The poet’s gift matured rapidly. There is strength in such poems as ‘Prometheus,’ ‘Columbus,’ ‘A Glance behind the Curtain,’ rare beauty in ‘A Legend of Brittany,’ ‘Hebe,’ and ‘Rhœcus,’ a mystical power in the haunting lines of ‘The Sower,’ passion and uplift in ‘The Present Crisis,’ ‘Anti-Apis,’ the lines ‘To W. L. Garrison,’ and the ‘Ode to France,’ while in ‘An Interview with Miles Standish’ is a promise of that satirical power which was presently to find complete expression in The Biglow Papers.
Early in his career Lowell announced his theory of the poet’s office, which is to inspire to high thought and noble action, not merely to please with pretty fancies and melodious verse. The ‘Ode,’ written in 1841, is an expression of his poetic faith. The ethical and reforming bent in Lowell’s character was so strong as to make it difficult for him, true bard though he was, to look on poetry as an art to be cultivated for itself alone.
Inspiriting as were stanzas like ‘The Present Crisis,’ Lowell’s power became most effective in the anti-slavery struggle when the outbreak of the Mexican War led to the writing of The Biglow Papers. Printed anonymously in a journal, copied into other newspapers, the question of their authorship much debated, these satires were at last adjudicated to the man who wrote them, but not until he himself had heard it demonstrated ‘in the pauses of a concert’ that he was wholly incapable of such a performance.
Of the characters of the little drama, Hosea Biglow, the country youth, stands for the plain common-sense of New England, opposed to the extension of slavery whatever the means employed, and above all by legalized murder with an accompaniment of drums and fifes. The Reverend Homer Wilbur acts as ‘chorus,’ and by his learned comments surrounds the productions of the country muse with an atmosphere of scholarship. Birdofredom Sawin is the clown of the little show.
Many finer touches have become obscure by the lapse of time, and The Biglow Papers is now provided with historical notes; but the energy, the spirit, and the unfailing humor of the work are perennial. Lowell was most fortunate in his verbal felicities. Who could have foreseen that so much danger lurked in a middle initial, or that a plain name of the sort borne by the former senator from Middlesex contained such comic potentialities?
We were gittin’ on nicely up here to our village,
With good old idees o’ wut’s right an’ wut aint,
We kind o’ thought Christ went agin war an’ pillage,
An’ thet eppyletts worn’t the best mark of a saint;
But John P.