A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

During the scant six years that followed, the years of his literary life in which he wrote all that is distinctive in his poetry, he lived in a whirlwind of activity, of study in the large libraries to which he now had access, of music, of literary hack-work, or he lay totally incapacitated by sickness that threatened always the speedy termination of all. Poetry he could write only in moments stolen from more imperative things. He compiled a guide book to Florida, he prepared courses of lectures on Shakespeare for clubs of women, he delivered two scholarly courses of lectures at Johns Hopkins University, and he published four juveniles that adapted for boys the old romances of chivalry. He wrote lyrics and songs, but his future as a poet must rest on five poems: "Corn," the first significant poem from the new South; "The Symphony," a latter-day ode to St. Cecilia; "The Psalm of the West," which he intended should do for the centennial year what Taylor had failed so lamentably to do in his Fourth of July ode; "The Marshes of Glynn," a symphony without musical score; and, finally on his death bed, held in life only by his imperious will, "Sunrise," his most joyous and most inspired improvisation of all.

V

For Lanier was essentially an improvisatore. He left behind him no really finished work: he is a poet of magnificent fragments. He was too excited, too impetuous, to finish anything. Poetry was a thing of rhapsodic outbursts, of tiptoe glimpses: his eager jottings for poems made on the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, anything that was at hand, fill a volume. He may be likened to a child in a meadow of daisies: he filled his hands, his arms, full of the marvelous things, then threw them aside to gather more and ever more. There was no time to arrange them, no time even to look at them twice. Ideas came in flocks; he lived in a tumult of emotion. His letters quiver with excitement as do those of no other American poet. "All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody." "I cannot tell you with what eagerness I devoured Felix Holt." "My heart was all a-cry." "The fury of creation is on me to-day." "Lying in the music-waters, I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and prostrate." "The very inner spirit and essence of all wind-songs, bird-songs, passion-songs, folk-songs, country-songs, sex-songs, soul-songs, and body-songs hath blown me in quick gusts like the breath of passion and sailed me into a sea of vast dreams." One may quote interminably.

Hamerik's characterization of his flute-playing may be taken as the key to all his work: "The artist felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary inspiration to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship." It explains the unevenness of his work and its lack of finish. He had no patience to return to a poem and labor upon it. Other and more rapturous melodies were calling to him. It explains his lack of constructive power: inspiration is a thing of rapturous glimpses, not of long, patient coördinating effort. His poems are chaotic in structure even to the point often of obscurity. "Corn," for example, was intended to be a poem with a message, and that message doubtless the superiority of corn over cotton as a crop for the new South. But half the poem has only the vaguest connection with the subject. One-third of it outlines the duties and privileges of the poet soul. The message is not brought home: one has to labor to find it. There is a succession of beautiful images expressed often with rare melody and distinction, but inconsecutive even to vagueness.

His prose has the same characteristics. The lectures on the English novel seem like the first draft of work rather than like a finished product. He changes his plan as he proceeds. It was to be a study of the novel as a literary form, but as he progresses he changes it into a study of the development of personality in literature, and finally ends it by devoting half his total space to a rhapsody upon George Eliot. The Science of English Verse has the same faults. He rides a pet theory through chapters and dismisses really basic principles with a paragraph. It is a book of magnificent, even at times of inspired sections, but as a complete treatise it has no great value. The same may be said of all his prose work: he had flashes of inspiration but no consecutive message. The cause for it was partly pathological, partly temperamental. He was first of all a musician, a genius, an improvisatore.

That his conception of the poet's office was a broader and saner and more modern one than that of most of his contemporaries was undoubtedly true. In "Corn" he addresses thus the stalk that stands high above its fellows:

Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime
That leads the vanward of his timid time
And sings up cowards with commanding rime—
Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow
By double increment, above, below;
Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee,
Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry.

The poet then is not to be a mere dreamer of beauty, a dweller in the clouds apart from the men of his time. He is to stand squarely on the earth:

Thou lift'st more stature than a mortal man's,
Yet ever piercest downward in the mold
And keepest hold
Upon the reverend and steadfast earth
That gave thee birth.

But despite his conception of the poet's office, Lanier himself is not often a leader and a prophet. He had ceased to be Georgia-minded and he had felt the national thrill that was making a new America, but it was not his to be the strong voice of the new era. "The Psalm of the West," which casts into poetic form certain vital episodes of American history, has no message. One searches it in vain for any interpretation of the soul of the great republic, or any forecasting of the future years, or any passages expressing what America is to stand for among the nations. It is a fragment, the introduction to what should have been the poem.