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.