[Sidenote: STEDMAN AND ALDRICH]
It was the war, or rather the new American spirit that issued from the war, which finally assured these poets and critics that mythology and legend were, so far as America was concerned, as dead as the mastodon, and that life itself was the only vitally interesting subject of poetry. Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908), after writing many "finished" poems that were praised and forgotten, manfully acknowledged that he had been following the wrong trail and turned at last to the poetry of his own people. His Alice of Monmouth, an idyl of the war, and a few short pieces, such as "Wanted: a Man," are the only parts of his poetical works that are now remembered. Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) went through the same transformation. He had a love of formal beauty, and in the exquisite finish of his verse has had few rivals in American poetry; but he spent the great part of his life in making pretty trifles. Then he seemed to waken to the meaning of poetry as a noble expression of the truth or beauty of this present life, and his last little book of Songs and Sonnets contains practically all that is worth remembering of his eight or nine volumes of verse.
[Illustration: THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH]
[Sidenote: JOAQUIN MILLER]
One of the first in time of the new singers was Cincinnatus Heine Miller or, as he is commonly known, Joaquin Miller (1841-1912). His Songs of the Sierras (1871) and other poems of the West have this advantage, that they come straight from the heart of a man who has shared the stirring life he describes and who loves it with an overmastering love. To read his My Own Story or the preface to his Ship in the Desert is to understand from what fullness of life came lines like these:
Room! room to turn round in, to breathe and be free,
To grow to be giant, to sail as at sea
With the speed of the wind on a steed with his mane
To the wind, without pathway or route or a rein.
Room! room to be free, where the white-bordered sea
Blows a kiss to a brother as boundless as he;
Where the buffalo come like a cloud on the plain,
Pouring on like the tide of a storm-driven main,
And the lodge of the hunter to friend or to foe
Offers rest, and unquestioned you come or you go.
My plains of America! seas of wild lands!…
I turn to you, lean to you, lift you my hands.
Indeed, there was a splendid promise in Miller, but the promise was never fulfilled. He wrote voluminously, feeling that he must express the lure and magic of the boundless West; but he wrote so carelessly that the crude bulk of his verse obscures the originality of his few inspired lines. To read the latter is to be convinced that he was a true poet who might have accomplished a greater work than Whitman, since he had more genius and manliness than the eastern poet possessed; but his personal oddities, his zeal for reforms, his love of solitude, his endless quest after some unnamed good which kept him living among the Indians or wandering between Mexico and the ends of Alaska,—all this hindered his poetic development. It may be that an Indian-driven arrow, which touched his brain in one of his numerous adventures, had something to do with his wanderings and his failure.
There is a poetry of thought that can be written down in words, and there is another poetry of glorious living, keenly felt in the winds of the wilderness or the rush of a splendid horse or the flight of a canoe through the rapids, for which there is no adequate expression. Miller could feel superbly this poetry of the mountaineer, the plainsman and the voyageur; that he could even suggest or half reveal it to others makes him worthy to be named among our most original singers.
[Sidenote: IRWIN RUSSELL]
The hundred other poets of the period are too near for criticism, too varied even for classification; but we may at least note two or three significant groupings. In one group are the dialect poets, who attempt to make poetry serve the same end as fiction of the local-color school. Irwin Russell, with his gay negro songs tossed off to the twanging accompaniment of his banjo, belongs in this group. His verses are notable not for their dialect (others have done that better) but for their fidelity to the negro character as Russell had observed it in the old plantation days. There is little of poetic beauty in his work; it is chiefly remarkable for its promise, for its opening of a new field of poesie; but unfortunately the promise was spoiled by the author's fitful life and his untimely death.