A Manual of American Literature

by Unknown

For our lack of a national art, a national poetry, a superficial reason is often assigned: in the conditions of a new country, in the struggle for existence, in the development of agriculture and commerce, in the assimilation of foreign races, there has been very little time for the nourishment of letters, very little of that leisure which the Greeks called scholé, and which is indispensable for a productive scholarship and for the flourishing of imagination. Yet we have had, or have taken, sufficient leisure to write and publish an immense amount of verse, judged merely by its bulk. Scarcely an American author can be mentioned in the nineteenth century that did not try his hand at metrical composition. The truth is, rather, that we have seldom approached the art of poetry with enough seriousness; that, having rebelled against the Puritan’s unkindly conception of life, we have nevertheless to some extent acquiesced in his belittling estimate of imaginative art; that we have failed to recognise in the poet a necessary servant of the commonwealth, a leader worthy of a high and severe training. Our versifiers have rushed into print before they were ripe, and they have praised each other’s work too easily; while the standards set by the public taste have been readily met when the rhymers succeeded in being “patriotic.” Real patriotism demands such an admission.

Not that our poets have been wholly without a philosophy of criticism; though it is significant that the most subtle and sympathetic understanding of the poetic temperament, of its function as well as its perils, is to be found, not in the writings of any maker of verses but in those of a novelist, Hawthorne—for example, in “The House of Seven Gables” and “The Great Stone Face.” Yet Bryant read, meditated, and wrote upon the art of poetry; Poe thought somewhat, if not deeply, upon it; Lanier made a worthy contribution to the science of meter; Longfellow was conversant with the literature of criticism; and Emerson’s stimulating essay on “The Poet,” while it may not have been the sort of medicine that our men of letters most needed, has doubtless exerted a wholesome influence. In Poe’s day, several magazines were discussing the principles of imaginative composition. However, an “Art of Poetry” like Timrod’s (published in The Atlantic Monthly for September, 1905) could lie for forty years in manuscript, without exciting any strong suspicion of its value; and in the long run there has been an amazing disproportion between the slender thread of fundamental tradition and sound critical theory on the one hand, and the swollen and rapid stream of naïve, uncultivated verse, gathering from every quarter, on the other. Whatever English poets furnished the models, the imitation was largely on the surface. First Pope and his successors in England, then Wordsworth and Coleridge, then Shelley and Keats, and Scott and Bryon, and subsequently Tennyson,—all had in turn their American devotees. But there seems to have been relatively little understanding like that of Bryant and Timrod for the conscious theory underlying the “experiments” in “Lyrical Ballads,” or for the ideal demands which Shelley laid upon poetry and poets; nor did cisatlantic readers of Lord Byron much concern themselves about that Longinus whom he studied “o’er a bottle,” or for the structural frame upon which was reared Tennyson’s “Palace of Art.”

Characteristics of the Period.—Of course in the following pages we shall deal as briefly as possible with those American poets in the last century who are touched to any great extent by strictures like these; for a history of literature is bound to treat as far as may be of writers that have made a wise use of tradition, and whose native insight has enabled them to train their genius in accordance with universal canons of art, and with a due appreciation of masterly technique. Meanwhile we may attempt to summarise the characteristics of the poetical era under consideration, and, in particular, of the earlier rather than the latter half of that era. The nearer we advance toward our own day, the wiser it is to refrain from general characterisation.

1. The relation between English literature and American in the initial twenty or thirty years of the last century has already been suggested. Aside from that, or very often through that, the influence of Rousseau was paramount. The doctrine that upheld the innocence of “man in a state of nature,” and maintained the equality of all individuals, and the feeling, half pantheistic, for an external nature opposed to civilisation, since they entered into the vital tissue of our national thought,—and though they are at bottom contrary to science and all demonstrable experience—are among the very conditions, so to speak, of much of our poetry. From these sources, for example, it came about that while in actual practice we despised and maltreated that “natural man” the cruel Indian, we idealised him in poetical effusions; just as Fenimore Cooper, treading in the footsteps of Chateaubriand, idealised him in prose.

2. Our earlier poets, that is, immediately after the Revolution, but again, and especially, after the War of 1812 had confirmed our sense of national solidarity, are much given to the utterance of their patriotism; albeit only a few out of many more or less pretentious or tasteful efforts have survived. Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner” (1814), conceived at the close of the second war, antedates “The American Flag” (1819) of Drake by but five years; these two, with Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia” (1798), and “America” (1832), the well-known hymn by S. F. Smith, whatever their relative or absolute merits as literature, remain our most cherished national poems.

3. However frequent or insistent the note of patriotism, the general temper of American poets has not been strongly optimistic. As one glances over a long list of the subjects chosen for treatment, a leaning toward the more sombre and melancholy elements and aspects of life becomes more and more apparent. Nor is this leaning confined to the multitude. Exceptions like Walt Whitman to the contrary notwithstanding, it is characteristic, in the main, of the leaders, whenever they escape from common or inherited themes, and give rein to their own personalities. That joy which is the well-spring of Wordsworth’s vitality is greatly diminished in even his nearest American counterpart, Bryant; assuredly it is not akin to the subdued sadness of Longfellow, though this be not strictly “akin to pain.”

4. On the other hand, the noblest American poetry has not been tragic. Tragedy and serious epic have been attempted, but, as in the case of Dwight, Barlow, and so many others, largely as academic exercitations, savouring of the desk and the library. With our national life they have had no essential connection. A central motive in our history like the death of Lincoln still awaits the imagination of a master-dramatist.

5. Though few have devoted their entire lives to it, most of our poets have begun the profession betimes, conceiving very often in haste, and publishing in their immaturity. The painful advice of Horace has not been to our liking. With the examples of Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson continually before us, we have yet failed to profit by their insistence upon generous preparation, meticulous technique, and laborious delay in publication. We have realised the brevity of life more fully than the length of art.

6. Our respect for the “practical” and for “common sense” is allied to a fondness shown in our poetry for common, everyday subjects. Here, of course, we have succeeded better in the comic than in the serious vein. To treat of homely topics so as to invest their essential dignity with the light of imagination—in painting the world about us, to “add the gleam”—was the task set for himself by an English mystic. It is a dangerous trade for men whose talk is of oxen. Homely minds on homely matters are prone to slip into the trivial or the pathetic. Even Longfellow cannot be freed from the charge of too much attention to the obvious commonplace, and, as a versifier at least, of too much love for the merely sentimental. For adequate imaginative handling of themes that are serious, complete, and of sufficient magnitude to produce the loftier effects of great literary art, we are in general forced to go to our best prose fiction.