Guerdon and glory then—father, I crave no more.
Poems. By Richard Henry Stoddard. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1 vol. 16mo.
It is impossible to open this volume at any page without feeling that the author is a poet, and a poet whose promise is very much greater even than his performance. Every poem is bright and warm with imagery and feeling—poetical expressions are showered with a liberal hand—the verse has that soft and fluent movement which indicates that the thoughts they convey come from a teeming mind in a gush of melodious sentiment—and the impression left on the reader’s imagination is of a singularly rich, sensuous, fertile and poetical nature. Every poem, almost every line, is a protest against the prose of thought and the prose of life, and all the objects of sense are studiously idealized and heightened into “something rich” if not into “something strange.” The author seems to dwell in a dream of life, peopled with beauties if not with Beauty, and sweetly abandoning himself to the soft and subtle sensations they imaginatively excite. Pleasure, but a pleasure more than mortal, seems to be his aim and aspiration, and infinitely provoked is he when the hard facts of life protrude their misshapen but solid substance into his meditations, and mock his luxurious illusion.
Now the mood out of which this profuse idealization of thoughts and sensations proceeds is undoubtedly poetical, but it should be exhibited in connection with higher and sterner qualities, and at best indicates the youth of the poetic vision and faculty. But, it must be admitted, that Mr. Stoddard has represented it in all its deliciousness, and no person can read his volume without being filled and stimulated with its sweetness and melody, and luxuriant fancy and opulence of sensuous forms and images. It indicates, to some extent, a sensitive and imaginative nature overmastered by the pleasant scenes and airy beings in which and with whom it revels—possessed instead of possessing—and therefore lacking that individual power which wields dominion over its own resources, selects, discriminates, rejects, governs, and, in the highest sense, combines and creates. Accordingly he does not inform objects, but is rather informed by them—does not pass into them by an internal force but is rather drawn into them by their external attraction—and thus leaves an impression rather of fertility than power. There is a great difference between the poet who merges himself in objects, and the poet who allows objects to immerge him. In the one case he is a victor, in the other a captive.
As a result of this exceeding sensitiveness to impressions, Mr. Stoddard is open to the influence of other poets; for when a poet once ceases to exercise a jealous guardianship over the individuality of his genius, he is liable to be overcome by the superior power of the natures with whom he sympathises. Now, Mr. Stoddard is no copyist or imitator, much less a plagiarist, but he evidently has an intense love for the genius of Shelley, Keats and Tennyson, and sympathises so deeply with them that he catches the tone and tune of their spirits—sometimes sets his own songs to their music—and thus gives us original thoughts and images that sound like theirs because conceived in their spirit. Thus in the “Castle in the Air” there is an original line which still has the mark of Shelley’s individuality upon it:
“Like some divinest dream upon the couch of sleep.”
It would be easy to select many more illustrations of this unconscious imitation, proving, not that Mr. Stoddard is a borrower, but that he is not on his guard against the magnetic power of other minds, exercised as it is through the most subtile avenues of mental influence. It should be his ambition not to differ in degree from the poets he loves, but to differ in kind. It is better to be Stoddard than to be a Tennysonian, especially, as in the present case, when Stoddard contains within himself the elements of a new individuality in letters, with a force and flavor and fragrance of his own.
We have been thus prolix and minute in characterizing some of the peculiarities of this volume, because we are convinced that the author is a man of genius, and has a right to be tried by laws of criticism severer than those which apply to the common run of versifiers. But we are not insensible to the excellencies of the poems; willingly plead guilty to the charge of having read the volume with delight, and trust that we shall entice many of our readers into the same pleasant employment. They evince thought, sentiment, fancy, imagination, delicacy and depth of nature; every thing but directing will and a broad perception of the true poetical relations of the ideal and the actual; and these will come with the growth of his mind, and a larger and more genial experience of life. We had marked many passages to illustrate our idea both of his merits and his defects, but we have no space at present to quote them. The gorgeous “Castle in the Air,” the leading poem in the volume, would furnish many a splendid example of the fluency and fertility of his genius. “The Witch’s Whelp” is an original conception of a different kind. The Songs and Sonnets, toward the close of the volume, are perhaps, the most individual and essentially original poems of the collection, and some of them display uncommon subtilty and sharpness of mental vision.