SOME METROPOLITAN POETS
In the metropolitan group of the latter half of the nineteenth century
Bryant was dominant until his death in 1878. Other conspicuous
representatives were Bayard Taylor (1825-1878), Richard Henry Stoddard
(1825-1903), Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908), Thomas Bailey Aldrich
(1836-1907) in his early career, and--with a difference--Richard Watson
Gilder (1844-1909). None of these men was born and brought up in New
York, and none but Gilder partook of the nature of the town as Irving
and even Bryant and Halleck had been able to do in the preceding
generation when it was more compact and unified. Taylor clung to the
idea of establishing a manorial estate at Kennett Square, Pennsylvania,
but lived more or less in New York and buzzed restlessly about the
literary market until he died a victim of overwork in 1878. Stoddard,
more stable and unexcited than Taylor or than Stedman, was occupied
in a succession of uninspired literary ventures. Aldrich, after a
few years, returned to Boston, where he was happier, although always
consciously a newcomer. Stedman devoted as much time and energy to
poetry as his unsuccessful efforts to become independently rich would
allow him. These men were in a way the first American literary victims
to "Newyorkitis." Only Richard Watson Gilder succeeded in coping with
the great city. The others were not only unable to impress their stamp
on the city of their adoption but were engulfed by it. In the midst of
the turmoil they could not enjoy the serenity which prevailed in those
same days in the Boston or the Charleston where cultural pursuits were
held in higher esteem than commercial activity.
They were in the midst of a different cultural atmosphere. Bryant,
Irving, Halleck, and Greeley led the way for a succeeding group of
self-educated men. The New England writers of the day had been schooled
at Harvard and Bowdoin and certain German universities, and the
cultured men of Charleston were going abroad for study and travel in
increasing numbers. In the midst of all the hurly-burly of New York
there was no dominant circle who were disposed to take time for the
leisurely contemplation of the finer things in art and life, and the
art and life of New York suffered in consequence. In spite of all that
had been said for generations about the employment of American subject
matter, these men turned away from either the romance or the realities
of the town. Except in rare instances they did not even satirize it.
Instead they took refuge in sentimentalism and in remote times and
places. "The Ballad of Babie Bell," "Ximen, or the Battle of the
Sierra Morena, and Other Poems," "Poems of the Orient," "The Blameless
Prince," "Poems Lyric and Idyllic," "Königsmark, and Other Poems," "The
King's Bell," and "The Book of the East" were the natural output of
such a group. Moreover, the plays were of the same sort. "Tortesa the
Usurer," "The Merchant of Bogota," "Francesca da Rimini," and "Leonora,
or the World's Own" represented the majority. "Fashion" and "Rip Van
Winkle" were quite the exceptions.
* * * * *
Of his generation Stoddard was perhaps more devoted than any other
in his worship of a fanciful and unvitalized Muse. The criticisms of
Lowell and Holmes served as correctives for the artificialities of
Stedman and Aldrich, but Stoddard made no poetic response either to the
Civil War or to the march of science or to the religious changes that
attended it. To the end of his career he was the complete product of
the influences surrounding his youth. He had been brought to New York
at the age of ten by his widowed mother and kept in school only until
he was fifteen. For nine years he worked as an artisan, cultivating
literature and literary people in his leisure hours. From 1853 to 1870
he held a post in the New York Customhouse, and from 1860 on, literary
editorships with the _New York World_, the _Aldine_ and the _New York
Mail and Express_.
Stoddard's poetry is altogether detached from this life, ignoring or
avoiding the facts of daily existence; and even in the little lyrics of
pleasure there is the lovely detachment of the orchid. Though now and
again they show signs of becoming mildly erotic, they have no passion
in them. Rather they exhibit the chaste delights of the virtuoso, who
takes up one object after another from the glass-covered cabinets in
the museum which his fancy has furnished, looks it over fondly, admires
its form and color, and sets it back with even pulse until such time as
he shall choose to gaze on it again. These lyrics are sometimes nature
descriptions and sometimes nature fantasies. Often they are about the
idea of love--rather than about love itself--and about wine--but not
about conviviality. In the philosophical ones there is a negative tone,
as in
Man loses but the life he lives
And only lives the life he loses.
or in
There is no life on land or sea
Save in the quiet moon and me;
Nor ours is true, but only seems
Within some dead old World of Dreams.
And this dream world was an abandoned unreality and not a hope for
something better.
Taken at its best, his verse is chiefly excellent for its form. As it
does not spring from any vivid experiencing of life, it is conventional
and reminiscent rather than spontaneous and original. It suggests many
measures from many periods. In only a few poems, which purport to be
themselves imitations from the East, he writes what seems fresh and
new. His real gift was in the composition of little poetic cameos,
bits of from four to a dozen lines, the dainty ornaments of literature.
* * * * *
The career of Thomas Bailey Aldrich was closely interwoven with the
whole fabric of professional authorship in America. Like Bryant and
Willis before him, and like Stedman, Stoddard, and Winter of his own
generation, he established himself in New York, although he was a
New England boy; but unlike all the others he fulfilled his career
in Boston. It was an accident of dollars and cents that kept him out
of Harvard and put him into a New York office. A love of literature
led him then successively into the adventurous byways of Bohemian New
York, the secure dignity of magazine editorship in Boston, and the fair
prospects of independent literary success as enjoyed on Beacon Hill.
To be explicit, he was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1836. His
father's pursuit of fortune took Aldrich as a child to many parts of
the country, but brought him back to Portsmouth at the age of thirteen.
For the next three years he lived there the life which provided the
basic facts for "The Story of a Bad Boy." Lack of funds prevented
his entering Harvard, and in 1852 he undertook a clerkship in the
office of a New York uncle. In 1855, when he was still only nineteen,
he published his first volume of poetry and became junior literary
critic on the _Evening Mirror_. In the next several years he held a
sub-editorship in New York on the _Home Journal_ and the _Saturday
Press_ and literary adviserships to several minor publishing houses,
capping off with the editorship of the _Illustrated News_, which had
become a thing of the past when, in 1866, he was called to Boston to
become editor of _Every Saturday_. This post he held for nine years.
For the six years up to 1881 he was an abundant contributor to the
_Atlantic Monthly_ and for the next nine, 1881-1890, he was the editor.
During the remainder of his life he held no literary position.
During his fifteen years in New York, Greeley and Bryant, two newspaper
editors, were perhaps the dominant figures in the literary and
intellectual stratum, Willis and Halleck the most popular, Henry Clapp,
Jr., and Charles T. Congdon the cleverest, and "Bohemia," with its
rallying point at Pfaff's restaurant, the visible rallying place for
the authors.[30] Aldrich gravitated toward this group, but never really
belonged to it. Just why he did not can be inferred from a sentence by
Howells, whose nature was very like his own: "I remember that, as I sat
at that table, under the pavement, in Pfaff's beer-cellar, and listened
to the wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with
Lowell, the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat's, and
felt that I had fallen very far."[31]
[30] For varying sentiments about "Bohemia" see the following
passages: Ferris Greenslet, "Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich," pp.
37-47; W. D. Howells, "Literary Friends and Acquaintances," pp.
68-76; Stedman and Gould, "Life of Edmund Clarence Stedman," pp.
208, 209; William Winter, "Old Friends," pp. 291-297.
[31] In reply to this and like passages William Winter wrote:
"No literary circle comparable with the Bohemian group of
that period, in ardor of genius, variety of character, and
singularity of achievement, has since existed in New York, nor
has any group of writers anywhere existent in our country been
so ignorantly and grossly misrepresented and maligned" ("Old
Friends," p. 138).
The men who gathered at Pfaff's were very conscious of Boston, though
their consciousness came out in various ways. The most violent said
that the thought of it made them as ugly as sin; others loved it
though they left it, as Whitman did "the open road"; and some, on the
outskirts of "Bohemia," were not too aggressively like Stedman, who
admitted much later, "I was very anxious to bring out my first book
in New York in Boston style, having a reverence for Boston, which I
continued to have." Aldrich was of like mind, and readily accepted
Osgood's invitation to "the Hub" and to the editorship of _Every
Saturday_. Years after he wrote to Bayard Taylor, who could understand:
"I miss my few dear friends in New York--but that is all. There is a
finer intellectual atmosphere here than in our city.... The people of
Boston are full-blooded _readers_, appreciative, trained." And later,
to Stedman: "In the six years I have been here, I have found seven or
eight hearts so full of noble things that there is no room in them for
such trifles as envy and conceit and insincerity. I didn't find more
than two or three such in New York, and I lived there fifteen years. It
was an excellent school for me--to get out of!" Boston was his native
heath, in spite of his own saying: "Though I am not genuine Boston, I
am Boston-plated."
Aldrich's literary career began and ended with the writing of poetry,
but what he did in the interims of poetical silence contributed to
the peculiar character of his work even though it was a source of
distraction and sometimes of prolonged interruption. As a reader and
editor he was schooled from very young manhood in the exercise of a
peculiarly fine artistic taste, a taste so exacting in detail that the
_Atlantic_ under his direction was described by a foreign critic as
"the best edited magazine in the English language." He did not reserve
the exercise of this rectitude of judgment for the work of others,
but applied it with perhaps increased austerity to himself. His verse
will consequently endure close examination, and the later collections
will show the virtues and defects of scrupulous rejection and of the
revision in each succeeding publication of the work which he chose to
preserve.
The virtues of work so carefully perfected are evident. His effects
are, in the end, all calculated, for he gave no quarter to what he had
produced with zest if it did not ring true to his critical ear. His
poetic machinery is therefore well oiled and articulated. His metaphors
are sound and his diction happily adjusted. "The vanilla-flavored
adjectives and the patchouli-scented participles" criticized by his
kindly senior, Dr. Holmes, are pared away. So in the little steel
engravings that are the best expressions of his peculiar talent there
is a fine simplicity, but it is the simplicity of an accomplished
woman of the world rather than of a village maid. And herein lie
the shortcomings of Aldrich's poetry--that it is the poetry of
accomplishment. As a youth in New York, writing while Halleck's
popularity was at its height, he was not independent enough to be more
original than his most admired townsman. The verses in "The Bells: a
Collection of Chimes" are most of them clearly imitative; and from the
day of "Babie Bell" on, whatever of originality was Aldrich's belonged
to the library and the drawing-room and the literary club rather than
to the seas, woods, and mountains.
It is logical, then, that his longer narrative poems have least of his
own stamp in them. From a literary point of view they are well enough,
but they are literary grass of the field and have no more claim on the
primary attention of a modern reader than do the bulk of prose short
stories written in the same years by Aldrich and his fellows. The
only one that stands out is "Pauline Pavlovna," and that because it
has the dramatic vigor and the startling unexpectedness of conclusion
which mark the best of his prose tales. It is logical, too, that in
his more ambitious odes--such as "Spring in New England" and the "Shaw
Memorial Ode," which open and close the second volume of his poems--he
did not appear to the best advantage. Memorials of the Civil War are
adequate only if written with epic vision, but the best that Aldrich
did with such material was to make it the ground for heartfelt tributes
to the nobility of his fallen friends. Read Moody's "Ode in Time of
Hesitation" beside Aldrich's slender lyric based on the same man and
the same memorial, and the difference is self-evident. Aldrich's
biographer has commented on the rarity of his æsthetic sense, "among
modern poets with their preoccupations, philosophical, religious and
political." In this not unjust criticism of Aldrich--which marks a
distinction rather than a superiority--lies the reason why he should
have left the writing of national odes to poets who were sometimes
capable of such preoccupation.
In writing on personal and local and occasional themes Aldrich dealt
with more congenial material. When celebrating his fellow-authors and
the places he loved he could invoke beauty with an unpreoccupied mind;
and he did so with unvarying success, addressing the choicest of the
limited public in which he was really interested. The kind of folk he
cared for "Drank deep of life, _new books_ and hearts of men," like
Henry Howard Brownell. As a youth he wrote delightedly of a certain
month when he could see "her" every day and browse in a library of
ten thousand volumes. He was a literary poet for literary people. As
such he was most successful in poems which ranged in length from the
sonnet to the quatrain. In the tiny bits like "Destiny," "Heredity,"
"Identity," "Memory," "I'll not confer with Sorrow," "Pillared Arch
and Sculptured Tower," he achieved works as real as Benvenuto's jewel
settings. It was a fulfillment of the wish recorded in his "Lyrics and
Epics":
I would be the lyric
Ever on the lip,
Rather than the epic
Memory lets slip.
I would be the diamond
At my lady's ear
Rather than a June rose
Worn but once a year.
No more charming tribute was ever paid Aldrich than this of Whittier's
narrated by a friend who had been visiting for a week with the poet in
his old age: "Every evening he asked me to repeat to him certain short
poems, often 'Destiny,' and once even 'that audacious "Identity,"'
as he called it; but at the end he invariably said, 'Now thee knows
without my saying so that I want "Memory,"' and with his wonderful
far-off gaze he always repeated after me: 'Two petals from that
wild-rose tree.'"
* * * * *
In his address at a meeting held in memory of Edmund Clarence Stedman
in January, 1909, Hamilton Mabie struck the main note in two
complementary statements: "Mr. Stedman belongs with those who have not
only enriched literature with works of quality and substance, but who
have represented it in its public relationships," and, "Stedman was
by instinct and temperament a man of the town." He elected to live in
Manhattan just as deliberately as Aldrich elected to live in Boston;
and in this distinction lies something much broader than the mere
difference between the two men.
Stedman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1833. After the death
of his father and the remarriage of his mother, he was brought up
from 1839 to 1850 under charge of an uncle. A member of the class of
1853 at Yale, he was "rusticated" (see p. 282) and then expelled for
persistent misbehavior. Until 1863 he was in journalism, as petty
proprietor in two Connecticut towns, and later as member of the _New
York Tribune_ staff, ending with two years as war correspondent. In
1863 he went into Wall Street, and in 1869 became a member of the New
York Stock Exchange. From this date to the end of his life in 1908 he
knew little real repose, oscillating from over-exertion in business to
over-exertion in writing, with occasional enforced vacations. His work
as poet was inseparable from his labors as editor and critic. In this
field he wrote "Victorian Poets," 1875, "Poets of America," 1885, and
"The Nature and Elements of Poetry," 1892; and edited the "Library of
American Literature" (with Ellen Hutchinson) 1888-1889, "A Victorian
Anthology," 1895, and "An American Anthology," 1900.
Stedman took the consequences of settling in the commercial capital
of the United States. While the members of the Saturday Club were
lending distinction to Boston, the members of the Ornithorhyncus Club
and the Bohemians were receiving the impress of New York. Men came
to the Saturday luncheons from Salem and Haverhill, Concord, and
Cambridge as well as near-by Brookline and Boston itself, but the New
York groups congregated into literary neighborhoods in the "Unitary
Home" or "on the south side of Tenth Street." Thus it came about that
Aldrich contributed to Boston what he brought there, but that Stedman
was "made in New York." As a result Aldrich was more frankly absorbed
in the concerns of the enlightened reader, and Stedman relatively
more interested in a broader society. Both were war correspondents,
but Aldrich admitted the war into his poetry only rarely, and then
without much success. On the other hand, the first eighth of Stedman's
collected poems are entitled "In War Time," and with the poems of
Manhattan, of New England, and of special occasions amount to nearly
one half the volume. Moreover, of the poems by Stedman which are
generally known and quoted, quite the larger portion are included
in utterances which are representative of literature "in its public
relationships."
A timely admonition from Lowell, as valuable as the one from Holmes to
Aldrich, helped keep him out of the byways in which he was inclined to
stray. In 1866 Stedman was proud of his "Alectryon," a blank-verse poem
on a classic theme which had appeared in one of his books three years
before.
When Mr. Lowell praised the volume in _The North American Review_ I
was chagrined that he did not allude to my _pièce de résistance_,
and finally hinted as much to him. He at once said that it was my
"best piece of work," but "no addition to poetic literature," since
we already have enough masterpieces of that kind--from Landor's
"Hamadryad" and Tennyson's "OEnone" down to the latest effort
by Swinburne or Mr. Fields. So I have never written since upon an
antique theme. Upon reflection, I thought Lowell right. A new land
calls for new song.
The best of Stedman's nature poems are directly drawn from boyhood
reminiscence or from a voyage and vacation in the West Indies, and many
of his songs and ballads are derived from contemporary backgrounds and
episodes.
Stedman did his work as a poet, however, in full consciousness of all
the wealth of continental literature and the splendors of Old World
tradition. Perhaps there was no single work into which he put more
ambition than into his uncompleted metrical version from the Greek of
the Sicilian Idyllists. His "Victorian Poets" and the anthology which
followed were undertaken by way of making a workmanlike approach to the
poetry of his own countrymen. As a reader he had the scholar's attitude
toward literature; as a poet he felt a respect approaching reverence
for the established traditions of his art. And yet--and in this respect
Stedman is lamentably rare among critics and artists--his conviction
that the centuries had achieved permanent canons for the poetic art
did not lead him into slashing abuse of those who dissented from his
views. He wrote no single essay which better demonstrated his wisdom,
his sanity, and his charming suavity of mind and manner than his
discussion of Walt Whitman. Although he felt a native distaste for much
of Whitman's writing and for the way most of it was done, he succeeded
in applying a fair mode of criticism, and he did it in the manner of
an artist and not as a counsel for the plaintiff. Instead of beginning
with cleverness and ending with truculence Stedman did himself the
honor of coming out magnanimously with "... there is something of the
Greek in Whitman, and his lovers call him Homeric, but to me he shall
be our old American Hesiod, teaching us works and days." The measure
of Stedman's poetry should therefore be made in the light of two
characteristics: his instinctive and temperamental love of the town,
as this determined his choice of subject matter, and his widely read
appreciation of the older poets, as this affected his sense of artistic
form.
Although some of it was very popular at the moment and not altogether
negligible to-day, his less important work was the succession of verses
which were written in the spirit and, in some cases, at the speed of
the journalist. "The Diamond Wedding," for example, was done in an
evening and was the talk of the town thirty-six hours later. But, more
than that, it was actually good satire,--as good a piece of its kind
as had appeared in New York since Halleck's "Fanny." So, too, "Israel
Freyer's Bid for Gold" was published three days after the idea had
first occurred to him. These, like the "Ballad of Lager Bier" and "The
Prince's Ball" and even "How Old Brown Took Harper's Ferry" represented
the high spirit of youth rollicking on paper in the fashion of the
young authors of the "Salmagundi" and "Croaker" satires.
"Bohemia" and "Pan in Wall Street," though composed in this same
general period, are far more sober, deliberate, and genuinely
poetical. In both Stedman dealt with the romantic rather than with the
ridiculous or contemptible in city life. From the years of his work
on "The Victorian Poets" to the end two developments took place. He
inclined more to refine on the form of his poems, giving over at last
all fluent satire, and he progressed in subject matter, first to what
literature and the past suggested and then, with advancing years, to
considerations of age and death. The changes are not abrupt, but they
are pervasive and evident.
During the last dozen years of his life poetry could not be his natural
form of expression, for the world was too much with him. A great deal
of the time when he was not getting or losing on Change (he seems to
have lost rather more than he spent) he devoted to service on all
sorts of boards and councils of good works, speaking and versifying
for special occasions, editing miscellaneously,--even a "Pocket Guide
to Europe,"--and giving advice and encouragement to younger poets.
He was admirably representing literature in its public relationships
and paying the price which is always exacted of an ambassador of
any sort in the complete sacrifice of independent leisure. There is
something pathetic in his oft-repeated protests in these latter years
at being called a "banker-poet" or "broker-poet," for he had failed
to become rich as he had hoped, and he had enjoyed on the whole less
security than many of his acquaintances who had attached themselves to
literature in some professional way. This, however, had been a mistake
not so much of judgment as of temperament. Unless his voluminous
biography utterly misrepresents him he had no true capacity for
leisure. He was an intellectual flagellant; and his poetry, although
he was in theory devoted to it, was in reality a proof of the love of
art which continually tantalized and distracted him but never won his
complete allegiance.
* * * * *
Richard Watson Gilder was born in Bordentown, New Jersey, in 1844. He
studied there in Bellevue Seminary, founded by his father, intending
to practice law. He was in brief active service during the war when
Pennsylvania was invaded. On his father's death he entered journalistic
work, first with two Newark newspapers and then with _Hours at Home_
in New York. From its founding in 1870 he was associate editor of the
old _Scribner's Monthly_ (since 1881 _The Century_) and from 1881 was
its editor in chief. He became increasingly important in New York
as contributor to civic welfare, and at the same time held his own
as editor and poet. Thus he was first president of the Kindergarten
Association of New York and a founder of the Authors' Club. He was
identified with the leading agencies for cultural and humanitarian
ends, was in demand as laureate on special occasions, and was recipient
of many honorary degrees.
Gilder was almost exclusively a lyric poet. His units are very
brief,--there are more than five hundred in the one-volume "Complete"
edition,--very few extending to the one hundred lines ordained by Poe.
Even among lyrics, moreover, he set distinct boundaries to his field.
Among his metropolitan fellows--Taylor, Stoddard, Aldrich, Stedman, and
the others--he was notable in not writing imitative and reminiscent
poetry. These men must have been rather definitely in the back of his
mind when he wrote:
Some from books resound their rhymes--
Set them ringing with a faint,
Sorrowful, and sweet, and quaint
Memory of the olden times,
Like the sound of evening chimes.
And too many of his contemporaries did not follow as well as he the
admonition,
Tell to the wind
Thy private woes, but not to human ear.
There was still a world of beauty left for him, first of all in songs
of love. It is a chaste and disembodied passion that he celebrated in
frequent groups of song. The lady is a delight to the eye, modest,
timid, and yet all-generous; the lover eager, gentle, adoring, and
inspired to nobility. What Gilder recorded in one of the earliest of
these lyrics seems in large measure to hold true of them all. After an
enumeration of the lady's charms and the charm she bestowed upon earth
and sky, he continued:
I love her doubting and anguish;
I love the love she withholds;
I love my love that loveth her
And anew her being molds.
A poet of so rarefied a sentiment as this hangs on the brink of
sentimentalism, but Gilder seldom fell over, for his nicety of feeling
could not easily be led into mawkishness.
His regard for nature was refined and sophisticated. One passes
from the exquisite "Dawn" with which his first volume opened, past
"Thistle-Down" and "The Violet" to the poems of Tyringham, his summer
home; and then to "Home Acres" and "The Old Place," which had no rival;
and ends "In Helena's Garden" between "The Marble Pool" and "The
Sundial," to drink tea with eleven pretty girls at a round table made
from a granite millstone. The sun shines brightly, the flowers are in
bloom, their odor mingling with that of the souchong, the conversation
is facile, and everybody is amiable and complacent. From such a
catalogue one might expect sappy and emasculated nature poems, but once
again Gilder's sanity rescues him. Even in Helena's garden he is rather
a strong man at ease than a sybarite.
In his enjoyment of the allied arts his taste was generous. Music
appealed to him most of all. He chanted the praises of Handel and
Chopin, Rubinstein and Tschaikowsky, but of Beethoven still more,
and of Wagner most of all. He told of the thrill he caught from the
various instruments, but of the deeper thrill from the singer and from
the chorus. The art of "Madame Butterfly" appealed to him, but not so
deeply as the power of the drama, even if played "In a little theater,
in the Jewry of the New World." Naturally he wrote much of his own art,
revealing his high seriousness in his poems about the poet. Poetry was
not solely the record or the evidence of beauty for him. Although his
only markedly personal allegiance in poetry was an allegiance to Keats,
it was a fealty to Keats taken off before his prime. Gilder lamented
the wrong fate had done the youthful genius and did not content himself
with reiterating that "a thing of beauty is a joy forever."
For Gilder never, even in his most ecstatic moods, indulged in the
fallacy of setting art above life. Though his work does not show the
marked changes which have developed in many evolving careers, there is
a clear emergence of philosophic and then social and civic interest in
his progressive volumes. His sense for the need of a brave integrity
comes to the surface in such poems as "Reform," "The Prisoner's
Thought," "The Heroic Age," "The Demagogue," "The Tool," "The New
Politician," "The Whisperers," and "In Times of Peace." To such themes
as these and to his poems of heroism and of the reunited country Gilder
brought the same delicacy of touch as to his poems of love and art and
nature, and he brought into view in them the latent vigor which saved
the others from being merely pink and mellifluous.
In poetry written on the scale of Gilder's there is need of finest
workmanship. There is no chance for Turneresque effects:
The foreground golden dirt,
The sunshine painted with a squirt.
These paintings are like miniatures which must submit to scrutiny
under the reading glass. In this connection his craftsmanship becomes
interesting in the history of versification. For Gilder was at once
a master of the more complex forms of traditional verse and an early
experimenter in the free, rhythmic forms which are the subject of
spirited controversy to-day. Some rhythmic prose appears in his
earliest volume, but the sonnet prevails at the beginning of his
authorship, and at the end it almost utterly disappears in favor of
the freest sort of blank verse, irregular and unrimed iambic measures,
poems which are suggestive of but distinct from Whitman's, and frank
prose-poetry, not even "shredded prose"--in the language of Mr.
Howells--but printed in solid paragraphs. Except for the sonnet, Gilder
had no favorite measure or stanza in his earlier volumes. Few poems are
in exactly similar measures. There are lines of from three to seven
feet, quatrains of various sorts, and rhythms from that of the heroic
couplet to that of the so-called Pindaric ode. But whatever the measure
he adopted, he was scrupulously consistent to it, though he employed
it easily, seldom conceding an awkward or prosaic locution to the
exigencies of lilt or rime. So he seems to have been equally at home in
the use of sundry forms--in the antiphonal ballad like "The Voyager,"
within the pale of "The Sonnet," in the anapæstic flow of "A Song of
Early Autumn," in the swift-moving iambics of "A Woman's Thought," with
its intricate double and triple rimes, or in the psalmlike sibilations
of "The Whisperers."
The philosophy of Gilder was the philosophy of his most enlightened
contemporaries. There is in it much of Emerson, whom he called the
"shining soul" of the New World, and there is much of Whitman, though
it is not clear whether their likeness does not lie in their common
accord with Emerson rather than in a direct influence from "the good
gray poet" to Gilder. The immanence of God in nature and in the heart
of man (see "The Voice of the Pine"); the unity of all natural law
(see "Destiny"); the conflict between religion and theology (see
"Credo"); and a faith in the essentials of democratic life,--these
are the wholesome fundamentals of modern thinking shared alike by
Emerson and Whitman and Gilder. Gilder is not their most impressive
or prophetic expositor. He is a lesser voice in the choir. The
point of real distinction for him is that he combined so finely the
discriminating work of a literary editor with the unwearying life of
a good and courageous citizen and still kept the current of his song
serene and clear.
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Authors_=
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. Works. Complete Poems. 1 vol. His verse
appeared in book form originally as follows: Footprints, 1849;
Poems, 1852; Songs of Summer, 1857; The King's Bell, 1862; Abraham
Lincoln: an Horatian Ode, 1865; The Book of the East, and Other
Poems, 1871; The Lion's Cub, with Other Verse, 1890.
=Collections=
BOYNTON, PERCY H. American Poetry, pp. 542-554, 680-684.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol.
VIII, pp. 226-238.
=Biography=
Recollections Personal and Literary, by Richard Henry Stoddard.
Ripley Hitchcock, editor. 1903.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. Works. The Writings of, in 9 vols. 1907.
(Vols. I-II, Poetry; Vols. III-IX, Prose.) The best single volume
of the poetry is Poems. 1906. His works appeared in book form
originally as follows: The Bells, 1855; The Ballad of Babie Bell,
1856; Daisy's Necklace, 1857; Pampinea and Other Poems, 1861; Out
of his Head, 1862; The Story of a Bad Boy, 1869; Marjorie Daw, and
Other People, 1873; Prudence Palfrey, 1874; Cloth of Gold, 1874;
Flower and Thorn, 1876; The Queen of Sheba, 1877; The Stillwater
Tragedy, 1880; From Ponkapog to Pesth, 1883; Mercedes, and Later
Lyrics, 1883; Wyndham Towers, 1889; The Sisters' Tragedy, 1891;
Two Bites at a Cherry, 1893; An Old Town by the Sea, 1893;
Unguarded Gates, and Other Poems, 1895; Later Lyrics, 1896; Judith
and Holofernes, 1896.
=Collection=
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. IX,
pp. 377-399.
=Bibliography=
A chronological list of Aldrich's works is appended to the Life.
See Biography, below.
=Biography=
The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich is by Ferris Greenslet. 1908.
See also The Story of a Bad Boy, by Aldrich himself.
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. Works. The Poems of. 1908. These appeared
in book form originally as follows: The Prince's Ball, 1860;
Poems Lyrical and Idyllic, 1860; The Battle of Bull Run, 1861;
Alice of Monmouth, 1863; The Blameless Prince, and Other Poems,
1869; Victorian Poets, 1875; Hawthorne and Other Poems, 1877;
Poets of America, 1885; The Nature and Elements of Poetry, 1892;
A Victorian Anthology, 1895; An American Anthology, 1900; Mater
Coronata, 1901.
=Bibliography=
An excellent chronological list is contained in Vol. II of the
Life.
=Biography=
The Life and Letters is by Laura Stedman and George M. Gould.
1910. 2 vols. See also A New England Childhood: the Story of
the Boyhood of Edmund Clarence Stedman. Margaret Fuller. 1916.
RICHARD WATSON GILDER. Works. The Poems of. Household Edition. 1908.
These appeared in book form originally as follows: The New Day,
1875; The Celestial Passion, 1878; Lyrics, 1878; The Poet and
his Master, and Other Poems, 1878; Two Worlds, and Other Poems,
1891; Great Remembrance, and Other Poems, 1893; For the Country,
1897; In Palestine and Other Poems, 1898; Poems and Inscriptions,
1901; A Christmas Wreath, 1903; In the Heights, 1905; A Book of
Music, 1906; Fire Divine, 1907; Lincoln the Leader, 1909; Grover
Cleveland, 1910.
=Collection=
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. X,
pp. 252-259.
=Biography=
Letters of Richard Watson Gilder. Rosamond Gilder, editor. 1906.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the biographical passages cited in the text relative to the
difference of literary atmosphere in New York and Boston. Read W. D.
Howells's "A Hazard of New Fortunes" for a further contrast between the
two cities.
Read Stoddard's poems with a view to marking definite literary
influences as shown in poems which seem evidently imitative.
Read a group of the four-line and eight-line poems of Aldrich and
compare them in spirit and execution with similar bits by Stoddard and
by Emerson.
Read Stedman's critical essays on one or two of the New England poets
and on two or three of his fellow New Yorkers. Read his essay on Walt
Whitman. Does Stedman's own verse confirm the theory of his criticisms
of Whitman?
Read Gilder's poems in the newer verse forms and compare them with one
of the contemporary poets mentioned in the last chapter of this book.
Is there a legitimate connection to be mentioned between Gilder's poems
on civic themes and the movement for better citizenship in the 1890's?
Can you cite political events and characters and novels or plays on
political life which belong to this period?