American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century

...This poetry is, of course, gospel in full flower, and from gospel was to emerge the secular blues...

...First, he prints some 100 pages of nineteenth-century versions of American Indian poetry, supplemented in some instances by pictographs...

...R andall Jarrell once opined that "Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville seem to me the best poets of the 19th century here in America," adding that "Melville's poetry has been grotesquely underestimated...

...Poe's more pretentious versifying is watered Keats...

...a duality that encapsulates the history, and the problem, of the era's verse...

...it is almost a paradigm of the nineteenth-century Yankee sensibility, which has been described as a Puritanism bereft of God but not of moral struggle...

...Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jerico...

...The Days of '49...

...That's unfair, though...

...Still, both for those of us who grew up with it and for the country itself, it is time, as the twentieth century winds down, for a comprehensive, grown-up retrospective on the songs of the homing nation in the century before this...

...Two writers manage the old noble strain: Katharine Bates in "America the Beautiful" (written "after an outing to Pike's Peak in a prairie wagon") and Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty in "The New Colossus...

...I couldn't wait to escape from it, either back to the lusts of Catullus or forward to the recognizable shudders of Prufrock...

...True, minor poets early in the century had written sonnets on works of Michelangelo or Raphael or on the LaocoOn...

...I cannot live with You—It would be Life—and Life is over there—Behind the Shelf...

...it was didactic and high-minded, full of the beauty of nature and the dignity of man...

...by John Howard Payne, and "The New England Boy's Song about Thanksgiving Day" ("Over the river and through the wood, / To grandfather's house we go") by Lydia Maria Child...

...May is a pious fraud of the almanac") but in the sprightly literary satire of "A Fable for Critics" and perhaps most in the magnificent "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration" on July 21, 1865...

...propriate to this anthology, for traffic between the language of life and the language of the book was often a fertilizing agent for American verse of the period...

...The full note of Wordsworthian Romanticism enters U.S...

...Whitman's "Drum-Taps" are wartime elegies, and his "Memories of President Lincoln" contains both the vatic romanticism of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and the catchy populism of "0 Captain...

...there is a Robert Frost, too, buried somewhere in Longfellow...

...Let My People Go...

...Hollander stays invisible behind his choices, like an Epicurean god...

...The contrast between them is pleasing and rare, Her sweet eye of blue, and her soft silken hair...

...I undress...

...But speaking of elegies, the polymath John Jay Chapman writes an elegy on Bismarck remarkable for a sustained pitch of prophetic hatred...

...and "My Lost Youth" ("A boy's will is the wind's will, / And the thoughts are long, long thoughts") and "The Children's Hour," he can look less like the American Tennyson than like the male Lydia Maria Child...

...Cripple Creek...

...The Civil War comes to dominate the closing pages of the first volume, not just in popular texts like Daniel Decatur Emmett's "Dixie's Land" ("I wish I was in de land ob cotton"—it was, ironically, written for a minstrel show) or Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" (how close to religion is the language of the century's verse, as in this hymn, and in, for example, Philips Brooks's "0 Little Town of Bethlehem") but in Whitman and James Russell Lowell...

...the great Edith Wharton has a go at capturing Chartres in sonnets...

...Lazarus was an unusual woman and an interesting minor poet...

...there's "Maryland" by James Ryder Randall and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" by James A. Bland...

...Since translation is creation in poetry, Boas can be called a decent minor poet of the period...

...The Heart asks Pleasure—first—And then—Excuse from Pain—And then—those little Anodynes That deaden suffering...

...One translator stands out, the great pioneer anthropologist Franz Boas...

...there is no nudging preface...

...On the other end of the scale, much serious verse gets arty and precious, straying away from the tongue and the lives of the people...

...H ollander concludes with two important separate sections...

...A pale Orientalism colors the chinoiserie of Stuart Merrill ("Oh my Li of the jasper nails . . .") and the japonaiserie of Ernest Fenollosa ("0 happy children of blest Japan...

...Some of it is strictly formulaic—"If the clouds come good, our tobacco will grow...

...1: FRENEAU TO WHITMAN VOL...

...It is a testament to the welcoming spirit that has pervaded both volumes that the final insertion of these two groups feels quite harmonious with the entire enterprise and smacks not at all of dogmatically inclusive multiculturalism...

...New birth of bur new soil, the first American...

...the darkies are gay .. ."), and "Susanna" ("I come from Alabama with my Banjo on my knee") by Stephen Foster...

...This is attractive, but it took Whitman, the Whitman whom Emerson described as a cross between the New York Herald and the Bhagavad-Gita, to unshackle this sort of thing from poetic chains of meter and rhyme and from cultural chains of religious restraint: "I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease...

...Volume 2 opens with a generous sample of Melville, but, alas, the century's greatest American fiction writer (well, with James and Twain) proves an undistinguished and derivative versifier, a sort of poor man's Matthew Arnold in diction if not in the pushy nihilism of his thought...

...Shenandoah...

...He freed himself from his Apollos and Auroras only occasionally, as in "The House-Top" on the Civil War Draft Riots ("The town is taken by its rats") and in "Billy in the Darbies," the incantatory "sailors' ballad" affixed to Billy Budd...

...Themselves as easy freeze—June Noon—as January Night...

...Again, I wish Hollander had been more generous with translation in general...

...What these dictions needed, and at surprising moments got, was a goosing from below...

...In the toughness and the longing of these songs can be glimpsed the roots of country music...

...this stage was one factor in the coarsening of popular taste observable in the waning century...

...With the exception of this and of Twain's hilarious parody-elegy from Huckleberry Finn, real satire rears its head rarely in these pages...

...A Home on the Range...

...The shock, the impudence, of its audacity is as vivid as it ever was: You sea...

...The century ends with two strong voices whose laconic, stony stoicism contrasts refreshingly with the surrounding decor of aestheticism: Edwin Arlington Robinson and Stephen Crane...

...Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Had...

...Free at Last...

...he sounds a truly Shelleyan note of anger without any Shelleyesque affectation...

...What had been a trickle became a freshet as more and more poetasters got a taste of Rome and Paris: George Santayana rhapsodizes over Michelangelo ("What beauteousform beneath a marble veil...

...Life is Earnest...

...There are discoveries in sophisticated light verse by Nathaniel Parker Willis, whose "City Lyrics" starts, "Come out, love—the night is enchanting...

...How ready was the American tongue for their new ways with it...

...Early in the century, Philip Freneau is using Popian couplets to plead the superiority of the "natural" Indian to civilization: "Forests destroyed by helots, and by slaves / And forests cleared, to breed a race of knaves...

...Another imitator of Keats is somebody called Christopher Pearse Cranch, whom we can see, in the thirty-five pages allotted him here, shake off Keatsery and achieve a relaxed, colloquial voice that, in him too, anticipates Frost: "'What are you looking at?' the farmer said...

...Her tricky little telegrams from the battlefields of suffering and death, a terrain she is shyly and slyly but firmly determined to shame God away from, are endlessly haunting: "I died for beauty...

...But knowing what we do of what was to come—the high tide of Modernism—we feel by the end the presence in the wings of Pound and Frost and Eliot and Stevens and Williams...

...poetry in the 1810s and 1820s with William Cullen Bryant, perpetrator of "To a Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis" and "Forest Hymn" ("The groves were God's first temples...

...L ongfellow's is the biggest "offi- cial" reputation in the first volume...

...The murmuring pines and the hemlocks") and "Hiawatha" are here in but a few snippets...

...Much more modest—indeed, scarcely above the level of folk jingles—appear John Greenleaf Whittier ("The Barefoot Boy...

...That high-school paideia of yore is long gone, and Allen Ginsberg is doubtless on the curriculum today...

...especially moving is its evocation of Lincoln: "Here was a type of the true elder race, / And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face...

...Yes...

...CI 66 The American Spectator September 1994...

...Hollander's selection from the Dickinson corpus omits, it almost goes without saying, the greeting-card cuteness about mushrooms and butterflies and hummingbirds that used to figure almost exclusively in school textbooks...

...One of the surprises of this volume is satirist Ambrose Bierce's "To the Bartholdi Statue," which takes a dimmer view than Lazarus of the Lady with the Lamp: Behind you, unsuspected, Have you the axe, fair wench, Wherewith you once collected A poll-tax from the French...

...The American Spectator September 1994 65 Late in the century, fresh themes occur in its verse...

...Oh My Darling Clementine...

...Emerson, too, went through something like this metamorphosis...

...Finally, there is a rich collection of (mostly) anonymous folk songs and spirituals...

...That's nothing but a yellow flowering weed" or "I heard five bobolinks laughing together / Over some ornithological joke...

...we find "Old Folks at Home" ("Way Down upon de Swanee ribber"), "My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night...

...My Lord, What a Morning...

...The job has been done, with admirable fullness, by John Hollander, poet, critic, and A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English at Yale, who has edited two Library of America volumes American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century Volume 1: Freneau to Whitman and Volume 2: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs, and Spirituals...

...Michael Row the Boat Ashore...

...The spirituals express, often in Biblical terms, the pain of black bondage and the ecstasy of release: "Deep River...

...Such linguistic democracy is unusually apDonald Lyons is the author of Independent Visions: A Critical Introduction to Recent Independent American Film (Ballantine...

...His popular "Hymn: Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument" (1836)—"the shot heard around the world"—has become, in a peculiarly and paradoxically American way, his poetic signature...

...What care the dead for Winter...

...It was fitting, it was almost necessary, that the century's two great outcasts, the extrovert and the introvert, should have signaled their breaks with the theological and psychological decorums of their time in their very punctuation: in Whitman's dreamily embracing and seductive ellipses and in Dickinson's sharp, tortured, questioning dashes...

...2: MELVILLE TO STICKNEY, AMERICAN INDIAN POETRY, FOLK SONGS AND SPIRITUALS Edited by John Hollander Library of America / 1,099 pages and 1,050 pages / $35 each reviewed by DONALD LYONS 64 The American Spectator September 1994 primeval...

...Dickinson gets the biggest single chunk of Volume 2, and deserves it...

...His long poems are scanted: "Evangeline" ("This is the forest AMERICAN POETRY: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY VOL...

...With Midnight to the North of Her—And Midnight to the South of Her—And Maelstrom—in the Sky...

...Lowell's is, for me, the reputation most enhanced here, not only in the lively nature verse ("And what is so rare as a day in June...

...Meanwhile, snaking through the solemn texts are populist creations like "A Visit from St...

...Upon thy breast, / I languish to respire...

...he imports, or finds, a spareness, a dryness, a wit, e.g., "Because my relations are dead, / When the steamboat leaves, I cry" or "Ya, always I long / For my husband in California" or "I don't care / If you desert me...

...Trumbull Stickney is stricken by Rodin and by a never-never Greece...

...California pops up, for example, in Edward Rowland Sill's "California Winter" ("This is not winter: where is the crisp air, / And snow upon the roof, and frozen ponds . . . ?") and in the Cherokee poet John Rollin Ridge, who can also claim pioneer status in white maiden-handsome brave verse in his "Stolen White Girl": Though he stole her away from the land of the whites, Pursuit is in vain for her bosom delights...

...Cranch, as we learn from the fascinating short biography in the back (everybody gets one), was an itinerant Unitarian minister in Maine who threw it over to become an artist in Rome and Paris...

...Many pretty boys are in the town" or "Nobody loves me, she is the greatest of all, I walk inland . . . They love me only on account of the food I obtain for them" (all c. 1888-94...

...The Moon hangs just over Broadway...

...My Captain...

...T he dominant dictions of official poetry—eighteenth-century Augustan and nineteenth-century Romantic—both came from England and were duly and dully aped here...

...observing a spear of summer grass . . . And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves...

...I heard a Fly buzz—when I died...

...I can repay you...

...no "Courtship of Miles Standish" at all and none of the Dante translation...

...In later years, one returned to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the loner screwballs who turned out, satisfyingly, to have been greater than all the official bards...

...And in this spirit, these volumes extend a cheerful and unjudging welcome to a wide range of utterance, from the corny to the noble, from the demotic to the academic...

...his son became the first American aviator killed in World War I, the war Chapman's poem foresees...

...Light verse becomes so light, so coy that Whittier looks like Milton: James Whitcomb Riley ("The Old Swimmin'-Hole," "When the Frost Is on the Punkin," "Little Orphant Annie") and Eugene Field are cases in point...

...and by John Quincy Adams (the JQA), whose witty "To Sally" brilliantly adapts Horace's "Integer vitae" to New World geography...

...Reduced to short stuff like "A Psalm of Life" ("Life is real...

...1859)—but all these translations have an immense interest as representing the white ear's nineteenth-century hearing of the Indian...

...His diction was as enslaved as his body...

...Just so, in 1829, an enslaved black poet, George Moses Horton, expresses his plight thus: "Dear Liberty...

...But the sublime highlight, the sexy thrill, of the first volume—of both volumes—is the 1855 text, the one full of ellipses, of Leaves of Grass...

...Whitman saw that, at that time and in that country, "new poetic messages, new forms and expressions [were] inevitable...

...The folk songs are mainly whoopees or laments from the white wild West: "The Cowboy's Lament...

...Barbara Frietchie") and Edgar Allan Poe ("The Raven...

...He strikes a pleasingly original note in "Summer Wind": For me, I lie Languidly in the shade . . . and I woo the wind That still delays its coming...

...We will be happy" (c...

...We must have a turn together...

...rock me in billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet...

...New England gets replaced as the favorite locale of popular song and verse (the two now become much closer) by a Southland viewed through lenses of nostalgia and prettifying sentiment by both sides...

...there's "Marching through Georgia" by Henry Clay Work, author also of the temperance song, "Come Home, Father...

...All these exoticisms—classical, medieval, oriental—derive from the European Decadents and look no more vital, no less languid in American garb...

...A clue to the volumes' brief lies on the jacket: "In nineteenth-century America, poetry was a part of everyday life, as familiar as a hymn, a love song, a patriotic exhortation...

...hurry me out of sight of the land, Cushion me soft...

...her "Long Island Sound," which begins "I see it as it looked one afternoon / In August . . ." strangely prefigures the passage at the end of The Great Gatsby...

...The stars are all lighted and panting— / Hot weather up there, I dare say...

...Speaking of Emerson, he is represented here, at length, and emerges, poetically, as a spinsterly propagandist for the thing Whitman actually did ("Bring me new wine, but wine which never grew," etc...

...The Bells...

...Nicholas" by Clement Moore, "Defence of Fort McHenry" by Francis Scott Key, "Home, Sweet Home...

...In the noisy barn dance that was American poetry in the century when the country was learning how to sing in its own voices, high and low—gregarious and solitary—somehow joined hands...

...Acclaimed in its day and worthy of rediscovery in ours, this tribute to the college's and the country's war dead, with its vision of the war as midwife of a new humanity, is truly Pindaric in scope and burden...

...Why so slow, Gentle and voluble spirit of the air...

...Jesse James...

...Much of this was in fact written for the minstrel stage, as the full notes tell us...