley must be dismissed as artificial and,
on the whole, insincere. He seems always to be striving for effect--he
is an entertainer who knows his audience and who is never for a moment
dull. He has little of insight, little knowledge of the deeps of life
and the human soul, little of message, and he wrote enormously too
much. He must be rated finally as a comedian, a sentimentalist, an
entertainer.
His influence has been great. A whole school of imitators has sprung
up about him, the most of whom have perished with the papers to which
they have contributed. The strongest of them all undoubtedly was
Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911) whose _Back Country Poems_ were genuine
and distinctive. Drummond's _Habitant_ ballads, which rank with the
strongest dialect poetry of the century, belong to Canadian rather
than American literature. Stedman's praise of them is none too high:
"Most of us are content if we sing an old thing in a new way, or a new
thing in an old way. Dr. Drummond has achieved the truest of lyrical
successes; that of singing new songs, and in a new way. His poems are
idyls as true as those of Theocritus or Burns or our own poet of _The
Biglow Papers_."[142]
III
Greatly different from Riley, yet greatly like him in many ways, was
Eugene Field, in whom the lawlessness of the West and the culture of
the East met in strange confusion. Though of Western origin--he was
born at St. Louis in 1850--he spent the formative years of his life
between six and nineteen with his father's relatives at Amherst,
Massachusetts. He completed a year at Williams College, then, called
West by the death of his father, whose law practice at St. Louis had
been distinctive, he was put by his guardian into Knox College. After
a year he was transferred to the University of Missouri, but coming
of age at the close of his junior year, and his share of his father's
estate becoming available, he decided in the spring of 1872 to leave
college and travel in Europe. Accordingly, to quote his own words, he
spent "six months and [his] patrimony in France, Italy, Ireland, and
England."
As a general rule one should quote the autobiographical statements of
Eugene Field with extreme caution, but one can trust this bit of his
"Auto-analysis":
In May, 1873, I became a reporter on the St. Louis _Evening
Journal_. In October of that year I married Miss Julia
Sutherland Comstock of St. Joseph, Mo., at that time a girl of
sixteen. We have had eight children--three daughters and five
sons.
My newspaper connections have been as follows: 1875-76,
city editor of the St. Joseph (Mo.) _Gazette_; 1876-80,
editorial writer on the St. Louis _Journal_ and St. Louis
_Times-Journal_; 1880-81, managing editor of the Kansas City
Times; 1881-83, managing editor of the Denver _Tribune_. Since
1883 I have been a contributor to the Chicago Record (formerly
_Morning News_).[143]
His success with the Denver _Tribune_, to which he contributed such
widely copied work as that published in his first thin volume, _The
Tribune Primer_ (1882), attracted attention. He began to receive offers
from Eastern papers, one at least from Dana, editor of the New York
_Sun_, but it was not until Melville E. Stone offered him the humorous
column of his paper, the Chicago _News_, that Field decided to turn
eastward. He had begun to dream of a literary career and this dream,
always a vague one, for he was chained by poverty to a tyrannical
profession, seemed more possible in a less tense atmosphere than that
of the Western mining center. Arriving at Chicago in 1883, he set out
to make his new column a thing with distinction. _Flats and Sharps_ was
the name he gave it, and into it he poured a melange of all things:
poetry in every key, paragraphs on all subjects, parodies, hoaxes, mock
reviews, pseudo news, personals, jokes--everything. He threw himself
completely into the thing: it became his life work; "practically
everything he ever wrote appeared at one time or another in that
column."
But newspaper humor usually perishes with the flimsy leaves upon which
it is recorded. Not until Field had written "Little Boy Blue" in 1887
did he become at all known to the reading public. The publication
of the popular editions of _A Little Book of Profitable Tales_ and
_A Little Book of Western Verse_ in 1890, only five years before
his death, marks, perhaps, the time of his general acceptation as a
writer. Hardly had the public learned to know him before they were
called upon to mourn his early death. Indeed, the work by which he
is now best known was done almost all of it in the last six or seven
years of his life. It was only in this brief later period that he was
a "bibliomaniac" or a lover of Horace or a student of the old English
ballads.
One must classify Eugene Field first of all as a humorist, one of the
leading figures in that nondescript school of newspaper comedians that
has played such a part in the history of the period. To a personality
as high spirited and as whimsical as Artemus Ward's he added the
brilliancy of a Locker-Lampson and the improvidence of a Goldsmith as
well as the kindly heart. Seriousness seemed foreign to his nature:
his life was a perpetual series of hoaxes and practical jokes and
hilarious sallies. No one has surpassed him in the making of parodies,
of rollicking paraphrases and adaptations, in skilful blendings of
modern and antique, in clever minglings of seriousness and humor. He
was a maker of brilliant trifles and sparkling _non sequiturs_. His
irreverence is really startling at times. He can make the _Odes_
of Horace seem fit material for the funny column of a Chicago daily
newspaper:
Boy, I detest the Persian pomp;
I hate those linden-bark devices;
And as for roses, holy Moses!
They can't be got at living prices!
Myrtle is good enough for us,--
For _you_, as bearer of my flagon;
For _me_, supine beneath this vine,
Doing my best to get a jag on!
He is boon companion of the old Sabine poet. He slaps him on the back
and invites him to all kinds of costly revelry, assuring him that
Maecenas will pay the freight. And Horace by no means takes offense. He
is a congenial soul.
I might discourse
Till I was hoarse
Upon the cruelties of Venus;
'T were waste of time
As well as rime,
For you've been there yourself, Maecenas!
In the presence of such an incorrigible joker the reader feels always
that he must be on his guard. One is never safe. Leafing the pages of
the large collected edition of the poems, glancing over the Bret Harte
echoes like "Casey's Table D'Hote," smiling at such outrageous nonsense
as "The Little Peach" and "The Onion Tart," one suddenly draws a sharp
breath. At last the heart of Eugene Field:
Upon a mountain height, far from the sea,
I found a shell,
And to my listening ear the lonely thing
Ever a song of ocean seemed to sing,
Ever a tale of ocean seemed to tell.
* * * * *
Strange, was it not? Far from its native deep,
One song it sang,--
Sang of the awful mysteries of the tide,
Sang of the misty sea, profound and wide,--
Ever with echoes of the ocean rang.
And as the shell upon the mountain height
Sings of the sea,
So do I ever, leagues and leagues away,--
So do I ever, wandering where I may,--
Sing, O my home! sing, O my home! of thee.
A lyric worthy of any anthology. Yet one quickly finds that it is not
Eugene Field at all. He wrote it deliberately as a hoax, a practical
joke on Modjeska, who all the rest of her life was obliged to deny
the authorship which Field had cunningly fastened upon her. The case
is typical. Like Riley, the man is making copy. He uses pathos and
sentiment and the most sacred things as literary capital. One wonders
where one can draw the line. Was he really sincere in his child lyrics
and his bibliomaniac writings or was he cleverly playing a part?
In criticizing Field one must remember the essential immaturity of the
man. His frequent artificiality and his lack of sincerity came from
his boyishness and his high spirits. He looked at life from the angle
of mischievous boyhood. Moreover, he wrote always at the high tension
of the newspaper office, for a thing that had no memory, a column that
had but one demand--_more_! It bred in him what may be denominated,
perhaps, the ephemeral habit. He was all his life a man preeminently
and predominatingly of the present moment, and thus he stands a type of
the literary creator that was to follow him.
For Field more than any other writer of the period illustrates the way
the old type of literary scholar was to be modified and changed by the
newspaper. Every scrap of Field's voluminous product was written for
immediate newspaper consumption. He patronized not at all the literary
magazines, he wrote his books not at all with book intent--he made them
up from newspaper fragments. He wrote always a timely thing to the
people, a thing growing out of the present moment for the people to
read, making palatable for them even Horace and the severer classics.
He was thus one of the leading forces in what may be called that
democratizing of literature for which the period so largely stands.
He has been given a place far beyond his real deserts. The sentiment
of "Little Boy Blue" and the other child lyrics, the whimsical fun
and high spirits of his comic verse, endeared him to the public that
enjoyed Riley. Then his whimsical, Goldsmith-like personality helped
his fame, as did also his death, since it followed so quickly his late
discovery by the reading public that it gave the impression he had
been removed like Keats at the very opening of his career. He must be
rated, however, not for what he wrote, though a few pieces, like his
child lyrics and his bibliomaniac ballads, will continue long in the
anthologies, but for the influence he exerted. He was a pioneer in a
peculiar province: he stands for the journalization of literature, a
process that, if carried to its logical extreme, will make of the man
of letters a mere newspaper reporter.
IV
In his own estimation Field was distinctively a Western poet; he gave
to his poetry the name "Western verse"; and he refused the offers of
Dana and others because he was not at all in sympathy with the Eastern
ideals. To quote his biographer, he felt that Chicago "was as far East
as he could make his home without coming within the influence of those
social and literary conventions that have squeezed so much of genuine
literary flavor out of our literature."[144]
What New York might have made of Field we may learn, perhaps, from
the career of Henry Cuyler Bunner, for nearly twenty years the most
brilliant poetic wit in the East. He, too, had approached literature
from the journalistic entrance. At eighteen he had left school to begin
an apprenticeship on the brilliant but short-lived _Arcadian_, and at
twenty-two he was editor of the newly established _Puck_, a position
that he held until his death at forty-one.
No man ever turned off verse and prose with more facility or in greater
quantity. "The staff of the paper was very small, and little money
could be spent for outside contributions; and there were many weeks
when nearly half the whole number was written by Bunner."[145] Like
Field, he could write a poem while the office boy, who had brought
the order, stood waiting for the copy to carry back with him. For
more than ten years he furnished nearly all the humorous verse for
the periodical, besides numberless paragraphs, short stories, and
editorials. But he was more fastidious than Field, inasmuch as he kept
this journalistic material strictly unconnected with his name. It was
a thing alone of the editorial office, no more to be mingled with his
more literary product than Charles Lamb's India office books were to be
brought into his _Elia_ essays. The greater number of those who laughed
over the verses of the whimsical "V. Hugo Dusenberry, professional
poet," never once dreamed that he was H. C. Bunner, author of the
exquisite lyrics in _Airs from Arcady_ and _Rowen_, and the carefully
wrought stories--French in their atmosphere and their artistic
finish--_Short Sixes_ and _Love in Old Cloathes_. The skilful parodies
and timely renderings, the quips and puns--all the voluminous melange,
indeed, of the poetic Yorick--lie buried now in the files of _Puck_.
Their creator refused to republish them, and we to-day can but yield
to his wish and judge him only by that which he himself selected for
permanence.
Judged by this, Bunner undoubtedly is our chief writer of _vers de
societe_, our laureate of the trivial. He is restrained, refined,
faultless. He is of the artificial world, where fans flutter and
dancers glide and youth is perennial. Triolets penciled in the program
while the orchestra breathed its melody, epigrams over the tea-cups,
conceits for a fan, _amours de voyage_, lines written on the menu,
_amoretti_, valentines--these are his work, and no one has done them
more daintily or with more skill of touch. Trifles they are, to be
sure, yet Bunner, like every master of the form, makes of them more
than trifles. A hint of tears there may be, the faintest breath of
irony, the suspicion, vague as an intuition, of satire or facetiousness
or philosophy, the high spirits and the carelessness of youth, yet
a flash here and there into the deeps of life as, for instance, in
"Betrothed" and "A Poem in the Programme," and "She was a Beauty in the
Days when Madison was President."
The French forms, imported echoes of Dobson and Lang and
Gosse--ballades, rondels, rondeaux, and the like, that so bewitched the
younger poets of the mid-eighties--found in Bunner perhaps their most
skilful American devotee. Perhaps no one but he has ever succeeded in
English with the chant royal, or has found it possible to throw into
that most trivial of all verse forms, triolets, a throb of life, as in
"A Pitcher of Mignonette":
A pitcher of mignonette
In a tenement's highest casement:
Queer sort of flower-pot--yet
That pitcher of mignonette
Is a garden in heaven set,
To the little sick child in the basement--
The pitcher of mignonette,
In the tenement's highest casement.
The period, especially in its later years, has run abundantly to these
trivial, though difficult, forms of verse. As poetry ceased more and
more to be a thing of vision and compelling power, it became more
and more a thing of daintiness and brilliancy. The American _Lyra
Elegantiarum_ for the period has been more sparkling and abundant than
the English, more even than the French. John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887)
belongs almost wholly to the days of Holmes and Lowell, but the greater
number of our trivial makers fall into the group that was active during
the closing quarter of the century. To mention all of them would be
to call the roll of the younger American poets. Perhaps the most
noteworthy, however, are Mary Mapes Dodge (1838-1905), whose dainty and
tender "The Minuet" gives her a place in the choir; James Jeffrey Roche
(1847-1908); Walter Learned (1847----); Richard Kendall Munkittrick
(1853-1911); Samuel Minturn Peck (1854----), in many respects the most
delightful of the group; Clinton Scollard (1860----); John Kendrick
Bangs (1862----), and such modern instances as Oliver Herford, Gelett
Burgess, and Carolyn Wells. One might, indeed, collect a notable
anthology of _vers de societe_ from the files of _Life_ alone.
V
A large amount of the poetry of the era has been written by women.
After the war their thin volumes, bound in creamy vellum and daintily
tinted cloth, began more and more to fill the book tables, until
reviewers no longer could give separate notice to them, but must
consider the poets of a month in groups of ten or twelve. The quality
of the feminine product was high enough to find place in the most
exclusive monthlies, and the quantity published was surprising. The
_Atlantic Monthly_, for instance, during the decade from 1870 published
108 poems by Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Aldrich, and
450 other poems, and of the latter 201 were by women. The feminine
novelists and short story writers, so conspicuous during all the
period, were, indeed, almost all poets, some of them voluminous. One
may note the names not only of the older group--Mrs. Stuart Phelps
Ward, Mrs. Cooke, Mrs. Spofford, Miss Woolson--but of such later
writers as Mrs. Freeman, Alice Brown, Mrs. Deland, and Mrs. Riggs.
Very little of this mass of poetry has been strong enough to demand
republication from the dainty volumes in which it first appeared. It
has been smooth and often melodious, but for the most part it has been
conventional. Prevailingly it has been short lyric song in minor key,
gentle and sentimental--graceful exercises in verse rather than voices
from a soul stirred to utterance and caring not. In a sonneteering age
this feminine contingent has swelled enormously the volume of sonnets.
Helen Hunt Jackson's thin volume contains one hundred, Louise Chandler
Moulton's one hundred and thirty-one, yet in both collections occurs no
sonnet one would dream of adding to the select few that undoubtedly are
worth while. Here and there in Mrs. Jackson a bit of work like "Poppies
on the Wheat," "Glimpses," "Vashti," that rises, perhaps, a little
above the level monotony of the times, but in the vital seventies in
America why should one have published sonnets? Even as she was shaping
them, Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was demanding in major key,
How long, and yet how long,
Our leaders will we hail from over seas,
Masters and kings from feudal monarchies,
And mock their ancient song
With echoes weak of foreign melodies?
* * * * *
This fresh young world I see,
With heroes, cities, legends of her own;
With a new race of men, and overblown
By winds from sea to sea,
Decked with the majesty of every zone.
* * * * *
The distant siren-song
Of the green island in the eastern sea,
Is not the lay for this new chivalry.
It is not free and strong
To chant on prairies 'neath this brilliant sky.
The echo faints and fails;
It suiteth not, upon this western plain,
Our voice or spirit; we should stir again
The wilderness, and make the vales
Resound unto a yet unheard-of strain.
The life of Emma Lazarus was brief and externally eventless. Born
in New York City in a home of refinement and wealth, as a child
precocious, inclined to seriousness, intense, she passed her early life
among books rather than among companions. At seventeen she had issued a
collection of verses, melancholy even above the usual poetry of women,
valueless utterly; then at twenty-one she had published again, now a
long poem, Greek in its chaste beauty, _Admetus_, inscribed "To My
Friend Ralph Waldo Emerson." Two forces were contending, even as they
had contended in Heine. In Paris in later years before the Venus of the
Louvre she wrote a sonnet, and, miracle among modern sonnets, it is
impassioned, unfettered, alive--a woman's soul:
... I saw not her alone,
Serenely poised on her world-worshiped throne,
As when she guided once her dove-drawn car,--
But at her feet a pale, death-stricken Jew,
Her life adorer, sobbed farewell to love.
Here _Heine_ wept! Here still he weeps anew,
Nor ever shall his shadow lift or move,
While mourns one ardent heart, one poet-brain,
For vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain.
Until 1876 quiet emotion, Hellenic beauty, romance without passion.
"Tannhaeuser" suggests William Morris and _The Earthly Paradise_. Then
came _The Spagnioletto_, a tense drama, which showed for the first time
the latent embers in her Hebraic soul. It needed but a breath to kindle
them and that breath came with reports of the Jewish massacres of 1879.
No more of Hellenism. With Liebhaid in _The Dance of Death_, that most
tense drama in American literature, she could cry out:
No more of that.
I am all Israel's now--till this cloud pass,
I have no thought, no passion, no desire,
Save for my people.
Henceforth fiery lyrics of denunciation, rallying cries, translations
of Hebrew prophets, songs of encouragement and cheer, as "The Crowing
of the Red Cock," "In Exile," "The New Ezekiel," "The Valley of Baca,"
and, most Hebraic of all, "The Banner of the Jew," with its ringing
lines:
Oh, for Jerusalem's trumpet now,
To blow a blast of shattering power,
To wake the sleepers high and low,
And rouse them to the urgent hour!
No hand for vengeance--but to save,
A million naked swords should wave.
The fire was too intense for the frail, sensitive body. Suddenly, like
Heine, she was on a "mattress grave," powerless, though never so eager,
never so quivering with burning message. She died at thirty-eight.
No more impetuous and Hebraic lines in the literature of the period
than hers. Often she achieved a distinction of phrase and an
inevitableness of word and of rhythm denied to all but the truest
of poets. No other American woman has surpassed her in passion, in
genuineness of emotion, in pure lyric effect.
Other impassioned singers there have been. Ella Wheeler Wilcox
(1855----) wrote of love with lyric abandon, but she mingled too much
of sentimentality and all too much of posing and of tawdriness. Anne
Reeve Aldrich (1866-1892) in _Songs About Life, Love, and Death_ struck
deeper notes, and Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832-1911), though she wrote
exceedingly much in the key of the conventional mid-century sadness and
longing, yet now and then sent forth lyrics that laid bare her woman's
soul.
One may not dismiss so confidently Celia Thaxter, the poet of the
_Isles of Shoals_. She was, to be sure, no dominating voice in the
period, no poet with whom distinction of phrase and poetic melody
were native and spontaneous. Rather was she of the Jean Ingelow type,
feminine, domestic, tremulous with sentiment. In one area, however,
she commanded: her poetry of the sea was autochthonic, and it sprang
not from books, but from her life. Her childhood she had passed in
the seclusion of the lighthouse keeper's home on White Island, a
storm-beaten rock off the New Hampshire coast. For months at a time
no visitors came save the sea gulls and the migrating birds. Her
companion through all her young girlhood was the ocean. She grew to
know intimately all its thousand moods, the sea gardens along the rocks
at low tide, the ships that hovered like clouds on the horizon, the
flowers in the rock crannies, the sandpipers that flitted before her on
the beach. The birds that flew against the lantern of the lighthouse on
migrating nights furnished the first tragedy of her life:
Many a May morning have I wandered about the rock at the
foot of the tower, mourning over a little apron brimful of
sparrows, swallows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged blackbirds,
many-colored warblers and fly-catchers, beautifully clothed
yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, even the purple finch
and scarlet tanager and golden oreole, and many more
besides--enough to break the heart of a small child to think
of![146]
No ordinary child, this lonely little islander. The lure of the sea
possessed her, the terror of its storms, the beauty of its summer
moods, the multitudinous variety of its voice. "Many a summer morning
have I crept out of the still house before any one was awake, and,
wrapping myself closely from the chill wind of dawn, climbed to the top
of the high cliff called the Head to watch the sunrise." It was this
communion with the sea that awoke the poet soul within her:
Ever I longed to _speak_ these things that made life so sweet,
to speak the wind, the cloud, the bird's flight, the sea's
murmur. A vain longing! I might as well have sighed for the
mighty pencil of Michel Angelo to wield in my impotent child's
hand. Better to "hush and bless one's self with silence"; but
ever the wish grew. Facing the July sunsets, deep red and
golden through and through, or watching the summer northern
lights--battalions of brilliant streamers, advancing and
retreating, shooting upward to the zenith, and glowing like
fiery veils before the stars; or when the fog bow spanned the
silver mist of morning, or the earth and sea lay shimmering in
a golden haze of noon; in storm or calm, by day or night, the
manifold aspects of Nature held me and swayed all my thoughts
until it was impossible to be silent any longer, and I was fain
to mingle my voice with her myriad voices, only aspiring to be
in accord with the Infinite harmony, however feeble and broken
the notes might be.[147]
The first poem of hers to gain the ear of the public was "Land-Locked,"
accepted by Lowell and published in the _Atlantic_, March, 1861. Its
closing stanzas ring with sincerity. It is the voice of every inland
dweller whose youth has been spent by the sea:
Neither am I ungrateful; but I dream
Deliciously how twilight falls to-night
Over the glimmering water, how the light
Dies blissfully away, until I seem
To feel the wind, sea-scented, on my cheek,
To catch the sound of dusky flapping sail
And dip of oars, and voices on the gale
Afar off, calling low--my name they speak!
O Earth! thy summer song of joy may soar
Ringing to heaven in triumph. I but crave
The sad, caressing murmur of the wave
That breaks in tender music on the shore.
About all her poetry of the sea there are genuineness and truth to
experience. All of them are fragments of autobiography: "Off Shore,"
"The Wreck of the Pocahontas," "The Sandpiper," "Watching," "At the
Breakers' Edge," "The Watch of Boon Island," "Leviathan"--all of them
have in them the heart of the northern Atlantic. They are not deep like
Whitman's mighty voicings, but they are the cry of one who knew and
loved the sea better than any other American who has ever written about
it.
Her prose study _Among the Isles of Shoals_, overflorid though it may
be in places, is nevertheless one of the notable books of the period.
Nowhere may one find so complete a picture of the northern ocean in all
its moods and aspects. Its pictures of storm and wreck, its glimpses of
the tense and hazardous life of dwellers by the ocean, its disclosings
of the mystery and the subtle lure of the sea, stir one at times like
the deeper notes of poetry.
One of the most perplexing of later poetic problems came in 1890 with
the publication by Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the posthumous poetry
of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). The explanation by Higginson that the
poet was a daughter of the treasurer of Amherst College, that she was
a recluse "literally spending years without setting her foot beyond
the doorstep and many more years during which her walks were strictly
limited to her father's grounds," and that she had written "verses in
great abundance," refusing, however, save in three or four instances,
to allow any of them to be published, that she wrote "absolutely
without thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the
writer's own mind,"--all this aroused curiosity. At last one might see,
perchance, a woman's soul.
The poems are disappointing. Critics have echoed Higginson, until Emily
Dickinson has figured, often at length, in all the later histories
and anthologies, but it is becoming clear that she was overrated.
To compare her eccentric fragments with Blake's elfin wildness is
ridiculous. They are mere conceits, vague jottings of a brooding mind;
they are crudely wrought, and, like their author's letters, which were
given to the public later, they are colorless and for the most part
lifeless. They reveal little either of Emily Dickinson or of human life
generally. They should have been allowed to perish as their author
intended.
Most of the feminine poets of the later generation have been
over-literary. There is grace and finish in the work of Louise Imogen
Guiney (1861----), but nowhere in all her carefully selected final
volume, _Happy Ending_, are there lines that suddenly send the pulses
into quicker beat and haunt the memory. It is beautiful, but it is of
a piece with ten thousand other beautiful pieces; there is nothing
to compel the reader, nothing to lead him into fresh fields. Of all
too many of the later feminine poets may we say this: of Ina Donna
Coolbrith, for instance, and Helen Gray Cone (1859----), Dora Read
Goodale (1866----), Katharine Lee Bates (1859----).
Only one other feminine singer has done work that compels attention,
Edith Matilda Thomas (1854----). Only by birth and rearing was she
of Ohio. To read her poems is to be transported into that no-man's
land which so many poets have called Arcady. She is more Greek than
American. She has reacted little upon her time, and she might be
dismissed with mere mention were there not in many of her poems a lyric
distinction that has been rare in American poetry. A fragment from her
work will make this clearer than exposition. Here, for instance, are
the opening stanzas of "Syrinx":
Come forth, too timid spirit of the reed!
Leave thy plashed coverts and elusions shy,
And find delight at large in grove and mead.
No ambushed harm, no wanton's peering eye,
The shepherd's uncouth god thou needst not fear--
Pan has not passed this way for many a year.
'Tis but the vagrant wind that makes thee start,
The pleasure-loving south, the freshening west;
The willow's woven veil they softly part,
To fan the lily on the stream's warm breast:
No ruder stir, no footstep pressing near--
Pan has not passed this way for many a year.
Unlooked-for music indeed from the banks of the Ohio. Her muse was
remote, unimpassioned, classical, yet no lyrist of the period has had
more of the divine poetic gift of expression. She seems curiously out
of place in the headlong West in those stormy closing years of the
nineteenth century.
V
Belated singers of the mid-century music were Richard Watson Gilder
(1844-1909), Edward Roland Sill (1841-1887), George E. Woodberry
(1855----), and Henry Van Dyke (1852----), all of them poets like Miss
Thomas, who were remote from their era, workers in art and beauty
rather than voices and leaders.
One may pause long with Gilder. No other man of his generation did so
much to turn the direction of the period and to determine its nature.
As managing editor of _Scribner's Monthly_ from the first number to
the last, and then after the death of Holland, editor of the _Century
Magazine_, he exerted for twenty-eight years an influence upon American
letters that cannot be overestimated. In a way he is the central
literary figure of the period, even more so than Dr. Holland. More
than any one else he was responsible for the revolution in magazine
management for which the period stands, and more than any one else he
helped to gather the new school of novelists and short story writers
and poets that made the era distinctive. He was the James T. Fields of
the national period.
He was first of all an editor, then he was a humanitarian, active
in all movements for city betterment, then he was a poet. Beginning
with _The New Day_ in 1875, he issued many small volumes of delicate
verse, mystical often in tone, always serious, always artistic. That he
knew the divine commission of the poet he revealed in his volume _The
Celestial Passion_, 1878:
Dost thou not know this is the poet's lot:
Mid sounds of war--in halcyon times of peace--
To strike the ringing lyre and not to cease;
In hours of general happiness to swell
The common joy; and when the people cry
With piteous voice loud to the pitiless sky,
'Tis his to frame the universal prayer
And breathe the balm of song upon the accursed air?
But he himself seemed not bound by this ideal of the poet. His
carefully wrought verses add little that is new, and little that
may be understood by those for whom a poet should sing. They lack
substance, the _Zeitgeist_, masculinity. Stedman could say that they
are "marked by the mystical beauty, intense emotion, and psychological
emotion of the elect _illuminati_," but the criticism, even were it
true, was condemnatory. Gilder's definition did not mention the "elect
_illuminati_."
It is depressing to think that this most virile of men, who was the
tireless leader of his generation in so many beneficent fields of
activity, must be judged in the coming periods solely by this volume of
poems. For classic poetry was not his life-work, not his enthusiasm,
not himself--it was a rarely furnished room in the heart of his home,
rather, where at times he might retire from the tumult and enjoy the
beauty he had gathered in the realms of gold. He was not a poet,
singing inevitable lines, spontaneous and inspired. His poems lacked
lyric distinction, that compelling quality that sinks a poem into the
reader's soul, and, lacking it, they have little hope for permanence.
They are finished always and coldly beautiful, but finish and beauty
are not enough. So it is with George E. Woodberry's polished work, and
Father Tabb's. It is not vital with the life of an epoch, it is not the
voice of a soul deeply stirred with a new and compelling message. All
too often it has come from deliberate effort; it is a mere performance.
With the work of Edward Rowland Sill one must be less positive. Here
we find conflict, reaction, spontaneous expression. He was by no means
a voice of his era, a robust shouter like Whitman and Miller: he was
a gentle, retiring soul who felt out of place in his generation.
Seriousness had come to him as a birthright. Behind him were long lines
of Connecticut Puritans. He was frail, moreover, of physique, with a
shrinking that was almost feminine from all that was discordant and
assertive. After his graduation at Yale, the poet of his class, in
1861, he was unable to settle upon a profession. He attempted theology,
and then, disillusioned, for bare support he drifted into teaching.
Year after year passed with the problem unsettled, until he awoke to
find that teaching was to be his life-work. He had hidden among the
children in the schoolroom, and the things he had dreamed over had
passed him by. His external biography is largely a list of schools and
positions. At forty-six he died.
Poetry to Sill was a peculiarly personal thing, almost as much so as it
was to Emily Dickinson. He was not eager to publish, and much that he
did send to the magazines bore other names than his own. He wrote, as
Thoreau wrote his journal, with simple directness for himself and the
gods, and as a result we have in his work the inner history of a human
soul. There is no artificiality, no sentimental vaporings, no posing
for effect. It is not art; it is life.
Here is poetry of struggle, poetry not of the spirit of an epoch but
of the life of an individual at odds with the epoch, introspective,
personal. One thinks of Clough, who also was a teacher, a gentle soul
oppressed with doubts and fears, a struggler in the darkness of the
late nineteenth century. But Sill was less masculine than Clough. His
doubtings are gentle and half apologetic. Never is he bitter or excited
or impetuous. To such robust climaxes as "Say not the Struggle Naught
Availeth" he is incapable of rising: he broods, but he is resigned. He
exhorts himself deliberately to cheerfulness and faith and to heights
of manhood where all that is low may fall away. Erotic passion has no
part in his work. He has deliberately conquered it:
Is my life but Marguerite's ox-eyed flower,
That I should stand and pluck and fling away,
One after one, the petal of each hour,
Like a love-dreamy girl, and only say,
"Loves me," and "loves me not," and "loves me"? Nay!
Let the man's mind awake to manhood's power.
No poet has shrunk more sensitively from the realistic, material age
of which he was a part than Sill. His poems deal with the realm of
the spirit rather than with the tangible. They are without time and
place and material basis. One may illustrate with the poems he wrote
for Yale gatherings. They are colorless: change but the name and they
would apply as well to Harvard or Princeton. Read in connection with
Hovey's dramatic, intensely individual Dartmouth poems and they seem
like beautiful clouds. They are serious, often over-serious, they have
no trace of humor, they deal with the soul life of one upon whom the
darkness threatens constantly to fall.
His claim to remembrance comes not from lyrical inspiration, for he
was not lyrically gifted. He lacked what Gilder and Woodberry lacked.
Once in a while he made a stanza that approaches lyric distinction, as,
perhaps, in this final one of "A Foolish Wish":
'Tis a child's longing, on the beach at play:
"Before I go,"
He begs the beckoning mother, "Let me stay
One shell to throw!"
'Tis coming night; the great sea climbs the shore--
Ah, let me toss one little pebble more,
Before I go!
But not often lines so inevitable. His power came largely from the
beauty and purity of his own personality. His own conception of a poem
was, that "coming from a pure and rich nature, it shall leave us purer
and richer than it found us." Judged by such a standard, Sill holds a
high place among the poets. Nothing that he has written but leaves us
purer and richer of soul and more serious before the problems of life.
Eight or ten of his lyrics for a long time undoubtedly will hold their
place among the very highest pieces of American reflective poetry.
It was the opinion of Edmund Gosse that the period was notably
deficient in serious verse.[148] No statement could be more wide of
the mark; the period has abounded in serious poetry and its quality
has been high. To consider in detail this mass of poetry, however,
were to exceed our limits. We can only single out one here and there a
little more notable than the others--John Boyle O'Reilly (1844-1890),
for instance, with his Celtic fancy and his graphic power to depict
life in the Southern Seas; Maurice Francis Egan (1852----) and Lloyd
Mifflin (1846----), makers of beautiful and thoughtful sonnets; S.
Weir Mitchell (1829-1914), a poet of rare distinction as well as a
novelist; Frank Dempster Sherman (1860-1916), maker of madrigals and
joyous lyrics; Charles Warren Stoddard (1825-1903), whose songs have a
lyric quality that is distinctive, and Abram Joseph Ryan (1839-1886), a
beautiful and heroic soul, who had he written but a single lyric would
occupy a high place among American poets. His "The Conquered Banner"
was the voice of a people:
Furl that Banner, softly, slowly!
Treat it gently--it is holy--
For it droops above the dead.
Touch it not--unfold it never--
Let it droop there, furled forever,
For its people's hopes are fled.
VI
The two most prominent younger poets of the South were Robert Burns
Wilson (1850-1916) and Madison Cawein (1865-1914), both residents
of Kentucky, one at Frankfort, the other at Louisville, and both
contemplative Nature poets who voiced but little the spirit of their
period. Of the two, Wilson undoubtedly was the most inspired singer, as
Cawein was the most careful observer of Nature.
Of Wilson we may say that he was a later Thomas Buchanan Read, a
devotee of art, a painter of landscapes and portraits, whose work
was seen in many distinctive galleries, and in addition to this a
poet--most pictorial of poets, whose stanzas seem like inscriptions for
his paintings. When the lyrics "When Evening Cometh On" and "June Days"
appeared in _Harper's_ in 1885, it was felt that a new singer had come.
There was distinction in the lines, there was restraint, there was more
than promise, there was already fulfilment. One feels a quality in a
stanza like this that he may not explain:
Though all the birds be silent--though
The fettered stream's soft voice be still,
And on the leafless bough the snow
Be rested, marble-like and chill--
Yet will the fancy build from these
The transient but well-pleasing dream
Of leaf and bloom among the trees,
And sunlight glancing on the stream.
It has somehow the singing quality that may not be learned, that may
not be taught. Finer still when there is joined with it graphic power
that arrests and pleases the eye, and pathos that grips hard the heart,
as in a lyric like this:
Such is the death the soldier dies:
He falls--the column speeds away;
Upon the dabbled grass he lies,
His brave heart following, still, the fray.
The smoke-wraiths drift among the trees,
The battle storms along the hill;
The glint of distant arms he sees;
He hears his comrades shouting still.
A glimpse of far-borne flags, that fade
And vanish in the rolling din:
He knows the sweeping charge is made,
The cheering lines are closing in.
Unmindful of his mortal wound,
He faintly calls and seeks to rise;
But weakness drags him to the ground--
Such is the death the soldier dies.
Wilson's poetic product was small, but it stands distinctive.
The work of Cawein has been far more widely trumpeted. He had the good
fortune to attract the attention of Howells with his first book and to
be commended by him persistently and with no uncertain voice. "There
is much that is expressive of the new land," Howells wrote in "The
Editor's Study," "as well as of the young life in its richly sensuous,
boldly achieved pieces of color. In him one is sensible (or seems so)
of something different from the beautiful as literary New England
or literary New York conceived it. He is a fresh strain."[149] He
deplored the gorgeous excesses of the poems and the touches for merely
decorative effect, but he defended them as the natural exuberance of
extreme youth. With time they would disappear: undoubtedly a great poet
had arisen. Thus encouraged, Cawein began upon a poetic career that
in single-hearted devotion to the lyric muse has been equaled only
by Clinton Scollard. Before his death he had issued more than twenty
volumes of lyrics and his collected work had been published in five
thick volumes.
The final estimate of the poet cannot yet be written. It is too
soon, but even now one may venture certain predictions. Cawein wrote
enormously too much, and he wrote all too often with merely literary
intent. He was not a lyrist born: he had little ear for music, and he
blended meters and made rimes seemingly with the eye alone. One can not
feel that a passage like this, for instance, sang itself spontaneously:
Seemed that she
Led me along a flower-showered lea
Trammeled with puckered pansy and the pea;
Where poppies spread great blood-red stain on stain,
So gorged with sunlight and the honied rain
Their hearts are weary; roses lavished beams
Roses, wherein were huddled little dreams
That laughed coy, sidewise merriment, like dew
Or from fair fingers fragrant kisses blew.
There is a straining constantly for the unusual in epithet, a seeking
for a picturing adjective that shall give verisimilitude in an utterly
new way. "The songs have all been sung," he would seem to argue, "but
the picturing adjectives have not all been used and the striking
conceits." One might open at random for an illustration:
Athwart a sky of brass long welts of gold;
A bullion bulk the wide Ohio lies.
Up from the glimmering east the full moon swung,
A golden bubble buoyed zenithward.
Between the pansy fire of the west,
And poppy mist of moonrise in the east,
This heartache will have ceased.
"It is as if we had another Keats," says Howells, and in saying it he
touches the fatal weakness of the poet. There is lack of virility in
great parts of his work, there is lack of definiteness and of vigor.
He tells nothing new and he adds nothing to the old by his telling.
Even Baskerville can say, "There is little or no Southern, not to say
Kentucky, atmosphere in Mr. Cawein's poetry. His flowers and birds
and rocks and trees do not appear to us as objects of the rich, warm
Southern nature. He frequently mentions the whole register of flowers
and birds in his poetry--almost, we might say, drags them into his
descriptions by force--but he has not created a warm, genial, Southern
poetic atmosphere in which they may thrive."[150]
Nevertheless, it is only in his Nature poetry that he is at all
convincing. He can paint a summer noon, or a summer shower, and he can
detail minutely the flowers and the mosses and the birds in an old
fence corner or an old garden. Pictures like this have, undoubtedly, a
certain kind of value:
Bubble-like the hollyhocks
Budded, burst, and flaunted wide
Gipsy beauty from their stocks;
Morning-glories, bubble-dyed,
Swung in honey-hearted flocks.
Tawny tiger-lilies flung
Doublets slashed with crimson on;
Graceful girl slaves, fair and young,
Like Circassians, in the sun
Alabaster lilies swung.
Ah, the droning of the bee
In his dusty pantaloons,
Tumbling in the fleurs-de-lis;
In the drowsy afternoons
Dreaming in the pink sweet-pea.
Always is he heavy with adjectives, profuse, gorgeous; always is he
dreamy and remote. One turns page after page of the thick volumes of
the collected lyrics to find some simple human bit that came hot from
the heart of a poet, some stanza that compels quotation, but one gets
lost at length in the maze of sweetness. If any of his poems are to
outlast their generation it will be some of the Nature pieces, but
landscape studies, flower songs, and pretty conceits about bees and
birds are thin material of which to make enduring poetry.
VII
With Richard Hovey (1864-1900), representative of the poets of the
second generation of the National period, our survey closes. Hovey was
a later Lanier, excited, impetuous, possessed by poetry until it ruled
all his thinking. Like Lanier, he was Gallic of temperament rather than
Teutonic. He read enormously--the Elizabethans, Tennyson, Whitman, the
pre-Raphaelites, Dobson, Kipling, and later, in France, Paul Verlaine,
Maeterlinck, Stephane Mallarme, and all the later symbolists. After his
college course at Dartmouth he was, at brief intervals, theological
student, newspaper reporter, actor, lecturer in Alcott's Concord
school of philosophy, and in his last year, like Lanier, professor of
literature in one of the larger universities--Barnard College, New
York--yet his one profession all his life long was poetry. His facility
was marvelous. He wrote an elegy of purest Greek type and he added a
canto to _Don Juan_; he wrote Arthurian masques and dramas and then
rollicking Bohemian songs and _vers de societe_.
His facility was his weakness. Like Lanier he was too excited, too
given to improvisation and the blending of meters. His dramatic
interludes like _The Quest of Merlin_ and _Taliesin_ are marvelous in
their workmanship, their mastery of all the intricacies of prosody,
but they come near to being void of human interest. Lanier dominated
his first poem _The Laurel_ and there are echoes of Whitman and others
in his later work. He matured slowly. At his death he had arrived at a
point where there was promise of creative work of highest distinction.
He was breaking from his Bohemianism and his excited Swinburnian music
and was touching his time. His definition of poetry makes his early
death seem like a tragedy. Of the poet he wrote, "It is not his mission
to write elegant canzonettas for the delectation of the Sybaritic
dilettanti, but to comfort the sorrowful and hearten the despairing, to
champion the oppressed and declare to humanity its inalienable rights,
to lay open to the world the heart of man, all its heights and depths,
all its glooms and glories, to reveal the beauty in things and breathe
into his fellows a love of it and so a love of Him whose manifestation
it is.... In the appointed work of every people, the poets have been
the leaders and pioneers."[151]
His most finished work is his elegy on the death of Thomas William
Parsons, _Seaward_, which at times has a lyric quality that brings it
into the company even of _Adonais_ and _Thyrsis_. One is tempted to
quote more than a single stanza:
Far, far, so far, the crying of the surf!
Still, still, so still, the water in the grass!
Here on the knoll the crickets in the turf
And one bold squirrel barking, seek, alas!
To bring the swarming summer back to me.
In vain; my heart is on the salt morass
Below, that stretches to the sunlit sea.
His most spontaneous and original outbursts are doubtless his Dartmouth
lyrics--a series distinctive among college poetry, worthy of a place
beside Dr. Holmes's Harvard lyrics--and his rollicking convivial songs
that have in them the very soul of good fellowship. There is in all he
wrote a Whitman-like masculinity. He could make even so conventional a
thing as a sonnet a thing to stir the blood with:
When I am standing on a mountain crest,
Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray,
My love of you leaps foaming in my breast,
Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray;
My heart bounds with the horses of the sea,
And plunges in the wild ride of the night,
Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee
That rides out Fate and welcomes gods to flight.
Ho, love! I laugh aloud for love of you,
Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather;
No fretful orchid hot-housed from the dew,
But hale and hearty as the highland heather,
Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills,
Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills.
He is the singer of men--of Western men, red-blooded and free--the very
opposite of Cawein. He wrote songs to be sung in barrack rooms and at
college reunions--songs of comradeship and masculine joy:
Give a rouse, then, in the Maytime
For a life that knows no fear!
Turn night-time into daytime
With the sunlight of good cheer!
For it's always fair weather
When good fellows get together
With a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear.
And again this
Comrades, give a cheer to-night,
For the dying is with dawn!
Oh, to meet the stars together,
With the silence coming on!
Greet the end
As a friend a friend
When strong men die together.
His Launcelot and Guenevere cycle, which was to be complete in nine
dramas, only four of which he lived to finish, though undoubtedly
the best was yet to come, has in it enough of strength to make for
itself, fragment as it is, a high place in our literature. The dramas
are in different key from Tennyson's. In the _Idyls of the King_ the
old legend is domesticated and the table round is turned into a tea
table. Hovey in his _Marriage of Guenevere_ and _The Birth of Galahad_
puts virile power into his knights, makes of Launcelot the hero of the
cycle, and gives to Guenevere a reality that is Shakespearian. Few
indeed have been the poets of the younger school who have dared to plan
on so grand a scale or to venture to offer something new in a field
that has been so thoroughly exploited.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
WILL CARLETON. (1845-1912.) _Poems_, 1871; _Farm Ballads_, 1873;
_Farm Legends_, 1875; _Young Folks' Centennial Rhymes_, 1876;
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JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY. (1849-1916.) _The Old Swimmin'-Hole_, 1883;
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of Eugene Field_. Sabine Edition. Ten vols. 1896. The Poems of
Eugene Field, Complete Editions. One volume. 1910. _Eugene Field,
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HENRY CUYLER BUNNER. (1855-1896.) _A Woman of Honor_, 1883; _Airs
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Stories_, 1891; _Rowen: Second-Crop Songs_, 1892; _Made in
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EMMA LAZARUS. (1849-1887.) _Poems and Translations_, 1866;
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_Songs of a Semite_, 1882; _Poems of Emma Lazarus_, 1888.
CELIA THAXTER. (1836-1894.) _Poems_, 1872; _Among the Isles of
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EDITH M. THOMAS. (1854----.) _A New Year's Masque_, 1884; _The
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_In the Young World_, 1895; _Winter Swallow; with Other Verse_,
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RICHARD WATSON GILDER. (1844-1909.) _The New Day_, 1875; _The
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_Poems_, 1887; _Two Worlds, and Other Poems_, 1891; _Great
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_For the Country_, 1897; _In Palestine and Other Poems_, 1898;
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EDWARD ROLAND SILL. (1841-1887.) _The Hermitage and Other Poems_,
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MADISON JULIUS CAWEIN. (1865-1914.) _Blooms of the Berry_, 1887;
_The Triumph of Music and Other Lyrics_, 1888; _Accolon of Gaul
and Other Poems_, 1889; _Lyrics and Idyls_, 1890; _Days and
Dreams_, 1891; _Poems of Nature and Love_, 1893; _Intuitions
of the Beautiful_, 1895; _White Snake and Other Poems_, from
the German, 1895; _Garden of Dreams_, 1896; _Undertones_, 1896;
_Shapes and Shadows_, 1898; _Myth and Romance, a Book of Verses_,
1899; _One Day and Another_, 1901; _Weeds by the Wall_, 1901; _A
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1905; _In Prose and Verse_, 1906; _Poems_, 5 volumes, 1908;
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RICHARD HOVEY. (1864-1900.) _The Laurel: an Ode_, 1889;
_Launcelot and Guenevere: a Poem in Dramas_, 1891; _Seaward:
an Elegy on the Death of Thomas William Parsons_, 1893; _Songs
from Vagabondia_ [with Bliss Carman], 1894; _More Songs from
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1898; _The Marriage of Guenevere_, 1898; _The Birth of Galahad_,
1898; _Along the Trail: Book of Lyrics_, 1898; _Last Songs from
Vagabondia_ [with Bliss Carman], 1900; _Taliesin_, 1900; _Along
the Trail_, 1907; _Launcelot and Guenevere: a Poem in Dramas_, 5
vols., 1907; _To the End of the Trail_, 1908.