A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

OTHER POETS

1. Robert Southey (1774–1843). Southey was born at Bristol, educated at Westminster School and at Oxford, and settled down to lead the laborious life of a man of letters. He produced a great mass of work, much of which is of considerable merit, and he ranked as one of the leading writers of his age. Most of his work was written at Greta Hall, near Keswick, where he lived most of his life. He was made Poet Laureate in 1813. His reputation, especially as a poet, has not been maintained.

His poems, which are of great bulk, include Joan of Arc (1798), Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), The Curse of Kehama (1810), and Roderick the Goth (1814); they are pretentious in style and subject, but are now almost forgotten. Some shorter pieces, such as The Holly-tree, The Battle of Blenheim, and The Inchcape Rock, are still in favor, and deservedly so.

His numerous prose works include The History of Brazil (1810–19) and The Peninsular War (1822–33). The slightest of them all, The Life of Nelson (1813), is the only one now freely read. It shows Southey’s easy yet scholarly style at its best.

2. Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864). Landor had a long life, for he was born five years after Wordsworth, and lived to see the full yield of the Victorian era. Of an ancient family, he was born in Warwickshire, and was educated at Rugby and Oxford. Later he was fired with republican ideas, abandoned his projected career in the British Army, and supported the revolutionaries in Spain. In temper he was impulsive to the point of mania; and his life is marked by a succession of violent quarrels with his friends and enemies. The middle years of his life were passed in Italy. He returned to England in 1838, and lived in Bath until 1858. In this year his pugnacity involved him in an action for damages, in which as defendant he cut a lamentable figure. Poor and dishonored, he forsook England, and settled again in Florence, where he died.

His Gebir (1798) is a kind of epic poem written in blank verse. It is “classical” in its stiff and formal style; but it has a stately beauty and much powerful natural description. Count Julian (1812), a tragedy, has much the same qualities, good and bad, as Gebir. His shorter pieces, especially the eight-line lyric Rose Aylmer, have more ease and passion, and are gracefully expressed.

His bulkiest prose work is his Imaginary Conversations, which was published at intervals from 1824 to 1846. The volumes record imaginary dialogues between all kinds of people on a great variety of subjects. They have Landor’s chief defect, a stony lifelessness; but in style they are stately, strong, and scholarly, with frequent passages of noble description. All his life he continued to issue essays and pamphlets. A collection of them, called Dry Sticks (1858), as has been noticed, brought upon his head the weight of the law. Landor professed to despise popularity; he was moody, crotchety, and often deliberately perverse. Posterity has repaid him by consigning him to an oblivion that only the devotion of a small but eminent band of admirers keeps from being absolute.

3. Thomas Moore (1779–1852). Moore was born in Dublin, took his degree at Trinity College, and studied law in the same city. He too was imbued with revolutionary notions, and attempted to apply them to Ireland, but with no success. He obtained a valuable appointment in the Bermudas, the duties of which were discharged by a deputy, who in this case proved faithless and caused Moore financial loss. Moore was a friend of Byron and a prominent literary figure of the time. Most of his life was passed as a successful man of letters.

His poems were highly successful during his lifetime, but after his death there was a reaction against them. His Irish Melodies are set to the traditional musical airs of Ireland. They are graceful, and adapt themselves admirably to the tunes. Moore, however, lacked the depth and far-ranging strength of Burns, and so he failed to do for Ireland what the Ayrshire poet did for Scotland: he did not raise the national sentiment of Ireland into one of the precious things of literature. His Lalla Rookh (1817) is an Oriental romance, written in the Scott-Byron manner then so popular. The poem had an immense success, which has now almost totally faded. It contains an abundance of florid description, but as poetry it is hardly second-rate. Moore’s political satires, such as The Twopenny Postbag (1813), The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and Fables for the Holy Alliance (1823), are keen and lively, and show his Irish wit at its very best.

His prose works include his Life of Byron (1830), which has taken its place as the standard biography of that poet. It is an able and scholarly piece of work, and is written with much knowledge and sympathy.

4. Thomas Campbell (1777–1844). Campbell was born in Glasgow, of a poor but ancient family. After studying at Glasgow University he became tutor to a private family; but his Pleasures of Hope (1799) brought him fame, and he adopted the career of a poet. He visited the Continent, and saw much of the turmoil that there reigned. Returning, he settled in London, where he was editor of The New Monthly Magazine from 1820 to 1830.

His longer poems are quite numerous, and begin with the Pleasures of Hope, which consists of a series of descriptions of nature in heroic couplets, written in a style that suggests Goldsmith. Other longer poems include Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), a longish tale of Pennsylvania, written in Spenserian stanzas, and The Pilgrim of Glencoe (1842). Campbell, however, is chiefly remembered for his stirring songs, some of which were written during his early Continental tour and were published in newspapers. His most successful are Ye Mariners of England and The Battle of the Baltic, which are spirited without containing the bluster and boasting that so often disfigure the patriotic song.

5. Samuel Rogers (1763–1855). Rogers was born in London, the son of a rich banker. He soon became a partner in his father’s firm, and for the rest of his life his financial success was assured. His chief interest lay in art and poetry, which he cultivated in an earnest fashion. He was a generous patron of the man of letters, and was acquainted with most of the literary people of the time. His breakfasts were famous.

His Pleasures of Memory (1792) is a reversion to the typical eighteenth-century manner, and as such is interesting. He could compose polished verses, but he was little of the poet. Other works are Columbus (1812), Jacqueline (1814), a tale in the Byronic manner, and Italy (1822).

Rogers was a careful and fastidious writer, but his excellence does not go much further. His name is a prominent one in the literary annals of the time, but his wealth rather than his merit accounts for this.

6. Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), unlike Rogers, was not a wealthy amateur who could trifle for years with mediocre production; he was of the arena, taking and giving hard knocks in both political and literary scuffles. He was born in Middlesex, educated at Christ’s Hospital, and while still in his teens became a journalist, and remained a journalist all his life. His Radical journal The Examiner (1808) was strongly critical of the Government, and Hunt’s aptitude for abuse landed him in prison for two years. His captivity, as he gleefully records, made a hero of him; and most of the literary men who prided themselves upon their Liberalism—among them being Wordsworth, Byron, Moore, Keats, and Shelley—sought his friendship. Hunt had a powerful influence on Keats, and published some of the latter’s shorter poems in The Examiner. He tried various other journalistic ventures, but none of them had the success of The Examiner; his attempted collaboration in journalism with Byron was a lamentable failure. He died, like Wordsworth and others, a respectable pensioner of the Government he had once so strongly condemned.

He much fancied himself as a poet, and popular taste confirmed him in his delusion. The best of his longer poems is Rimini (1811), an Italian tale in verse. The poem is of interest because its flowing couplets were the model for Keats’s Endymion. Hunt’s shorter pieces—for example, Abou Ben Adhem—are often graceful, but their poetical value is not very high.

His prose includes an enormous amount of journalistic matter, which was occasionally collected and issued in book form. Such was his Men, Women, and Books (1847). His Autobiography (1850) contains much interesting biographical and literary gossip. He is an agreeable essayist, fluent and easygoing; his critical opinions are solid and sensible, though often half-informed. He wrote a novel, Sir Ralph Esher (1832), and a very readable book on London called The Town (1848). Hunt is not a genius, but he is a useful and amiable second-rate writer.

7. James Hogg (1770–1835). Hogg became known to the world as “the Ettrick Shepherd,” for he was born of a shepherd’s family in the valley of the Ettrick, in Selkirkshire. He was a man of much natural ability, and from his infancy was an eager listener to the songs and ballads of his district. He was introduced to Walter Scott (1802) while the latter was collecting the Border minstrelsy, and by Scott he was supported both as a literary man and as a farmer. Many of his admirers assisted him in the acquisition of a sheep-farm, but Hogg proved to be a poor farmer. He was known to most of the members of the Scottish literary circle, but his shiftless and unmanageable disposition alienated most of his friends. He died in his native district.

Hogg had little education and very little sense of discrimination, so that much of his poetry is very poor indeed. Sometimes, however, his native talent prevails, and he writes such poems as Kilmeny and When the Kye comes Hame. The latter is a lyric resembling those of Burns in its humor and simple appeal. In Kilmeny (in The Queen’s Wake) he achieves what is commonly held to be the true Celtic note: the eerie description of elves and the gloaming, and murmuring and musical echoes of things half seen and half understood. Some of his books are The Forest Minstrel (1801), The Queen’s Wake (1813), and The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818), the last being a prose tale.

8. Ebenezer Elliott (1781–1849). Elliott was born at Masborough, in Yorkshire, and worked as an iron-founder. The struggles of the poor, oppressed by the Corn Laws, were early borne in upon him, and his poetical gift was used in a fierce challenge to the existing system. Like Crabbe, he devoted himself to the cause of the poor; and it is a tribute to his merit as a poet that, in spite of his bristling assertiveness, he produced some work of real value. He became known as the “Corn Law Rhymer,” and he lived to see the abolition of the laws that he had always attacked.

His best book is Corn Law Rhymes (1830), which includes the powerful and somber Battle-song. This poem is a kind of anthem for the poor, and breathes a spirit of fierce unrest.

9. Felicia Hemans (1793–1835). Mrs. Hemans’s maiden name was Browne, and she was born at Liverpool. Later she removed to Wales, where a large part of her life was spent. At the age of fifteen she began to write poetry, and persisted in the habit all her life. She married somewhat unhappily, but she lived to be a highly popular poetess, and produced a large amount of work. She died in Dublin.

Nobody can call Mrs. Hemans a great poetess, but her verses are facile and fairly melodious, and she can give simple themes a simple setting. One can respect the genuine quality of her emotions, and the zeal with which she expressed them. Some of her better lyrics—for example, The Stately Homes of England, The Graves of a Household, and The Pilgrim Fathers—are in their limited fashion well done.

10. Thomas Hood (1799–1845). Hood was a native of London, and became a partner in a book-selling firm. He took to a literary career, and contributed to many periodicals, including The London Magazine. For a time he edited The New Monthly Magazine, but he was much troubled by illness, and died prematurely.

Hood first gained notoriety with some humorous poems, published under the title of Whims and Oddities (1826). To modern taste the humor is rather cheap, for it consists largely of verbal quibblings, such as the free use of the pun. It seemed to be acceptable to the public of the time, for the book had much success. Other volumes in the same vein were The Comic Annual, Up the Rhine (1839), and Whimsicalities (1843). Hood, in spite of his smartness, could not keep free of vulgarity, and his wit often jars. As a kind of tragic relief Hood sometimes produced poems of a tearful intensity, such as The Death-bed and The Bridge of Sighs. One could believe that his grief was genuine if he did not dwell so much upon it. His Song of the Shirt, first published in Punch in 1845, is rather a versified political pamphlet than a real poem, but it is powerful verse, and one can forgive much on account of the motive, which was to help the sweated sempstress. His Dream of Eugene Aram (1829) was an attempt at the horrible, and was long a bravura piece for aspiring elocutionists. It is a middling specimen of poetical rhetoric.

11. John Clare (1793–1864) was a true peasant poet, and in his day he had a great popularity. After his death his works fell into neglect, but recently (1920) a reissue of his poems, some of them new to the public, has recalled attention to the considerable value of much that he wrote. He was born near Peterborough, his father being a cripple and a pauper. At the age of thirteen he saved sufficient money to buy a copy of The Seasons, which fired his poetic ability. His Collection of Original Trifles (1817) attracted notice, and his Poems (1820) was much praised. The patronage of rich admirers put him above poverty, but a tendency to insanity developed, and, like Christopher Smart, he died in a madhouse.

Clare’s poems are seen at their best when they deal with simple rustic themes, and then they are quite charming. He rejoices in the ways of animals and insects. He is not a great poet, but there are many poets with flaunting credentials who have less claims to consideration than he.

12. James Smith (1775–1837) and Horace Smith (1779–1849), two brothers, collaborated in the production of a work that was one of the “hits” of the period. This book was Rejected Addresses (1812). When the Drury Lane Theatre was burned down and rebuilt the management offered a prize for the best poem to be recited on the opening night. The Smiths hit on the idea of making parodies of the notable poets of the time and pretending that they were the rejected poems of the writers mentioned. The result is the classical collection of parodies in English. Scott, Wordsworth, and other well-known authors are imitated, usually with much cleverness. The Wordsworth poem is recited by Nancy Lake, a girl of eight, who is drawn upon the stage in a perambulator:

My brother Jack was nine in May,

And I was eight on New Year’s Day;

So in Kate Williams’ shop

Papa (he’s my papa and Jack’s)

Bought me, last week, a doll of wax,

And brother Jack a top.