Dana, Sprague, Hillhouse, etc.—Although his life and activity were centred elsewhere, Bryant, as we have seen, was a product of western Massachusetts. From him and the city of his adoption we naturally turn to a number of writers whose careers are to be more closely identified with New England. Many of these, like Richard Henry Dana senior (1787–1879), of Boston, were poets only secondarily. Dana was a journalist and politician—an admirer of Wordsworth and a lecturer on Shakespeare. An edition of his prose and verse in 1833 contained a poem, “The Buccaneer,” inspired by Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” His shorter poems are moral—
Oh, listen, man!
A voice within us speaks the startling word,
“Man, thou shalt never die”—
and are mostly tame and artificial. Though inferior in native talent to his brother-in-law, Washington Allston, Dana was more widely known as a writer, partly because of his ability as literary critic. His verse was melancholy and his meditation not virile. As a poet he won a smaller audience than did Charles Sprague (1791–1875), also of Boston; yet it is not now easy to understand why Sprague’s longest poem, “Curiosity” (1823), should have been “largely read and quoted in this country, and grossly plagiarised in England” (Onderdonk). James A. Hillhouse (1789–1841), who wrote a Biblical drama called “Hadad” (1824), published “Dramas, Discourses, and Other Pieces” in 1839. He is interesting as an early exponent of the dramatic art in America. His style shows a strange blending of elements from Lord Byron and the Scriptures. It would probably be fairer to judge him by “Demetria” than by “Hadad.” A Byronic sentimentalism runs through the work of James Gates Percival (1795–1856), whose “Prometheus” (1820) luxuriates in the sorrows of men and the vanity of human wishes. His poetry often belies his everyday life, since for all his facile pessimism he was a man of genuine attainments and solid interest in science. He could not make his own experience the fundamental thing in his verse;—unlike his contemporary John Pierpont (1785–1866), a clergyman of Boston. In his hymns and patriotic odes, Pierpont was masculine and sane, a good representative of the New England abolitionist, as may be gathered from “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star.” “Warren’s Address to the American Soldiers” is even better known, and still withholds the name of Pierpont from oblivion. John G. C. Brainard (1796–1828) died before his poetical gift could find complete expression. He dealt with the scenery and legends of Connecticut, but is hardly remembered outside the histories of American literature.
Mrs. Brooks and Mrs. Sigourney.—The same generation produced several women of note, whose poetry demands some attention; in particular, Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865), a prolific maker of books, not to speak of “more than two thousand articles in prose and verse” which were issued during her long and quiet life in Hartford. Mrs. Sigourney was no genius, albeit she passed for “the American Hemans.” She was a person of great moral worth and the most charitable disposition. It has been suggested that the beauty of her character was responsible for her extraordinary vogue. More probably the attention she gave to the legends of her own country, the not unwholesome cast of sentimentalism in her thought, and her readiness to contribute verses for any occasion, however slight, will in large part account for the unbounded admiration which she enjoyed. In 1822 appeared her poem, in five cantos, “Traits of the American Aborigines”; her “Lays of the Heart” were published in 1848. Besides her innumerable shorter articles, she is said to have been responsible for something like fifty volumes. “Maria del Occidente” (Mrs. Maria Gowen Brooks, 1795–1845) was of a different cast, less homely in her sentiments, a romantic soul, filled with the spirit of Southey and Moore, leaning toward the sensuous and exotic. When she bent her energies to verse, as in “Judith, Esther, and Other Poems” (1820), and “Zophiel, or The Bride of Seven” (1833)—a story based on the Apocryphal Book of Tobit—she showed herself far removed from Mrs. Sigourney and “The Power of Maternal Piety” or “The Sunday School.” On the whole, the taste of “Maria del Occidente,” as Southey called her, was worse than that of “the American Hemans”; and if Southey termed Mrs. Brooks “the most impassioned and most imaginative of all poetesses,” he paid an astounding tribute to his own acumen as a critic. Emma H. Willard (1787–1870), like Mrs. Sigourney, was prominent as an educator, accomplishing more as the head of a female seminary in Troy, N. Y., than by her writings. She was the author of “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep.” In the next generation were Sarah H. Whitman (1803–78) and Frances S. Osgood (1811–50), who composed verse not lacking in merit, but who are recalled rather for their championship of Edgar Allan Poe. Mrs. Whitman was at one time betrothed to him.
Minor Poets of New England.—Among the minor New England poets who came slightly later, was Samuel Longfellow (1819–92)—younger brother of Henry W. Longfellow—a hymn-writer of singular purity. Sylvester Judd (1813–53), a Unitarian minister, wrote an epic entitled “Philo” (1850). William Wetmore Story (1819–95), who edited the life and letters of his distinguished father, Chief Justice Story, forsook the bar at an early age and went to Italy to engage in sculpture. He was a poet of refinement, touched with melancholy, intellectual rather than passionate—yet with a fondness for the intangible—influenced by Longfellow and Holmes, by Tennyson and Browning. In verse, his chief works were “Poems” (1847), “Graffiti d’Italia” (1868), “A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem” (1870), “He and She” (1883), and “Poems” (1886). Among his individual pieces “Cleopatra” seems to be the best known. Theophilus W. Parsons (1819–92) shows a similar Continental influence, whose most valuable result was his free translation of Dante’s “Inferno” (cantos I-X, 1843, completed in 1867); this was preceded by his fine lines “On a Bust of Dante” (1841), which are justly admired. Henry H. Brownell (1820–72) attracted notice by a poem on Farragut, and through Farragut’s good offices entered the United States Navy. His “War Lyrics and Other Poems” (1866) contained a stirring piece, “The River Fight,” on the exploits of Farragut, somewhat in the style of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Poetry in the South.—The major poets of New England, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Emerson, and perhaps one or two others, constitute the one group in America that may rightfully be dignified with the name of school. Before approaching them, however, let us give some consideration to the poets of the South.
Though the institution of slavery gave the dominant classes in the Southern States a leisure comparable to that enjoyed by classic Greece, plantation life was not favourable to a thorough and imaginative education; nor were there great civic centres to collect, for mutual inspiration, such individuals as showed artistic and literary bent. Furthermore, in modern times most of the poets have been furnished by a restless and aspiring middle class, which was virtually lacking in the South. Among the owners of plantations, personal ambition rarely soared much higher than local, state, or sectional politics, and political and occasional oratory, with some noteworthy exceptions, was flamboyant and insincere. Save for a few noteworthy exceptions, accordingly, the career of poet languished, and literature of a high order failed of appreciation. The leading poets of the South realised only too well the weight of inertia against which they strove, in a civilisation where the odds were continually against their success.
The Forerunners.—Early and minor poets in the South need not long detain us. William Crafts (1789–1826), of Charleston, South Carolina, a graduate of Harvard, and an orator of repute, composed a “Raciad,” or epic on horse-racing, and “Sullivan’s Island.” His “Miscellaneous Writings” (1828) were published posthumously. William J. Grayson (1788–1863), who was more voluminous, attempted in his poem “The Hireling and the Slave” (1856) to represent slavery as a preferable state for the negro. Richard H. Wilde (1789–1847), Edward C. Pinkney (1802–28), George H. Calvert (1803–89), Philip P. Cooke (1816–50) and others, show a range of imitation running all the way from Byron through Scott and Moore to Tennyson. Cooke’s “Florence Vane” was warmly admired by Poe. Albert Pike (1809–91), should be remembered as the author of “Dixie,” which, “set to a popular air which has been traced back to slavery times in New York State, became, in a multitude of variations, a Southern Marseillaise” (Onderdonk).
Timrod, Hayne, and Simms.—Of a high order was the poetry of that champion of the Southern cause Henry B. Timrod (1829–67). Denied by fortune the sort of education that he craved, striving throughout much of his life with poverty and sickness, and finally defeated, saddened by personal bereavement as well as by the downfall of the South, Timrod died before he could make adequate report of his endowments. His volume of “Poems” (1860), issued at the beginning of the Civil War, was almost unnoticed; and even yet he has not obtained the recognition due him. His devotion to the South was not greater than his reverence for his art. Few of our poets have so clearly understood themselves and their craft. Unusual courage breathes in all he wrote. In the year of his death, a prey to disease and sorrow, he could say to the Confederate soldiers buried “At Magnolia Cemetery”: