But in making this civic Arcadia of their own they deliberately neglected the opportunity of reacting upon the actual civic life of their own land in their own and later times. They lived in one of the great germinal periods in the history of the race and they deliberately chose to create a little Arcadia of their own.
No man of the century, save Lowell, was given the opportunity to react upon the new world of America at a critical moment such as was given to Taylor at the Centennial in 1876. Subject and occasion there were worthy of a Milton. A new America had arisen from the ashes of the war, eager and impetuous. A new era had begun whose glories we of a later century are just beginning to realize. Who was to voice that era? The land needed a poet, a seer, a prophet, and in Taylor it had only a dreamer of beauty, gorgeous of epithet, musical, sensuous. "The National Ode," when we think of what the occasion demanded, must be classed as one of the greatest failures in the history of American literature. Freneau's "The Rising Glory of America," written in 1772, is an incomparably better ode. There are no lines in Taylor's poem to grip the heart and send the blood into quicker beat; there are no magnificent climaxes as in Lowell's odes:
Virginia gave us this imperial man.
Mother of States and undiminished men,
Thou gavest us a country giving him.
New birth of our new soil, the first American.
There is excessive tinkling of rimes; there is forcing of measures that could have come only of haste; there is lack of incisiveness and of distinctive poetic phrases that cling in the memory and become current coin; there is lack of vision and of message. The poet of beauty was unequal to his task. There was needed a prophet and a creative soul, and the lack of such a leader at the critical moment accounts in part perhaps for the poetic leanness of the period that was to come.
III
The poets of the second group, the transition poets, for the most part were born during the thirties. Like Taylor and Stoddard, they were poets of beauty who read other poets with eagerness and wrote with deliberation. Their early volumes are full of exquisitely finished work modeled upon Theocritus and Heine, upon Keats and Shelley. They reacted but little upon the life about them; they railed upon America as crude and raw, a land without adequate art, and were content to fly away into the world of beauty and forget.
Then suddenly the war crashed in their ears. For the first time they caught a vision of life, of their country, of themselves, and for the first time they burst into real song. "For eight years," wrote the young Stedman in 1861, "I have cared nothing for politics—have been disgusted with American life and doings. Now for the first time I am proud of my country and my grand heroic brethren. The greatness of the crisis, the Homeric grandeur of the contest, surrounds and elevates us all.... Henceforth the sentimental and poetic will fuse with the intellectual to dignify and elevate the race."[73]
Edmund Clarence Stedman was of old New England stock. He had inherited with his blood what Howells termed, in words that might have emanated from Dr. Holmes himself, "the quality of Boston, the honor and passion of literature." He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, October 8, 1833. Bereft of his father when he was but two years of age, and later, when he was a mere child, forced to leave his mother and live with an uncle who could little supply the place that only father and mother can fill in a boy's life, he grew into a headstrong, moody youth who resented control. He was a mere lad of fifteen when he entered Yale, the youngest member indeed of his class, and his rustication two years later was only a natural result. Boyishness and high spirits and impetuous independence of soul are not crimes, however, and the college in later years was glad to confer upon him his degree.