Made the earth tremble and the sun afraid
To look upon his agony—the heart
Of a lost world’s Redeemer—overflowed,
Touched by a mourner’s sorrow! Jesus wept!”
This is what Lowell called “inspiration and water.” Alfred de Vigny, a fine spirit and good poet, has tried the same thing in French and succeeded little, if at all, better than the Yankee collegian. The inadequacy of Willis’s Scripture renderings is made more apparent by the fact that his blank verse is not a good vehicle for strong feeling. It is correct and flowing, sometimes musical, but seldom energetic. It favored his tendency to diffuseness and it often degenerates into a kind of accentless oratio soluta, which is only verse because it scans, and only blank verse because it does not rhyme.
Upon the whole the most genuine expression of Willis’s talent in this early volume was in the piece entitled “Better Moments,” which remains one of his best, because one of his most spontaneous poems.
It makes one realize the startling growth of the United States in the last fifty years, to remember that Willis had already won a “national reputation” by his poetry when he left college. The air was much thinner then, American literature much scantier, the population so small and so comparatively homogeneous, that the suffrages of a few hundreds of readers in New York, Boston, New Haven, and Philadelphia, and the praises of a few dozen journals were enough to bestow fame. What undergraduate nowadays, however clever or precocious, could hope to make his voice heard beyond the limits of the college yard?
It remains only to mention that the presence in New Haven of the two poets Percival and Hillhouse, when Willis was a student there, was not without influence on his literary development. Percival went to West Point as Professor of Chemistry in 1824 and did not come back to New Haven until 1827, but Hillhouse resided constantly at his beautiful home in the outskirts of the city, “Sachem’s Wood.” His Master’s Oration, “The Education of a Poet,” and his Phi Beta Kappa poem, “The Judgment,” had given him great fame in the university as an orator and poet. “‘Hadad’ was published in 1825,” wrote Willis, “during my second year in college, and to me it was the opening of a new heaven of imagination. The leading characters possessed me for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious language was, for a long time, constantly in my ears.” Of its author he said, “In no part of the world have I seen a man of more distinguished mien.… Though my acquaintance with him was slight, he confided to me, in a casual conversation, the plan of a series of dramas, different from all he had attempted, upon which he designed to work with the first mood and leisure he could command.”