Chapter XV: The Later Poets (1)

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 mélange 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 Mæcenas 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, Mæcenas!

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'Hôte," 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 preëminently 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 mélange, 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 société_, 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 société_ 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. "Tannhäuser" 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.