FIRST NATIONAL PERIOD, 1775-1865
The two decades that brought the eighteenth century to a close were full of exciting political events, but barren of literature. The fathers could make a nation by adopting a constitution and abiding by it, but the creation of a national literature was not so easy a matter. National poetry did not come with national life. The efforts of Trumbull (1750-1831), and Barlow (1754-1812), are as good as the ordinary poetical work of the time in England, but they are not the expression of the soul of the new nation.
The first real literature was in prose, arising from natural imitation of past models under conditions of culture which led to appreciation of such imitation.
Washington Irving, then twenty-four years old, living the pleasant life of a clever young fellow in a small provincial city, joined with his brother William and James Kirke Paulding in one of the periodicals modeled after the Spectator common in the eighteenth century. Their venture was called Salmagundi, and although not remarkable in itself, its success gave confidence, so that two years afterward, feeling his own power, Irving wrote Knickerbocker’s History of New York, one of the first pieces of American belles-lettres to become known in Europe as well as America. These productions came naturally from the conditions of Irving’s life; so did the Sketch Book, with which he became a professed man of letters, the representative, we may say, of the first period of our national literature.
Irving had pre-eminently the gift for literary expression; in his hands everything became literature—history, biography, descriptive as well as satire, story, essay. He showed the possibility of giving literary form to American material.
The same thing was done in a special department of literature by James Fenimore Cooper. Charles Brockden Brown had written novels, but they have not survived. Cooper, on the other hand, so far saw the essential quality of certain elements of American life, that the figures of Leatherstocking, the American pioneer, Harvey Birch, the patriot, and Long Tom Coffin, the sailor, are still living figures.
In fiction also two masters of equal power were shortly to develop a form of literature in which America has produced much of the first order. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe made of the short story a means of artistic presentation, which has been more highly appreciated in our day than it was in their own.
The first true poet was William Cullen Bryant. In the same year with Cooper’s first American novel (1821) appeared a volume of Bryant’s poems, of which one at least, Thanatopsis, had already excited admiring attention. Bryant’s long and honorable life was devoted to many interests beside poetry, but he maintained throughout the pure and idealistic touch, and the intimate appreciation of nature that characterized his first work.
The first quarter of the nineteenth century, then, saw a beginning, slight indeed, but such as to endure, of a true literature in the departments of poetry, fiction, belles-lettres. The fifty years [777] following saw more substantial production in each direction.
The American poets of the middle of the century are not of the very first rank, but each is genuinely representative of some true poetic quality or way of looking at things.