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.