Read Stoddard’s poems with a view to marking definite literary influences as shown in poems which seem evidently imitative.
Read a group of the four-line and eight-line poems of Aldrich and compare them in spirit and execution with similar bits by Stoddard and by Emerson.
Read Stedman’s critical essays on one or two of the New England poets and on two or three of his fellow New Yorkers. Read his essay on Walt Whitman. Does Stedman’s own verse confirm the theory of his criticisms of Whitman?
Read Gilder’s poems in the newer verse forms and compare them with one of the contemporary poets mentioned in the last chapter of this book.
Is there a legitimate connection to be mentioned between Gilder’s poems on civic themes and the movement for better citizenship in the 1890’s? Can you cite political events and characters and novels or plays on political life which belong to this period?
CHAPTER XXIII
THE POETRY OF THE SOUTH
The non-mention of any Southern writers for nearly two centuries in a history of American literature is likely to mislead the unthinking reader. Certain qualifying facts should be reckoned with in drawing any deductions. The first and most specific is that Poe, although born in Boston and largely active in Philadelphia and New York, belongs to the South. His poems and tales are without time and space, but his criticisms are often vigorously sectional; yet he was really an isolated character, speaking for himself without associates or disciples.
For the comparative withdrawal of the South during a long period from the writing and publishing of poems, essays, and stories, there are two main reasons. One is the general nature of the early settlement (see pp. 3, 4, 6). The spread of the population over a wide area and the consequent lack of large towns gave no encouragement to printers and publishers before the Revolution and furnished no such gathering places as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Literature, like all the other arts, thrives best in fellowship. With the Revolution and after it the richest culture of the South devoted itself to statesmanship and expressed itself in oratory. John Adams, governmental specialist, regretted that he had no leisure for the arts (see p. 69), but Thomas Jefferson, his successor in the White House, was a creative educator, a linguist, an architect, and not unversed in music. Southern gentlemen from the days of Jefferson and Madison to those of Abraham Lincoln read “Mr. Addison” and “Mr. Steele” and “Mr. Pope,” fashioned their speech and writing after those courtly models, and, when they wrote at all, circulated their efforts among friends, not submitting them to the sordid touch of the publisher.
Moreover, the literary consciousness of the South is shown in the history of the American theater. The earliest performances of which there is record were given on Southern estates in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The Hallam company of players, arriving from England in 1752, secured their first hearing in Maryland and Virginia. Smaller Southern communities held their own with New York and Philadelphia in the patronage of the stage, while surviving Puritan prejudice made New England an arid field for the drama until well into the next century. Again, the founding of the University of Virginia, preëminent though not the oldest among Southern colleges, was a doubly important event in American education, for it was first among state universities, with a curriculum recognizing the demands of citizenship, and it was unique in the beauty of its housing. Finally, journalism was not neglected in the South, keeping pace with the progress in the rest of the country; and the Southern Literary Messenger (1834–1865) held an enviable place among American periodicals during its thirty years of life.