It is commonly assumed that the last half century has
been almost exclusively an age of prose. The student of literature knows,
on the contrary, that one difficulty of judging our recent poetry lies in
the amount and variety of it. Since 1876 more poetry has been published
here than in all the previous years of our history; and the quality of it,
if one dare judge it as a whole, is surprisingly good. The designation of
"the prose age," therefore, should not blind us to the fact that America
never had so many poets as at present. Whether a future generation will
rank any of these among our elder poets is another question. Of late years
we have had no singer to compare with Longfellow, to be sure; but we have
had a dozen singers who reflect the enlarging life of America in a way of
which Longfellow never dreamed. He lived mostly in the past and was busy
with legends, folklore, songs of the night; our later singers live in the
present and write songs of the day. And this suggests the chief
characteristic of recent poetry; namely, that it aims to be true to life as
it is here and now rather than to life as it was romantically supposed to
be in classic or medieval times. [Footnote: The above characterization
applies only to the best, or to what most critics deem best, of our recent
poetry. It takes no account of a large mass of verse which leaves an
impression of faddishness in the matter of form or phrase or subject. Such
verse appeals to the taste of the moment, but Time has an effective way of
dealing with it and with all other insincerities in literature.]
This emancipation of our poetry from the past, with the loss and gain which
such a change implies, was not easily accomplished, and the terrible
reality of the great war was perhaps the decisive factor in the struggle.
Before the war our poetry was largely conventional, imitative, sentimental;
and even after the war, when Miller's Songs of the Sierras and John
Hay's Pike-County Ballads began to sing, however crudely, of
vigorous life, the acknowledged poets and critics of the time were
scandalized. Thus, to read the letters of Bayard Taylor is to meet a poet
who bewails the lack of poetic material in America and who "hungers," as he
says, for the romance and beauty of other lands. He writes Songs of the
Orient, Lars: a Pastoral of Norway, Prince Deukalion and
many other volumes which seem to indicate that poetry is to be found
everywhere save at home. Even his "Song of the Camp" is located in the
Crimea, as if heroism and tenderness had not recently bloomed on a hundred
southern battlefields. So also Stedman wrote his Alectryon and
The Blameless Prince, and Aldrich spent his best years in making
artificial nosegays (as Holmes told him frankly) when he ought to have been
making poems. These and many other poets said proudly that they belonged to
the classic school; they all read Shelley and Keats, dreamed of medieval or
classic beauty, and in unnumbered reviews condemned the crudity of those
who were trying to find beauty at their own doors and to make poetry of the
stuff of American life.
Stedman and Aldrich
It was the war, or rather the new American spirit that issued from the war,
which finally assured these poets and critics that mythology and legend
were, so far as America was concerned, as dead as the mastodon, and that
life itself was the only vitally interesting subject of poetry. Edmund
Clarence Stedman (1833-1908), after writing many "finished" poems that were
praised and forgotten, manfully acknowledged that he had been following the
wrong trail and turned at last to the poetry of his own people. His
Alice of Monmouth, an idyl of the war, and a few short pieces, such
as "Wanted: a Man," are the only parts of his poetical works that are now
remembered. Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) went through the same
transformation. He had a love of formal beauty, and in the exquisite finish
of his verse has had few rivals in American poetry; but he spent the great
part of his life in making pretty trifles. Then he seemed to waken to the
meaning of poetry as a noble expression of the truth or beauty of this
present life, and his last little book of Songs and Sonnets contains
practically all that is worth remembering of his eight or nine volumes of
verse.
Joaquin Miller
One of the first in time of the new singers was Cincinnatus Heine Miller
or, as he is commonly known, Joaquin Miller (1841-1912). His Songs of
the Sierras (1871) and other poems of the West have this advantage,
that they come straight from the heart of a man who has shared the stirring
life he describes and who loves it with an overmastering love. To read his
My Own Story or the preface to his Ship in the Desert is to
understand from what fullness of life came lines like these:
Room! room to turn round in, to breathe and be free,
To grow to be giant, to sail as at sea
With the speed of the wind on a steed with his mane
To the wind, without pathway or route or a rein.
Room! room to be free, where the white-bordered sea
Blows a kiss to a brother as boundless as he;
Where the buffalo come like a cloud on the plain,
Pouring on like the tide of a storm-driven main,
And the lodge of the hunter to friend or to foe
Offers rest, and unquestioned you come or you go.
My plains of America! seas of wild lands!...
I turn to you, lean to you, lift you my hands.
Indeed, there was a splendid promise in Miller, but the promise was never
fulfilled. He wrote voluminously, feeling that he must express the lure and
magic of the boundless West; but he wrote so carelessly that the crude bulk
of his verse obscures the originality of his few inspired lines. To read
the latter is to be convinced that he was a true poet who might have
accomplished a greater work than Whitman, since he had more genius and
manliness than the eastern poet possessed; but his personal oddities, his
zeal for reforms, his love of solitude, his endless quest after some
unnamed good which kept him living among the Indians or wandering between
Mexico and the ends of Alaska,--all this hindered his poetic development.
It may be that an Indian-driven arrow, which touched his brain in one of
his numerous adventures, had something to do with his wanderings and his
failure.
There is a poetry of thought that can be written down in words, and there
is another poetry of glorious living, keenly felt in the winds of the
wilderness or the rush of a splendid horse or the flight of a canoe through
the rapids, for which there is no adequate expression. Miller could feel
superbly this poetry of the mountaineer, the plainsman and the voyageur;
that he could even suggest or half reveal it to others makes him worthy to
be named among our most original singers.
Irwin Russell
The hundred other poets of the period are too near for criticism, too
varied even for classification; but we may at least note two or three
significant groupings. In one group are the dialect poets, who attempt to
make poetry serve the same end as fiction of the local-color school. Irwin
Russell, with his gay negro songs tossed off to the twanging accompaniment
of his banjo, belongs in this group. His verses are notable not for their
dialect (others have done that better) but for their fidelity to the negro
character as Russell had observed it in the old plantation days. There is
little of poetic beauty in his work; it is chiefly remarkable for its
promise, for its opening of a new field of poesie; but unfortunately the
promise was spoiled by the author's fitful life and his untimely death.
Carleton and Riley
Closely akin to the dialect group in their effective use of the homely
speech of country people are several popular poets, of whom Will Carleton
and James Whitcomb Riley are the most conspicuous. Carleton's "Over the
Hills to the Poorhouse" and other early songs won him a wide circle of
readers; whereupon he followed up his advantage with Farm Ballads
and other volumes filled with rather crude but sincere verses of home and
childhood. For half a century these sentimental poems were as popular as
the early works of Longfellow, and they are still widely read by people who
like homely themes and plenty of homely sentiment in their poetry.
Riley won an even larger following with his Old Swimmin' Hole,
Rhymes of Childhood Days and a dozen other volumes that aimed to
reflect in rustic language the joys and sorrows of country people. Judged
by the number of his readers he would be called the chief poet of the
period; but judged by the quality of his work it would seem that he wrote
too much, and wrote too often "with his eye on the gallery." He was
primarily an entertainer, a platform favorite, and in his impersonation of
country folk was always in danger of giving his audience what he thought
they would like, not what he sincerely felt to be true. Hence the
impression of the stage and a "make-up" in a considerable part of his work.
At times, however, Riley could forget the platform and speak from the heart
as a plain man to plain men. His work at such moments has a deeper note,
more simple and sincere, and a few of his poems will undoubtedly find a
permanent place in American letters. The best feature of his work is that
he felt no need to go far afield, to the Orient or to mythology, but found
the beauty of fine feeling at his door and dared to call one of his
collections Poems Here at Home.
Typical Poets
In a third group of recent poets are those who try to reflect the feeling
of some one type or race of the many that make up the sum total of American
life. Such are Emma Lazarus, speaking finely for the Jewish race, and Paul
Lawrence Dunbar, voicing the deeper life of the negro,--not the negro of
the old plantation but the negro who was once a slave and must now prove
himself a man. In the same group we are perhaps justified in placing Lucy
Larcom, singing for the mill girls of New England, and Eugene Field, who
shows what fun and sentiment may brighten the life of a busy newspaper man
in a great city.
Finally come a larger number of poets who cannot be grouped, who sing each
of what he knows or loves best: Celia Thaxter, of the storm-swept northern
ocean; Madison Cawein, of nature in her more tender moods; Edward Rowland
Sill, of the aspirations of a rare Puritan soul. More varied in their
themes are Edith Thomas, Emily Dickinson, Henry C. Bunner, Richard Watson
Gilder, George Edward Woodberry, William Vaughn Moody, Richard Hovey, and
several others who are perhaps quite as notable as any of those whom we
have too briefly reviewed. They all sing of American life in its wonderful
complexity and have added poems of real merit to the book of recent
American verse. And that is a very good book to read, more inspiring and
perhaps more enduring than the popular book of prose fiction.
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