It came as a natural product of mid-century conditions. America, hungry for culture, had fed upon the romantic pabulum furnished so abundantly in the thirties and the forties. It looked away from the garish daylight of the new land of its birth into the delicious twilight of the lands across the sea, with their ruins and their legends and their old romance.
We have seen how it was an age of sugared epithet, of adolescent sadness and longing, of sentiment even to sentimentality. Its dreams were centered in the East, in that old world over which there hung the glamour of romance. "I hungrily read," writes Bayard Taylor of this epoch in his life, "all European books of travel, and my imagination clothed foreign countries with a splendid atmosphere of poetry and art.... Italy! and Greece! the wild enthusiasm with which I should tread those lands, and view the shrines 'where young Romance and Love like sister pilgrims turn'; the glorious emotions of my soul, and the inspiration I should draw from them, which I now partly feel. How my heart leaps at the sound of:
Woods that wave on Delphi's steep,
Isles that gem the Ægean deep.
The isles of Greece! hallowed by Homer and Milton and Byron! My words are cold and tame compared with my burning thoughts."[69]
The increasing tide of translations that marked the thirties and the forties, the new editions of English and continental poets—Shelley, Keats, Heine; the early books of the Victorians—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the young Tennyson—came across the sea to these sensitive souls like visitants from another planet. "I had the misfortune," Taylor writes in 1848, "to be intoxicated yesterday—with Tennyson's new poem, 'The Princess.'... For the future, for a long time at least, I dare not read Tennyson. His poetry would be the death of mine. His intense perception of beauty haunts me for days, and I cannot drive it from me."[70]
Poetry was a thing to be spoken of with awed lips like love or the deeper longings of the soul. It was an ethereal thing apart from the prose of life; it was beauty, melody, divinest art—a thing broken into harshly by the daily round, a thing to be stolen away to in golden hours, as Stoddard and Taylor stole away on Saturday nights to read their poets and their own poems, and to lose themselves in a more glorious world. "My favorite poet was Keats, and his was Shelley, and we pretended to believe that the souls of these poets had returned to earth in our bodies. My worship of my master was restricted to a silent imitation of his diction; my comrade's worship of his master took the form of an ode to Shelley.... It is followed in the volume before me by an airy lyric on 'Sicilian Wine,' which was written out of his head, as the children say, for he had no Sicilian wine, nor, indeed, wine of any other vintage."[71]
It explains the weakness of the whole school. All too often did these young poets of the second generation write from out their heads rather than their hearts. They were practitioners of the poetic art rather than eager workers in the stuff that is human life. They were inspired not by their times and the actual life that touched elbows with theirs in their toil from day to day; they were inspired by other singers. Poetry they wove from poetry; words from words. Song begotten from other song perishes with its singer. To endure, poetry must come from "that inexpressible aching feeling of the heart"—from the impact of life upon life; it must thrill with the deepest emotions of its creator's soul as he looks beyond his books and all the printed words of others into the yearning, struggling world of men.
I
The members of this second generation of poets fall into two distinct groups: first, those who caught not at all the new note that came into American life and American literature after the war, and so, like the survivors of the earlier school, went on to the end only echoing and reëchoing the earlier music; and, secondly, those transitional poets who yielded to the change of times and retuned their instruments to the new key. Of the first group four only may be mentioned: Thomas Buchanan Read (1822–1872), George Henry Boker (1823–1890), Bayard Taylor (1825–1878), and Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903). None of these may be called a poet of the transition; none of these, not even Taylor, caught the new spirit of recreated America; none of them added to poetry any notes that have influenced the song or the life or the spirit of later years. They were poets of beauty without a message, and they caught no new vision of beauty.
The work of the group began early, only a few years later than that of the major singers. Taylor's Ximena appeared in 1844; Boker's Lesson of Life and Read's Poems in 1847; and Stoddard's Footprints in 1849. By 1870 they had settled into their final manner. It was theirs to strike the last notes, ineffective and all too often decadent, of that mid-century music that had begun with Bryant and Poe, with Emerson and Whittier, with Willis and Longfellow.