“If ‘W,’ at Haverhill, will continue to favor us with pieces as beautiful as the one inserted in our poetical department to-day, we shall esteem it a favor.” This note appeared in the Free Press, of Newburyport, Mass., June 8, 1826. The “W” referred to was John G. Whittier, then in his nineteenth year, and the editor of the Free Press was William Lloyd Garrison, then in his twenty-first. “W” did continue to “favor us” with pieces quite as beautiful as the one inserted in the Free Press in 1826; indeed, with pieces more and more beautiful, of a wider and deeper application to American life, until he was recognized—tho not till after many years—as the chief of the purely American poets, indebted to America and its life in the highest degree for his equipment in song.
The first piece of “original poetry”—we are told by the sons of Mr. Garrison, in their admirable life of their father—was found lying near the door in the office of the Free Press. The editor, having a strong tendency to tear “original” sin—verse or otherwise—to pieces, says he had a momentary impulse to dispose of this in that way, without reading it; but summoning the resolution so needful in an editor, he read the poem and published it. He had the courage, moreover, to inquire about the writer, and found him to be a “Quaker lad who was daily at work on the shoemaker’s bench, with hammer and lapstone, at East Haverhill. Jumping into a vehicle, I lost no time,” says the editor, “in driving to see the youthful rustic bard, who came into the room with shrinking diffidence, almost unable to speak, and blushing like a maiden.” The parents of the lad were poor, “unable to give him a suitable education,” and unwilling, as being unable to, let him indulge in the unprofitable but delightful pursuit of verse-making. “Poetry will not give him bread,” they said, as many a father has had to say. But the poet, proverbially “born, not made,” is not easily unmade, since nature presides at the birth and fosters her own.—Journal of Education.
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Poetry and Religion—See [Religion and Poetry].
POETRY, POPULAR POWER OF
Poetry is not always the possession of the mart and street, but in the case of a favored few who write, there is this high compliment of approval, as the following suggests:
Walter Camp was talking about football at a dinner at the New York Athletic Club.
“Had we not reformed our football,” he said, “it would have fallen into grave disrepute—into such grave disrepute as surrounded cricket and football both during the Boer War, when Kipling wrote his poem about
“‘The flannel fools at the wicket,
The muddied oafs at the goal.’