A Manual of American Literature

by Unknown

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.

In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone.

Timrod’s works were brought to light again in 1873 by Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830–86), who, prior to the war, had united with Simms and Timrod to erect, if possible, the drooping spirit of poetry in the South. Hayne’s “Poems” (1855) and “Sonnets and Other Poems” (1857) had a chance to make their way before the outbreak of hostilities; and he survived the conflict long enough to publish “Legends and Lyrics” (1872) and “The Mountain of the Lovers, and Other Poems” (1873). A complete edition of his poems appeared in 1882. “The Laureate of the South,” as he was called, was an enthusiast in sub-tropical life and scenery, a word-painter and word-musician after the manner of Poe. His music is more obvious than Timrod’s and not so likely to please a delicate ear; and he did not have Timrod’s unity and clearness of conception.

Less careful still in his workmanship, and still more lacking in concentration, was the third of the trio, William Gilmore Simms (1806–70). Simms was a most abundant writer, known later for his novels and biographies rather than his poems. In his earlier poetry he was under the sway of Byron and Moore. His scanty advantages in the way of schooling were atoned for in part by voluminous indiscriminate reading; yet he never overcame certain defects in thinking to which self-taught men are prone. His first publication was “Lyrical and Other Poems” (1827). “Atalantis” (1832), a closet-drama in blank verse, in its general structure harks back to Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound.” His selected works, in nineteen volumes, were published in 1859. Simms’ commanding presence, the vigour of his personality, his determination to conquer all obstacles in his own path, and to vitalise the literary atmosphere of the South, make him an impressive, even heroic, figure.

Edgar Allan Poe.—The life of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) is duly recounted in another place, where his prose fiction is handled at some length. When Poe ran away from the ledgers in his guardian’s office, he carried with him in manuscript the first heir of his invention, “Tamerlane and Other Poems,” for which he found a publisher at Boston (1827). “Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems” followed in 1829. In 1831, the year of his discharge from West Point, appeared the volume of “Poems” with which Poe thought to win the interest of the cadets. Thereafter, most of his poetry first saw the light in various periodicals; for example, “The Raven” (1845) in the New York Evening Mirror, “The Bells” (1849) in Sartain’s Magazine, “Annabel Lee” (1849) in The New York Tribune.

In the opinion of the present writer, Poe’s verse is generally rated above its value, even for those qualities in which it is supposed particularly to excel. Certain poetical gifts this author unquestionably had in abundance. He had the copia verborum which is indispensable to every literary artist. His sensations were vivid, if not numerous. He knew how to choose the symbols with which to attain his ends. If we are to trust the substance of his remarks in “The Philosophy of Composition,” and of those which he made regarding “The Raven,” his choice and manipulation of literary artifice were for the most part very conscious. He was able through the use of carefully selected diction and imagery to produce in his reader precisely the shade of feeling—the glimmer of the supernatural, the sense of grey and subdued, occasionally the sense of Weird and poignant, grief—which he desired. He never forgets the music of his words, and through habit, almost without trying, he can write continuously in a minor key. And yet, his music is not inevitable enough, nor does it undergo enough variation, or variation sufficiently delicate. It is too forced, too repetitious. His effects all lie within narrow limits, and he runs his gamut over and over again. This is altogether aside from his failure to make his music grow out of that strong underlying poetical good sense which is to be confidently expected of every great imagination. People too often forget how far Poe falls short of his master, Coleridge, in the mere element of harmonious sound; just as they too often forget how far Coleridge falls short of his master, Milton, in the union of ethereal as well as sonorous cadences with a finely modulated or robust thought and sentiment. Were Poe’s appeals to the external senses more wonderful than they are, he would still lag behind those poets—and in the history of literature they are not after all so few—who can touch every chord, whether sad or joyous, known to the human ear, and still maintain that basis of firm reason without which human communication ceases to be broadly human. The intellect also has its music, lacking which no poetry has ever long survived.

Furthermore, all allowance being made for the tragic outcome of Poe’s career, for the part of his fate which was not the outgrowth of his own character, or could not, humanly considered, be attributed at some point in his development to his own will, his poetry is not uplifting. True, in his handling of material he is, in the ordinary acceptation, entirely clean. That is, he is wholly free from obscenity, as he is free also from that more perilous seeming cleanness which so often cloaks real impurity. Nevertheless may he be dangerous food for those whom he most readily attracts. Poe is essentially pessimistic, hopeless, toward general human experience. His favourite topic is death; and his vision does not pierce beyond the worm and the grave. Nay, like his predecessors in England and on the Continent, he luxuriates in the tomb and the charnel. As in his stories, so in his verse, though less patently, he follows some of the most pernicious motives in art that the older civilisation afforded his age. And it is the lethal progeny—Baudelaire and the rest—of that movement in European literature typified by Ann Radcliffe and “Monk” Lewis that has been quickest to take up with Poe and exploit him abroad. We may seek to explain and exculpate him; we may sorrow for his blighted life; but the fact remains that what Poe wrote sprang out of his career, hence, on the whole, was morbid. The flowers of his poetry are the flowers of Lethe. The stimulants with which he catches the reader are violent and exciting. His ideal of intellectual beauty was detached and unnatural. It is little wonder, then, that he would not enter into sympathy with the English poet by whom the normal Bryant was inspired, and whose works, the most normalising and healthful influence that American literature thus far has felt, were purposely reactive against artificial and abnormal stimulation.

Sidney Lanier.—Among the representatives of the “New South,” Sidney Lanier (1842–81), musician, poet, teacher of English, is easily foremost. He was born in Macon, Georgia, and received his education at Oglethorpe College, where, on graduating, he became a tutor; he volunteered in the Confederate Army (1860), toward the end of the war was captured, and perhaps owed his subsequent ill-health to his imprisonment of five months at Point Lookout. When the war was over, he taught again, in Alabama, read law, supported himself by his music—he was an adept on the flute—wrote for magazines, and by private study in Baltimore eventually fitted himself to take a lectureship in English literature at Johns Hopkins University. Courageous in his struggle with adverse circumstances, buoyant and energetic in spite of his long battle with disease, Lanier greatly resembles Timrod. Like Timrod, too, dying early, he left but a slender volume of poetry, uneven in excellence, an earnest of what he might have accomplished, hardly a standard by which to appraise him. Lanier’s was a delicate and sensuous rather than a profound imagination; however, both in his observation of external nature and in the thoroughness and extent of his acquaintance with general literature, he was unusually well prepared for the office of poet. His interest in science fortified and disciplined his contemplation of the outer world; his poetical instinct was nurtured through industrious and select reading; and he brought to bear upon his own literary craftsmanship, and upon the literary work of others, the ear of a trained musician. His musical ear helped him greatly in his studies on metre, where his contributions to scholarship are distinctly more valuable than in his lectures on the English novel. Deeply sympathetic and generous and sane in all relations of life, Lanier had a subtle understanding for the realm that lies outside the haunts of men—for the domain of wild fauna and flora, for the seldom heeded and the escaping phenomena of the woods and the marsh and the sea. The poor reception given to his “Tiger Lilies” (1867), a novel based on experiences in the army, did not dishearten him. In 1875 he definitely announced himself by his poem entitled “Corn,” published in Lippincott’s Magazine, a vision of the South restored through agriculture. This brought him the opportunity of writing the “Centennial Cantata” for the Philadelphia Exposition, where he expressed the faith he now had in the future of the reunited nation. The Cantata finished, he immediately began a much longer centennial ode, his “Psalm of the West” (1876), which appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine, and which, with “Corn” and “The Symphony,” made part of a small volume published in the autumn of 1876. Lanier’s important critical works were the product of the years between 1876 and his death. Some three years after he died, his poems were collected and edited by his wife. If we had to rely upon one poem to keep alive the fame of Lanier, thinks his biographer, Mr. Edwin Mims, we “could single out ‘The Marshes of Glynn’ with assurance that there is something so individual and original about it, and that, at the same time, there is such a roll and range of verse in it, that it will surely live not only in American poetry but in English.” “He is the poet of the marshes as surely as Bryant is of the forests.”

Maurice Thompson and Mrs. Preston.—Our notice of Southern writers may conclude with Maurice Thompson and Mrs. Margaret Preston. James Maurice Thompson (1844–1901) is commonly associated with the Middle West, since he was born and died in Indiana. His early life, however, was spent in Kentucky and Georgia, he saw service in the Confederate Army, and much of his verse and prose carries the stamp of his experiences in the South and his acquaintance with Southern literature. He was a lawyer by profession, but by instinct a natural scientist. In 1885 he was appointed State Geologist of Indiana. From 1890 on he was connected with the New York Independent. His style was crisp and neat, sometimes over-elaborate; but he kept an eye on the thing he was talking about, so that in general what he has said of nature is very acceptable. His devotion to the pastimes of fishing and archery gave him a good deal of literary material. His extensive and exact knowledge of the ways of birds enters into many of his poems, as for example “An Early Bluebird.” The strain of regenerate patriotism in “Lincoln’s Grave” is the same that we find in Lanier. Mrs. Preston (1820–97) was the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Junkin, founder of Lafayette College and afterward president of Washington and Lee University, in Virginia. Before her marriage, in 1857, she had done some writing. In 1866 she published “Beechenbrook, a Rhyme of the War”; in 1870, “Old Songs and New.” Her “Cartoons” (1875) and “Colonial Ballads” (1887) show her at her best. She has been styled “the greatest Southern poetess”; there have been few claimants to dispute the title.