The 19th
century
Early
19th-century literature
After the American Revolution, and increasingly
after the War of 1812, American writers were
exhorted to produce a literature that was truly
native. As if in response, four authors of very
respectable stature appeared. William Cullen
Bryant,
Washington Irving,
James Fenimore
Cooper, and
Edgar Allan Poe
initiated a great half century of literary
development.
William Cullen
Bryant, a New Englander by birth, attracted
attention in his 23rd year when the first version of
his poem Thanatopsis (1817) appeared. This, as well
as some later poems, was written under the influence
of English 18th-century poets. Still later, however,
under the influence of
Wordsworth and
other Romantics, he wrote nature lyrics that vividly
represented the New England scene. Turning to
journalism, he had a long career as a fighting
liberal editor of The Evening Post. He himself was
overshadowed, in renown at least, by a native-born
New Yorker,
Washington Irving.
Washington Irving,
youngest member of a prosperous merchant family,
joined with ebullient young men of the town in
producing the Salmagundi papers (1807–08), which
satirized the foibles of Manhattan’s citizenry. This
was followed by A History of New York (1809), by
“Diedrich Knickerbocker,” a burlesque history that
mocked pedantic scholarship and sniped at the old
Dutch families. Irving’s models in these works were
obviously Neoclassical English satirists, from whom
he had learned to write in a polished, bright style.
Later, having met
Sir Walter Scott
and having become acquainted with imaginative
German literature, he introduced a new Romantic note
in The Sketch Book (1819–20), Bracebridge Hall
(1822), and other works. He was the first American
writer to win the ungrudging (if somewhat surprised)
respect of British critics.
James Fenimore
Cooper won even wider fame. Following the
pattern of
Sir Walter Scott’s
“Waverley” novels, he did his best work in the
“Leatherstocking” tales (1823–41), a five-volume
series celebrating the career of a great
frontiersman named Natty Bumppo. His skill in
weaving history into inventive plots and in
characterizing his compatriots brought him acclaim
not only in America and England but on the continent
of Europe as well.
Edgar Allan Poe,
reared in the South, lived and worked as an author
and editor in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and
New York City. His work was shaped largely by
analytical skill that showed clearly in his role as
an editor: time after time he gauged the taste of
readers so accurately that circulation figures of
magazines under his direction soared impressively.
It showed itself in his critical essays, wherein he
lucidly explained and logically applied his
criteria. His gothic tales of terror were written in
accordance with his findings when he studied the
most popular magazines of the day. His masterpieces
of terror—The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The
Masque of the Red Death (1842), The Cask of
Amontillado (1846), and others—were written
according to a carefully worked out psychological
method. So were his detective stories, such as The
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), which historians
credited as the first of the genre. As a poet, he
achieved fame with The Raven (1845). His work,
especially his critical writings and carefully
crafted poems, had perhaps a greater influence in
France, where they were translated by Charles
Baudelaire, than in his own country.
Two Southern
novelists were also outstanding in the earlier part
of the century: John Pendleton Kennedy and
William Gilmore Simms. In Swallow Barn (1832),
Kennedy wrote delightfully of life on the
plantations. Simms’s forte was the writing of
historical novels like those of
Scott and Cooper, which
treated the history of the frontier and his native
South Carolina. The Yemassee (1835) and
Revolutionary romances show him at his best.
William Cullen
Bryant
William
Cullen Bryant, (b. Nov. 3, 1794,
Cummington, Mass., U.S.—d. June 12,
1878, New York City), poet of nature,
best remembered for “Thanatopsis,” and
editor for 50 years of the New York
Evening Post.
A
descendant of early Puritan immigrants,
Bryant at 16 entered the sophomore class
of Williams College. Because of finances
and in hopes of attending Yale, he
withdrew without graduating. Unable to
enter Yale, he studied law under private
guidance at Worthington and at
Bridgewater and at 21 was admitted to
the bar. He spent nearly 10 years in
Plainfield and at Great Barrington as an
attorney, a calling for which he held a
lifelong aversion. At 26 Bryant married
Frances Fairchild, with whom he was
happy until her death nearly half a
century later. In 1825 he moved to New
York City to become coeditor of the New
York Review. He became an editor of the
Evening Post in 1827; in 1829 he became
editor in chief and part owner and
continued in this position until his
death. His careful investment of his
income made Bryant wealthy. He was an
active patron of the arts and letters.
The
religious conservatism imposed on Bryant
in childhood found expression in pious
doggerel; the political conservatism of
his father stimulated “The Embargo”
(1808), in which the 13-year-old poet
demanded the resignation of President
Jefferson. But in “Thanatopsis” (from
the Greek “a view of death”), which he
wrote when he was 17 and which made him
famous when it was published in The
North American Review in 1817, he
rejected Puritan dogma for Deism;
thereafter he was a Unitarian. Turning
also from Federalism, he joined the
Democratic party and made the Post an
organ of free trade, workingmen’s
rights, free speech, and abolition.
Bryant was for a time a Free-Soiler and
later one of the founders of the
Republican party. As a man of letters,
Bryant securely established himself at
the age of 27 with Poems (1821). In his
later years he devoted considerable time
to translations.
Bryant
will be remembered longest as the poet
of his native Berkshire hills and
streams in such poems as “Thanatopsis”
and “To a Waterfowl.”
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Washington Irving
"The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow"
"Rip Van Winkle"
Illustrations by Arthur Rackham
American author
born April 3, 1783, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died Nov. 28, 1859, Tarrytown, N.Y.
Main
writer called the “first American man of letters.” He is best known for
the short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”
The favourite and last of 11 children of an austere Presbyterian
father and a genial Anglican mother, young, frail Irving grew up in an
atmosphere of indulgence. He escaped a college education, which his
father required of his older sons, but read intermittently at the law,
notably in the office of Josiah Ogden Hoffman, with whose pretty
daughter Matilda he early fell in love. He wrote a series of whimsically
satirical essays over the signature of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent.,
published in Peter Irving’s newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, in
1802–03. He made several trips up the Hudson, another into Canada for
his health, and took an extended tour of Europe in 1804–06.
On his return he passed the bar examination late in 1806 and soon set
up as a lawyer. But during 1807–08 his chief occupation was to
collaborate with his brother William and James K. Paulding in the
writing of a series of 20 periodical essays entitled Salmagundi.
Concerned primarily with passing phases of contemporary society, the
essays retain significance as an index to the social milieu.
His A History of New York . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) was
a comic history of the Dutch regime in New York, prefaced by a
mock-pedantic account of the world from creation onward. Its writing was
interrupted in April 1809 by the sudden death of Matilda Hoffman, as
grief incapacitated him. In 1811 he moved to Washington, D.C., as a
lobbyist for the Irving brothers’ hardware-importing firm, but his life
seemed aimless for some years. He prepared an American edition of Thomas
Campbell’s poems, edited the Analectic Magazine, and acquired a staff
colonelcy during the War of 1812. In 1815 he went to Liverpool to look
after the interests of his brothers’ firm. In London he met Sir Walter
Scott, who encouraged him to renewed effort. The result was The Sketch
Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20), a collection of stories and
essays that mix satire and whimsicality with fact and fiction. Most of
the book’s 30-odd pieces concern Irving’s impressions of England, but
six chapters deal with American subjects. Of these, the tales “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” have been called the first
American short stories. They are both Americanized versions of German
folktales. The main character of “Rip Van Winkle” is a henpecked husband
who sleeps for 20 years and awakes as an old man to find his wife dead,
his daughter happily married, and America now an independent country.
The tremendous success of The Sketch Book in both England and the United
States assured Irving that he could live by his pen. In 1822 he produced
Bracebridge Hall, a sequel to The Sketch Book. He traveled in Germany,
Austria, France, Spain, the British Isles, and later in his own country.
Early in 1826 he accepted the invitation of Alexander H. Everett to
attach himself to the American legation in Spain, where he wrote his
Columbus (1828), followed by The Companions of Columbus (1831).
Meanwhile, Irving had become absorbed in the legends of the Moorish past
and wrote A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) and The Alhambra
(1832), a Spanish counterpart of The Sketch Book.
After a 17-year absence Irving returned to New York in 1832, where he
was warmly received. He made a journey west and produced in rapid
succession A Tour of the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836), and The
Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837). Except for four years (1842–46)
as minister to Spain, Irving spent the remainder of his life at his
home, “Sunnyside,” in Tarrytown, on the Hudson River, where he devoted
himself to literary pursuits.
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James Fenimore
Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper, (b. September 15,
1789, Burlington, New Jersey, U.S.—d.
September 14, 1851, Cooperstown, New
York), first major U.S. novelist, author
of the novels of frontier adventure
known as the Leatherstocking Tales,
featuring the wilderness scout called
Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye. They include
The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the
Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The
Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer
(1841).
Early
years
Cooper’s mother, Elizabeth Fenimore, was
a member of a respectable New Jersey
Quaker family, and his father, William,
founded a frontier settlement at the
source of the Susquehanna River (now
Cooperstown, New York) and served as a
Federalist congressman during the
administrations of George Washington and
John Adams. It was a most appropriate
family background for a writer who, by
the time of his death, was generally
considered America’s “national
novelist.”
James
was but a year old when William Cooper
moved his family to the primitive
settlement in upstate New York. He was
doubtless fortunate to be the 11th of 12
children, for he was spared the worst
hardships of frontier life while he was
able to benefit educationally from both
the rich oral traditions of his family
and a material prosperity that afforded
him a gentleman’s education. After
private schooling in Albany, Cooper
attended Yale from 1803 to 1805. Little
is known of his college career other
than that he was the best Latin scholar
of his class and was expelled in his
junior year because of a prank. Since
high spirits seemed to fit him for an
active life, his family allowed him to
join the navy as a midshipman. But
prolonged shore duty at several New York
stations merely substituted naval for
academic discipline. His father’s death
in 1809 left him financially
independent, and in 1811 he married
Susan De Lancy and resigned from the
navy.
For 10
years after his marriage Cooper led the
active but unproductive life of a
dilettante, dabbling in agriculture,
politics, the American Bible Society,
and the Westchester militia. It was in
this amateur spirit that he wrote and
published his first fiction, reputedly
on a challenge from his wife. Precaution
(1820) was a plodding imitation of Jane
Austen’s novels of English gentry
manners. It is mainly interesting today
as a document in the history of American
cultural colonialism and as an example
of a clumsy attempt to imitate Jane
Austen’s investigation of the ironic
discrepancy between illusion and
reality. His second novel, The Spy
(1821), was based on another British
model, Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley”
novels, stories of adventure and romance
set in 17th- and 18th-century Scotland.
But in The Spy Cooper broke new ground
by using an American Revolutionary War
setting (based partly on the experiences
of his wife’s British loyalist family)
and by introducing several distinctively
American character types. Like Scott’s
novels of Scotland, The Spy is a drama
of conflicting loyalties and interests
in which the action mirrors and
expresses more subtle internal
psychological tensions. The Spy soon
brought him international fame and a
certain amount of wealth. The latter was
very welcome, indeed necessary, since
his father’s estate had proved less
ample than had been thought, and, with
the death of his elder brothers, he had
found himself responsible for the debts
and widows of the entire Cooper family.
Novels
The first of the renowned
“Leatherstocking” tales, The Pioneers
(1823), followed and adhered to the
successful formula of The Spy,
reproducing its basic thematic conflicts
and utilizing family traditions once
again. In The Pioneers, however, the
traditions were those of William Cooper
of Cooperstown, who appears as Judge
Temple of Templeton, along with many
other lightly disguised inhabitants of
James’s boyhood village. No known
prototype exists, however, for the
novel’s principal character—the former
wilderness scout Natty Bumppo, alias
Leatherstocking. The Leatherstocking of
The Pioneers is an aged man, of rough
but sterling character, who
ineffectually opposes “the march of
progress,” namely, the agricultural
frontier and its chief spokesman, Judge
Temple. Fundamentally, the conflict is
between rival versions of the American
Eden: the “God’s Wilderness” of
Leatherstocking and the cultivated
garden of Judge Temple. Since Cooper
himself was deeply attracted to both
ideals, he was able to create a powerful
and moving story of frontier life.
Indeed, The Pioneers is both the first
and finest detailed portrait of frontier
life in American literature; it is also
the first truly original American novel.
Both
Cooper and his public were fascinated by
the Leatherstocking character. He was
encouraged to write a series of sequels
in which the entire life of the frontier
scout was gradually unfolded. The Last
of the Mohicans (1826) takes the reader
back to the French and Indian wars of
Natty’s middle age, when he is at the
height of his powers. That work was
succeeded by The Prairie (1827) in
which, now very old and philosophical,
Leatherstocking dies, facing the
westering sun he has so long followed.
(The five novels of the series were not
written in their narrative order.)
Identified from the start with the
vanishing wilderness and its natives,
Leatherstocking was an unalterably
elegiac figure, wifeless and childless,
hauntingly loyal to a lost cause. This
conception of the character was not
fully realized in The Pioneers, however,
because Cooper’s main concern with
depicting frontier life led him to endow
Leatherstocking with some comic traits
and make his laments, at times, little
more than whines or grumbles. But in
these sequels Cooper retreated
stylistically from a realistic picture
of the frontier in order to portray a
more idyllic and romantic wilderness; by
doing so he could exploit the parallels
between the American Indians and the
forlorn Celtic heroes of James
Macpherson’s pseudo-epic Ossian, leaving
Leatherstocking intact but slightly
idealized and making extensive use of
Macpherson’s imagery and rhetoric.
Cooper
intended to bury Leatherstocking in The
Prairie, but many years later he
resuscitated the character and portrayed
his early maturity in The Pathfinder
(1840) and his youth in The Deerslayer
(1841). These novels, in which Natty
becomes the centre of romantic interest
for the first time, carry the
idealization process further. In The
Pathfinder he is explicitly described as
an American Adam, while in The
Deerslayer he demonstrates his fitness
as a warrior-saint by passing a series
of moral trials and revealing a keen,
though untutored, aesthetic sensibility.
The
“Leatherstocking” tales are Cooper’s
great imperfect masterpiece, but he
continued to write many other volumes of
fiction and nonfiction. His fourth
novel, The Pilot (1823), inaugurated a
series of sea novels, which were at once
as popular and influential as the
“Leatherstocking” tales. And they were
more authentic: such Westerners as
General Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan
Territory, and Mark Twain might ridicule
Cooper’s woodcraft, but old salts like
Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad
rightly admired and learned from his sea
stories, in particular The Red Rover
(1827) and The Sea Lions (1849). Never
before in prose fiction had the sea
become not merely a theatre for, but the
principal actor in, moral drama that
celebrated man’s courage and skill at
the same time that it revealed him
humbled by the forces of God’s nature.
As developed by Cooper, and later by
Melville, the sea novel became a
powerful vehicle for spiritual as well
as moral exploration. Not satisfied with
mere fictional treatment of life at sea,
Cooper also wrote a meticulously
researched, highly readable History of
the Navy of the United States of America
(1839).
Cultural and political involvement
Though most renowned as a prolific
novelist, he did not simply retire to
his study after the success of The Spy.
Between 1822 and 1826 he lived in New
York City and participated in its
intellectual life, founding the Bread
and Cheese Club, which included such
members as the poets Fitz-Greene Halleck
and William Cullen Bryant, the painter
and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse, and the
great Federalist judge James Kent. Like
Cooper himself, these were men active in
both cultural and political affairs.
Cooper’s own increasing liberalism was
confirmed by a lengthy stay (1826–33) in
Europe, where he moved for the education
of his son and four daughters. Those
years coincided with a period of
revolutionary ferment in Europe, and,
because of a close friendship that he
developed with the old American
Revolutionary War hero Lafayette, he was
kept well-informed about Europe’s
political developments. Through his
novels, most notably The Bravo (1831),
and other more openly polemical
writings, he attacked the corruption and
tyranny of oligarchical regimes in
Europe. His active championship of the
principles of political democracy
(though never of social egalitarianism)
coincided with a steep decline in his
literary popularity in America, which he
attributed to a decline in democratic
feeling among the reading—i.e. the
propertied—classes to which he himself
belonged.
Return to America
When he returned to America, he settled
first in New York City and then for the
remainder of his life in Cooperstown. In
the gentlemanly tradition of Jefferson
and Lafayette he attacked the
oligarchical party of his day, in this
case the Whig Party, which opposed
President Andrew Jackson, the exponent
of a more egalitarian form of democracy.
The Whigs, however, were soon able to
turn the tables on Cooper and other
leading Jacksonians by employing
Jackson’s egalitarian rhetoric against
them. Squire Cooper had made himself
especially vulnerable to popular feeling
when, in 1837, he refused to let local
citizens picnic on a family property
known as Three Mile Point. This incident
led to a whole series of charges of
libel, and suits and countersuits by
both the Whigs and Cooper. At this time,
too, agrarian riots on the estates of
his old New York friends shattered his
simple Jeffersonian faith in the virtue
of the American farmer. All of this
conflict and unrest was hard to bear,
and harder still because he was writing
more and earning less as the years went
by. The public, which had reveled in his
early forest and sea romances, was not
interested in his acute political
treatise, The American Democrat (1838),
or even in such political satires as The
Monikins (1835) or Home As Found (1838).
And though he wrote some of his best
romances—particularly the later
“Leatherstocking” tales and Satanstoe
(1845)—during the last decade of his
life, profits from publishing so
diminished that he gained little benefit
from improved popularity. Though his
circumstances were never straitened, he
had to go on writing; and some of the
later novels, such as Mercedes of
Castile (1840) or Jack Tier (1846–48),
were mere hackwork. His buoyant
political optimism had largely given way
to calm Christian faith, though he never
lost his troubled concern for the
well-being of his country.
George G. Dekker
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Edgar Allan Poe
1.
"Ligeia"
2.
"The Raven"
Illustrations by
Gustave Dore
3.
"The Fall of the
House of Usher"
4.
Illustrations from
Edgar Poe by Edmund Dulac
5.
Illustrations
from
Edgar Poe
by Harry Clarke
born Jan. 19, 1809, Boston, Mass., U.S.
died Oct. 7, 1849, Baltimore, Md.
American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is
famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. His
tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) initiated the
modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of
horror is unrivaled in American fiction. His “The Raven”
(1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national
literature.
Life.
Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth
ArnoldPoe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After
his mother died in Richmond, Va., in 1811, he was taken into
the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his
godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to
Scotland and England (1815–20), where he was given a
classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11
months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but
his gambling losses at the university so incensed his
guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe
returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira
Royster, engaged. He went to Boston, where in 1827 he
published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems, Tamerlane,
and Other Poems. Poverty forced him to join the army under
the name of Edgar A. Perry, but on the death of Poe's foster
mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and
helped in getting him an appointment to the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new
volume at Baltimore, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems
(1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy,
where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week.
He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of
Poems, containing several masterpieces, some showing the
influence of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. He then returned to Baltimore, where he
began to write stories. In 1833 his “MS. Found in a Bottle”
won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in
Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. There
he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young
cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to have
been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.
Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for
drinking, and went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to
be the bane of his life. To talk well in a large company he
needed a slight stimulant, but a glass of sherry might start
him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to
intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This
gave rise to the conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but
according to medical testimony he had a brain lesion. While
in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose
narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, combining (as
so often in his tales) much factual material with the
wildest fancies. Itis considered one inspiration of Herman
Melville's Moby Dick. In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton's
Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia. There a contract for a
monthly feature stimulated him to write “William Wilson” and
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” stories of supernatural
horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known
to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.
Later in 1839 his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
appeared (dated 1840). He resigned from Burton's about June
1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor, Graham's La
dy's and Gentleman's Magazine, in which he printed the first
detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In 1843
his “The Gold Bug” won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia
Dollar Newspaper, which gave him great publicity. In 1844 he
returned to New York, wrote the “Balloon Hoax” for the Sun,
and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.P.
Willis, thereafter a lifelong friend. In the New York Mirror
of Jan. 29, 1845, appeared, from advance sheets of the
American Review, his most famous poem, “The Raven,” which
gave him national fame at once. Poe then became editor of
the Broadway Journal, a short-lived weekly, in which he
republished most of his short stories, in 1845. During this
last year the now forgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke
Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did notobject, but “Fanny's”
indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great
scandal. His The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of
his Tales came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a
cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City), where he
wrote for Godey's Lady's Book (May–October 1846) “Literati
of New York”—gossipy sketches on personalities of the day,
which led to a libel suit.
His wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year
Poe went to Providence, R.I., to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, a
poet. There was a brief engagement. Poe had close but
platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with
SarahAnna Lewis, who helped him financially. He composed
poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published
the lecture “Eureka,” a transcendental “explanation” of the
universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some
critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south,
hada wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond,
where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then
the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only
one or two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of
childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a
youngpoet, Susan Archer Talley.
Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for
Baltimore late in September. There, after toasting a lady at
her birthday party, he began to drink heavily. The
indulgence proved fatal, for Poe had a weak heart. He was
buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in Baltimore.
Appraisal.
Poe's work owes much to the concern of Romanticism with the
occult and the satanic. It owes much also to his own
feverish dreams, to which he applied a rare faculty of
shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. With
an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions are
closely dependent on his own powers of imagination and an
elaborate technique. His keen and sound judgment as
appraiser of contemporary literature, his idealism and
musical gift as a poet, his dramatic art as a storyteller,
considerably appreciated in his lifetime, secured him a
prominent place among universally known men of letters.
The outstanding fact in Poe's character is a strange
duality. The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on
the manseems almost to point to the coexistence of two
persons in him. With those he loved he was gentle and
devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism,
found him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to
accuse him of lack of principle. Was it, it has been asked,
a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares or from
the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from appalling
graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe's unstable being?
Much of Poe's best work is concerned with terror and
sadness, but in ordinary circumstances the poet was a
pleasant companion. He talked brilliantly, chiefly of
literature, and read his own poetry and that of others in a
voice of surpassing beauty. He admired Shakespeare and
Alexander Pope. He had a sense of humour, apologizing to a
visitor for not keep ing a pet raven. If the mind of Poe is
considered, the duality is still more striking. On one side,
he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the
ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His
sensitiveness to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired
his most touching lyrics (“To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,”“Eulalie,”
“To One in Paradise”) and the full-toned prose hymns to
beauty and love in “Ligeia” and “Eleonora.” In “Israfel” his
imagination carried him away from the material world into a
dreamland. This Pythian mood was especially characteristic
of the later years of his life.
More generally, in such verses as “The Valley of Unrest,”
“Lenore,” “The Raven,” “For Annie,” and “Ulalume” and in his
prose tales his familiar mode of evasion from the universe
of common experience was through eerie thoughts,impulses, or
fears. From these materials he drew the startling effects of
his tales of death (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The
Masque of the Red Death,” “The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Oval Portrait,”
“Shadow”), his tales of wickedness and crime (“Berenice,”
“The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “Imp of the Perverse,”
“The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart”), his tales
of survival after dissolution (“Ligeia,” “Morella,” “Metzengerstein”),
and his tales of fatality (“The Assignation,” “The Man of
the Crowd”). Even when he does not hurl his characters into
the clutch of mysterious forces oronto the untrodden paths
of the beyond, he uses the anguishof imminent death as the
means of causing the nerves to quiver (“The Pit and the
Pendulum”), and his grotesque invention deals with corpses
and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death.
On the other side, Poe is conspicuous for a close
observation of minute details, as in the long narratives and
in many of the descriptions that introduce the tales or
constitute their settings. Closely connected with this is
his power of ratiocination. He prided himself on his logic
and carefully handled this real accomplishment so as to
impress the public with his possessing still more of it than
he had; hence the would-be feats of thought reading, problem
unravelling, and cryptography that he attributed to his
Legrand and Dupin. This suggested to him the analytical
tales, which created the detective story, and his science
fiction tales.
The same duality is evinced in his art. He was capable of
writing angelic or weird poetry, with a supreme sense of
rhythm and word appeal, or prose of sumptuous beauty and
suggestiveness, with the apparent abandon of compelling
inspiration; yet he would write down a problem of morbid
psychology or the outlines of an unrelenting plot in a hard
and dry style. In Poe's masterpieces the double contents of
his temper, of his mind, and of his art are fused into a
oneness of tone, structure, and movement, the more
effective, perhaps, as it is compounded of various elements.
As a critic, Poe laid great stress upon correctness of
language, metre, and structure. He formulated rules for the
short story, in which he sought for the ancient unities:
i.e., the short story should relate a complete action and
take place within one day in one place. To these unities he
added that of mood or effect. He was not extreme in these
views, however. He praised longer works and sometimes
thought allegories and morals admirable if not crudely
presented. Poe admired originality, often in work very
different from hisown, and was sometimes an unexpectedly
generous critic of decidedly minor writers.
Poe's genius was early recognized abroad. No one did more to
persuade the world and, in the long run, the United States,
of Poe's greatness than the French poets Charles Baudelaire
and Stéphane Mallarmé. Indeed his role in Frenchliterature
was that of a poetic master model and guide to criticism.
French Symbolism relied on his “Philosophy of Composition,”
borrowed from his imagery, and used his examples to generate
the modern theory of “pure poetry.”
Charles Cestre
Thomas Ollive Mabbott
Jacques Barzun
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John Pendleton Kennedy
John P.
Kennedy, in full John Pendleton Kennedy,
pseudonym Mark Littleton (b. Oct. 25,
1795, Baltimore, Md., U.S.—d. Aug. 18,
1870, Newport, R.I.), American statesman
and writer whose best remembered work
was his historical fiction.
Kennedy
was admitted to the Maryland bar in
1816. From 1821 he served two terms in
the Maryland House of Delegates and
three terms in the U.S. Congress and was
secretary of the navy in the cabinet of
President Millard Fillmore. In the
latter capacity, he organized Commodore
Matthew Perry’s trip to Japan.
Meanwhile, using the pen name of Mark
Littleton, Kennedy wrote historical
novels, including Swallow Barn (1832),
sketches of the post-Revolutionary life
of gentlemen on Virginia plantations,
and Rob of the Bowl (1838), a tale of
colonial Maryland in which Protestants
overthrow Roman Catholic control.
Kennedy’s major work of nonfiction is
Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt
(1849), about the man who was an
attorney for the prosecution in the
trial of Aaron Burr for treason. He also
coedited the satirical magazine Red Book
(1818–19) and wrote political articles
for the National Intelligencer. His
novels were his main achievement,
however; although their style was
imitative of the work of Washington
Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, they
were capably and imaginatively written.
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William Gilmore Simms
William
Gilmore Simms, (b. April 17, 1806,
Charleston, S.C., U.S.—d. June 11, 1870,
Charleston), outstanding Southern
novelist.
Motherless at two, Simms was reared by
his grandmother while his father fought
in the Creek wars and under Jackson at
New Orleans in 1814. Simms lived a
vicariously adventurous childhood
through his father, while absorbing
history through his storytelling
grandmother who had lived through the
Revolution. After attending public
schools for four years, when he entered
the College of Charleston at 10, he knew
enough French, Latin, German, and
Spanish to dabble in translations. At 12
he completed the study of materia
medica, and left college to become a
druggist’s apprentice. He began
publishing poetry in Charleston papers
at 16. Soon thereafter he joined his
itinerant father in the Mississippi
frontier country, meeting the people and
seeing the life of which he later wrote.
He edited a magazine and published a
volume of poetry at 19, married at 20,
and was admitted to the bar at 21.
Simms
was a prodigious worker, whether at
Woodlands Plantation in winter,
Charleston in summer, or on yearly
publishing trips north. As state
legislator and magazine and newspaper
editor, he became embroiled in political
and literary quarrels. From Charleston
and the South he nevertheless received
lifelong praise approaching adulation;
from the North, wide audience and
eminent literary friendships despite his
strong defense of slavery. Though his
life was shadowed by defeat of the
Confederacy, the death of his second
wife, poverty, and the destruction of
his home and library during the passage
of Sherman’s army, his letters attest a
figure long underestimated by literary
historians. Although not born into the
social and literary circles of
Charleston, he was eventually made a
member of the city’s most select group,
the St. Cecilia Society.
Simms
has been criticized for writing too
much, too carelessly, and with too
frequent use of stock devices; he was at
his best the master of a racy and
masculine English prose style and in
dealing humorously with rowdy frontier
characters. His gift as a teller of
tales in the oral tradition and the
antiquarian care he took in preparing
historical materials are dominant
features of such works as Pelayo (1838),
in an 8th-century setting; Vasconselos
(1853), 16th century; The Yemassee
(1835; his most successful work in
audience appeal), colonial; the
revolutionary series—The Partisan
(1835), Mellichampe (1836), The Kinsmen
(1841), Katherine Walton (1851),
Woodcraft (1854), The Forayers (1855),
Eutaw (1856), Joscelyn (1867); his best
border romances—Richard Hurdis (1838)
and Border Beagles (1840); his
short-story collection The Wigwam and
the Cabin (1845); and his History of
South Carolina (1840). Of 19 volumes of
poetry, the collected Poems (1853)
deserve mention. Most popular of his
biographies were The Life of Francis
Marion (1844) and The Life of Chevalier
Bayard (1847). His literary criticism is
represented in Views and Reviews of
American Literature (1845).
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American
Renaissance
The authors who began to come to prominence in the
1830s and were active until about the end of the
Civil War—the humorists, the classic New Englanders,
Herman Melville,
Walt Whitman, and
others—did their work in a new spirit, and their
achievements were of a new sort. In part this was
because they were in some way influenced by the
broadening democratic concepts that in 1829
triumphed in Andrew Jackson’s inauguration as
president. In part it was because, in this Romantic
period of emphasis upon native scenes and characters
in many literatures, they put much of America into
their books.
Particularly full
of vivid touches were the writings of two groups of
American humorists whose works appeared between 1830
and 1867. One group created several down-east Yankee
characters who used commonsense arguments to comment
upon the political and social scene. The most
important of this group were Seba Smith,
James Russell Lowell, and Benjamin P.
Shillaber. These authors caught the talk and
character of New England at that time as no one else
had done. In the old Southwest, meanwhile, such
writers as Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas
Bangs Thorpe, Joseph G. Baldwin, and
George Washington Harris drew lively pictures of
the ebullient frontier and showed the interest in
the common man that was a part of Jacksonian
democracy.
James Russell Lowell
James
Russell Lowell, (b. Feb. 22, 1819,
Cambridge, Mass., U.S.—d. Aug. 12, 1891,
Cambridge), American poet, critic,
essayist, editor, and diplomat whose
major significance probably lies in the
interest in literature he helped develop
in the United States. He was a highly
influential man of letters in his day,
but his reputation declined in the 20th
century.
A
member of a distinguished New England
family, Lowell graduated from Harvard in
1838 and in 1840 took his degree in law,
though his academic career had been
lacklustre and he did not care to
practice law for a profession. In 1844
he was married to the gifted poet Maria
White, who had inspired his poems in A
Year’s Life (1841) and who would help
him channel his energies into fruitful
directions.
In 1845
Lowell published Conversations on Some
of the Old Poets, a collection of
critical essays that included pleas for
the abolition of slavery. From 1845 to
1850 he wrote about 50 antislavery
articles for periodicals. Even more
effective in this regard were his Biglow
Papers, which he began to serialize June
17, 1846, and the first series of which
were collected in book form in 1848. In
these satirical verses, Lowell uses a
humorous and original New England
dialect to express his opposition to the
Mexican War as an attempt to extend the
area of slavery. The year 1848 also saw
the publication of Lowell’s two other
most important pieces of writing: The
Vision of Sir Launfal, an enormously
popular long poem extolling the
brotherhood of man; and A Fable for
Critics, a witty and rollicking verse
evaluation of contemporary American
authors. These books, together with the
publication that year of the second
series of his Poems, made Lowell the
most popular new figure in American
literature.
The
death of three of Lowell’s children was
followed by the death of his wife in
1853. Henceforth his literary production
comprised mainly prose essays on topics
of literature, history, and politics. In
1855 his lectures on English poets
before the Lowell Institute led to his
appointment as Smith professor of modern
languages at Harvard University,
succeeding Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
After a yearlong visit to Italy and
Germany in 1855–56 to study, he held
this professorship for the next 20
years. In 1857 he married Frances
Dunlap, who had cared for his only
remaining child, Mabel; and in that year
he began his four years’ editorship of
the new Atlantic Monthly, to which he
attracted the major New England authors.
Lowell wrote a second series of Biglow
Papers for the Atlantic Monthly that
were devoted to Unionism and that were
collected in book form in 1867. After
the American Civil War he expressed his
devotion to the Union cause in four
memorial odes, the best of which is “Ode
Recited at the Harvard Commemoration”
(1865). His essays such as “E Pluribus
Unum” and “Washers of the Shroud” (1862)
also reflect his thought at this time.
Disillusioned by the political
corruption evident in President Ulysses
S. Grant’s two administrations
(1869–77), Lowell tried to provide his
fellow Americans with models of heroism
and idealism in literature. He was
editor with Charles Eliot Norton of
North American Review from 1864 to 1872,
and during this time appeared his series
of critical essays on such major
literary figures as Dante, Chaucer,
Edmund Spenser, John Milton, William
Shakespeare, John Dryden, William
Wordsworth, and John Keats. These and
other critical essays were collected in
the two series of Among My Books (1870,
1876). His later poetry includes The
Cathedral (1870), a long and ambitious
but only partly successful poem that
deals with the conflicting claims of
religion and modern science.
President Rutherford B. Hayes rewarded
Lowell’s support in the Republican
convention in 1876 by appointing him
minister to Spain (1877–80) and
ambassador to Great Britain (1880–85).
Lowell won great popularity in England’s
literary and political circles and
served as president of the Wordsworth
Society, succeeding Matthew Arnold.
After his second wife died in 1885,
Lowell retired from public life.
Lowell
was the archetypal New England man of
letters, remarkable for his cultivation
and charm, his deep learning, and his
varied literary talents. He wrote his
finest works before he was 30 years old,
however, and most of his subsequent
writings lack vitality. The totality of
his work, though brilliant in parts,
ultimately suffers from a lack of focus
and a failure to follow up on his
undoubted early successes.
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New England
Brahmins
Although Lowell for a time was one of these
writers of rather earthy humour, his lifelong ties
were to a group of New England writers associated
with Harvard and Cambridge, Massachusetts—the
Brahmins, as they came to be called—at an opposite
extreme.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and
James Russell Lowell were
all aristocrats, all steeped in foreign culture, all
professors at Harvard.
Longfellow adapted European methods of
storytelling and versifying to narrative poems
dealing with American history, and a few of his less
didactic lyrics perfectly married technique and
subject matter.
Holmes, in occasional poems and his “Breakfast
Table” series (1858–91), brought touches of urbanity
and jocosity to a perhaps oversober polite
literature.
Lowell, in poems descriptive of the out-of-doors
in America, put much of his homeland into verse. His
odes—particularly the Harvard Commemoration Ode
(1865)—gave fine expression to noble sentiments.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The Song of
Hiawatha"
American poet
born Feb. 27, 1807, Portland, Mass. [now in Maine], U.S.
died March 24, 1882, Cambridge, Mass.
Main
the most popular American poet in the 19th century.
Longfellow attended private schools and the Portland Academy. He
graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825. At college he was attracted
especially to Sir Walter Scott’s romances and Washington Irving’s Sketch
Book, and his verses appeared in national magazines. He was so fluent in
translating that on graduation he was offered a professorship in modern
languages provided that he would first study in Europe.
On the continent he learned French, Spanish, and Italian but refused
to settle down to a regimen of scholarship at any university. In 1829 he
returned to the United States to be a professor and librarian at
Bowdoin. He wrote and edited textbooks, translated poetry and prose, and
wrote essays on French, Spanish, and Italian literature, but he felt
isolated. When he was offered a professorship at Harvard, with another
opportunity to go abroad, he accepted and set forth for Germany in 1835.
On this trip he visited England, Sweden, and The Netherlands. In 1835,
saddened by the death of his first wife, whom he had married in 1831, he
settled at Heidelberg, where he fell under the influence of German
Romanticism.
In 1836 Longfellow returned to Harvard and settled in the famous
Craigie House, which was later given to him as a wedding present when he
remarried in 1843. His travel sketches, Outre-Mer (1835), did not
succeed. In 1839 he published Voices of the Night, which contained the
poems “Hymn to the Night,” “The Psalm of Life,” and “The Light of the
Stars” and achieved immediate popularity. That same year Longfellow
published Hyperion, a romantic novel idealizing his European travels. In
1841 his Ballads and Other Poems, containing such favourites as “The
Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith,” swept the nation.
The antislavery sentiments he expressed in Poems on Slavery (1842),
however, lacked the humanity and power of John Greenleaf Whittier’s
denunciations on the same theme. Longfellow was more at home in
Evangeline (1847), a narrative poem that reached almost every literate
home in the United States. It is a sentimental tale of two lovers
separated when British soldiers expel the Acadians (French colonists)
from what is now Nova Scotia. The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are
reunited years later as Gabriel is dying.
Longfellow presided over Harvard’s modern-language program for 18
years and then left teaching in 1854. In 1855, using Henry Rowe
Schoolcraft’s two books on the Indian tribes of North America as the
base and the trochaic metrics of the Finnish epic Kalevala as his
medium, he fashioned The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Its appeal to the
public was immediate. Hiawatha is an Ojibwa Indian who, after various
mythic feats, becomes his people’s leader and marries Minnehaha before
departing for the Isles of the Blessed. Both the poem and its singsong
metre have been frequent objects of parody.
Longfellow’s long poem The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) was
another great popular success. But the death in 1861 of his second wife
after she accidentally set her dress on fire plunged him into
melancholy. Driven by the need for spiritual relief, he translated the
Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, producing one of the most notable
translations to that time, and wrote six sonnets on Dante that are among
his finest poems.
The Tales of a Wayside Inn, modeled roughly on Geoffrey Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales and published in 1863, reveals his narrative gift. The
first poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” became a national favourite. Written
in anapestic tetrameter meant to suggest the galloping of a horse, this
folk ballad recalls a hero of the American Revolution and his famous
“midnight ride” to warn the Americans about the impending British raid
on Concord, Mass. Though its account of Revere’s ride is historically
inaccurate, the poem created an American legend. Longfellow published in
1872 what he intended to be his masterpiece, Christus: A Mystery, a
trilogy dealing with Christianity from its beginning. He followed this
work with two fragmentary dramatic poems, “Judas Maccabaeus” and
“Michael Angelo.” But his genius was not dramatic, as he had
demonstrated earlier in The Spanish Student (1843). Long after his death
in 1882, however, these neglected later works were seen to contain some
of his most effective writing.
During his lifetime Longfellow was loved and admired both at home and
abroad. In 1884 he was honoured by the placing of a memorial bust in
Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, the first American to be
so recognized. Sweetness, gentleness, simplicity, and a romantic vision
shaded by melancholy are the characteristic features of Longfellow’s
poetry. He possessed great metrical skill, but he failed to capture the
American spirit like his great contemporary Walt Whitman, and his work
generally lacks emotional depth and imaginative power. Some years after
Longfellow’s death a violent reaction set in against his verse as
critics dismissed his conventional high-minded sentiments and the gentle
strain of Romanticism that he had made so popular. This harsh critical
assessment, which tried to reduce him to the status of a mere hearthside
rhymer, was perhaps as unbalanced as the adulation he had received
during his lifetime. Some of Longfellow’s sonnets and other lyrics are
still among the finest in American poetry, and Hiawatha, “The Wreck of
the Hesperus,” Evangeline, and “Paul Revere’s Ride” have become
inseparable parts of the American heritage. Longfellow’s immense
popularity helped raise the status of poetry in his country, and he
played an important part in bringing European cultural traditions to
American audiences.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes
Oliver Wendell Holmes, (b. Aug. 29,
1809, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.—d. Oct. 7,
1894, Cambridge), American physician,
poet, and humorist notable for his
medical research and teaching, and as
the author of the “Breakfast-Table”
series of essays.
Holmes read law at Harvard University
before deciding on a medical career;
and, following studies at Harvard and in
Paris, he received his degree from
Harvard in 1836. He practiced medicine
for 10 years, taught anatomy for two
years at Dartmouth College (Hanover,
N.H.), and in 1847 became professor of
anatomy and physiology at Harvard. He
was later made dean of the Harvard
Medical School, a post he held until
1882. His most important medical
contribution was that of calling
attention to the contagiousness of
puerperal fever (1843).
Holmes achieved his greatest fame,
however, as a humorist and poet. He
wrote much poetry and comic verse during
his early school years; he won national
acclaim with the publication of “Old
Ironsides” (1830), which aroused public
sentiment against destruction of the USS
Constitution, an American fighting ship
from the War of 1812. Beginning in 1857,
he contributed his “Breakfast-Table”
papers to The Atlantic Monthly and
subsequently published The Autocrat of
the Breakfast-Table (1858), The
Professor of the Breakfast-Table (1860),
The Poet of the Breakfast-Table (1872),
and Over the Teacups (1891), written in
conversational style and displaying
Holmes’s learning and wit.
Among his other works are the poems
“The Chambered Nautilus” (1858) and “The
Deacon’s Masterpiece, or ‘The Wonderful
One-Hoss Shay’ ” (1858), often seen as
an attack on Calvinism, and the
psychological novel Elsie Venner (1861),
also an attack on Calvinism that aroused
controversy.
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The Transcendentalists
Concord, Massachusetts, a village not far from
Cambridge, was the home of leaders of another
important New England group. The way for this group
had been prepared by the rise of a theological
system, Unitarianism, which early in the 19th
century had replaced Calvinism as the faith of a
large share of the New Englanders.
Ralph Waldo
Emerson, most famous of the Concord
philosophers, started as a Unitarian minister but
found even that liberal doctrine too confining for
his broad beliefs. He became a Transcendentalist
who, like other ancient and modern Platonists,
trusted to insights transcending logic and
experience for revelations of the deepest truths.
His scheme of things ranged from the lowest objects
and most practical chores to soaring flights of
imagination and inspired beliefs. His Essays
(1841–44), Representative Men (1850), and English
Traits (1856) were thoughtful and poetic
explanations of his beliefs; and his rough-hewn
lyrics, packed with thought and feeling, were as
close to 17th-century Metaphysical poems as any
produced in his own time.
An associate of
Emerson
with a salty personality of his own and
an individual way of thinking, Henry David
Thoreau, a sometime surveyor, labourer, and
naturalist, was closer to the earthy and the
practical than even
Emerson was. He also was more of
a humorist—a dry Yankee commentator with a flair for
paradoxical phrases and sentences. Finally, he was a
learned man, widely read in Western classics and
books of the Orient. These qualities gave
distinction to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers (1849) and to Walden (1854). The latter was a
record of his experiences and ponderings during the
time he lived in a hut by Walden Pond—a defense of
his belief that modern man should simplify his
demands if need be to “suck out all the marrow of
life.” In his essay Civil Disobedience (1849;
originally titled Resistance to Civil Government),
Thoreau expounded his anarchistic views of
government, insisting that if an injustice of
government is “of such a nature that it requires
injustice to another [you should] break the law
[and] let your life be a counter friction to stop
the machine.”
Associated with
these two major figures were such minor
Transcendentalists as Bronson Alcott,
George Ripley, Orestes Brownson,
Margaret Fuller, and Jones Very.
Fuller edited The Dial, the chief Transcendental
magazine, and was important in the feminist
movement.
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
"Nature"
American author
born May 25, 1803, Boston, Mass., U.S.
died April 27, 1882, Concord, Mass.
Main
American lecturer, poet, and essayist, the leading exponent of New
England Transcendentalism.
Early life and works.
Emerson was the son of the Reverend William Emerson, a Unitarian
clergyman and friend of the arts. The son inherited the profession of
divinity, which had attracted all his ancestors in direct line from
Puritan days. The family of his mother, Ruth Haskins, was strongly
Anglican, and among influences on Emerson were such Anglican writers and
thinkers as Ralph Cudworth, Robert Leighton, Jeremy Taylor, and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge.
On May 12, 1811, Emerson’s father died, leaving the son largely to
the intellectual care of Mary Moody Emerson, his aunt, who took her
duties seriously. In 1812 Emerson entered the Boston Public Latin
School, where his juvenile verses were encouraged and his literary gifts
recognized. In 1817 he entered Harvard College, where he began his
journals, which may be the most remarkable record of the “march of Mind”
to appear in the United States. He graduated in 1821 and taught school
while preparing for part-time study in the Harvard Divinity School.
Though Emerson was licensed to preach in the Unitarian community in
1826, illness slowed the progress of his career, and he was not ordained
to the Unitarian ministry at the Second Church, Boston, until 1829.
There he began to win fame as a preacher, and his position seemed
secure. In 1829 he also married Ellen Louisa Tucker. When she died of
tuberculosis in 1831, his grief drove him to question his beliefs and
his profession. But in the previous few years Emerson had already begun
to question Christian doctrines. His older brother William, who had gone
to Germany, had acquainted him with the new biblical criticism and the
doubts that had been cast on the historicity of miracles. Emerson’s own
sermons, from the first, had been unusually free of traditional doctrine
and were instead a personal exploration of the uses of spirit, showing
an idealistic tendency and announcing his personal doctrine of
self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Indeed, his sermons had divested
Christianity of all external or historical supports and made its basis
one’s private intuition of the universal moral law and its test a life
of virtuous accomplishment. Unitarianism had little appeal to him by
now, and in 1832 he resigned from the ministry.
Mature life and works.
When Emerson left the church, he was in search of a more certain
conviction of God than that granted by the historical evidences of
miracles. He wanted his own revelation—i.e., a direct and immediate
experience of God. When he left his pulpit he journeyed to Europe. In
Paris he saw Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu’s collection of natural
specimens arranged in a developmental order that confirmed his belief in
man’s spiritual relation to nature. In England he paid memorable visits
to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. At
home once more in 1833, he began to write Nature and established himself
as a popular and influential lecturer. By 1834 he had found a permanent
dwelling place in Concord, Mass., and in the following year he married
Lydia Jackson and settled into the kind of quiet domestic life that was
essential to his work.
The 1830s saw Emerson become an independent literary man. During this
decade his own personal doubts and difficulties were increasingly shared
by other intellectuals. Before the decade was over his personal
manifestos—Nature, “The American Scholar,” and the divinity school
Address—had rallied together a group that came to be called the
Transcendentalists, of which he was popularly acknowledged the
spokesman. Emerson helped initiate Transcendentalism by publishing
anonymously in Boston in 1836 a little book of 95 pages entitled Nature.
Having found the answers to his spiritual doubts, he formulated his
essential philosophy, and almost everything he ever wrote afterward was
an extension, amplification, or amendment of the ideas he first affirmed
in Nature.
Emerson’s religious doubts had lain deeper than his objection to the
Unitarians’ retention of belief in the historicity of miracles. He was
also deeply unsettled by Newtonian physics’ mechanistic conception of
the universe and by the Lockean psychology of sensation that he had
learned at Harvard. Emerson felt that there was no place for free will
in the chains of mechanical cause and effect that rationalist
philosophers conceived the world as being made up of. This world could
be known only through the senses rather than through thought and
intuition; it determined men physically and psychologically; and yet it
made them victims of circumstance, beings whose superfluous mental
powers were incapable of truly ascertaining reality.
Emerson reclaimed an idealistic philosophy from this dead end of
18th-century rationalism by once again asserting the human ability to
transcend the materialistic world of sense experience and facts and
become conscious of the all-pervading spirit of the universe and the
potentialities of human freedom. God could best be found by looking
inward into one’s own self, one’s own soul, and from such an enlightened
self-awareness would in turn come freedom of action and the ability to
change one’s world according to the dictates of one’s ideals and
conscience. Human spiritual renewal thus proceeds from the individual’s
intimate personal experience of his own portion of the divine “oversoul,”
which is present in and permeates the entire creation and all living
things, and which is accessible if only a person takes the trouble to
look for it. Emerson enunciates how “reason,” which to him denotes the
intuitive awareness of eternal truth, can be relied upon in ways quite
different from one’s reliance on “understanding”—i.e., the ordinary
gathering of sense-data and the logical comprehension of the material
world. Emerson’s doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-reliance
naturally springs from his view that the individual need only look into
his own heart for the spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the
province of the established churches. The individual must then have the
courage to be himself and to trust the inner force within him as he
lives his life according to his intuitively derived precepts.
Obviously these ideas are far from original, and it is clear that
Emerson was influenced in his formulation of them by his previous
readings of Neoplatonist philosophy, the works of Coleridge and other
European Romantics, the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, Hindu
philosophy, and other sources. What set Emerson apart from others who
were expressing similar Transcendentalist notions were his abilities as
a polished literary stylist able to express his thought with vividness
and breadth of vision. His philosophical exposition has a peculiar power
and an organic unity whose cumulative effect was highly suggestive and
stimulating to his contemporary readers’ imaginations.
In a lecture entitled “The American Scholar” (Aug. 31, 1837), Emerson
described the resources and duties of the new liberated intellectual
that he himself had become. This address was in effect a challenge to
the Harvard intelligentsia, warning against pedantry, imitation of
others, traditionalism, and scholarship unrelated to life. Emerson’s
“Address at Divinity College,” Harvard University, in 1838 was another
challenge, this time directed against a lifeless Christian tradition,
especially Unitarianism as he had known it. He dismissed religious
institutions and the divinity of Jesus as failures in man’s attempt to
encounter deity directly through the moral principle or through an
intuited sentiment of virtue. This address alienated many, left him with
few opportunities to preach, and resulted in his being ostracized by
Harvard for many years. Young disciples, however, joined the informal
Transcendental Club (founded in 1836) and encouraged him in his
activities.
In 1840 he helped launch The Dial, first edited by Margaret Fuller
and later by himself, thus providing an outlet for the new ideas
Transcendentalists were trying to present to America. Though
short-lived, the magazine provided a rallying point for the younger
members of the school. From his continuing lecture series, he gathered
his Essays into two volumes (1841, 1844), which made him internationally
famous. In his first volume of Essays Emerson consolidated his thoughts
on moral individualism and preached the ethics of self-reliance, the
duty of self-cultivation, and the need for the expression of self. The
second volume of Essays shows Emerson accommodating his earlier idealism
to the limitations of real life; his later works show an increasing
acquiescence to the state of things, less reliance on self, greater
respect for society, and an awareness of the ambiguities and
incompleteness of genius.
His Representative Men (1849) contained biographies of Plato,
Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. In English
Traits he gave a character analysis of a people from which he himself
stemmed. The Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson’s most mature work, reveals
a developed humanism together with a full awareness of man’s
limitations. It may be considered as partly confession. Emerson’s
collected Poems (1846) were supplemented by others in May-Day (1867),
and the two volumes established his reputation as a major American poet.
By the 1860s Emerson’s reputation in America was secure, for time was
wearing down the novelty of his rebellion as he slowly accommodated
himself to society. He continued to give frequent lectures, but the
writing he did after 1860 shows a waning of his intellectual powers. A
new generation knew only the old Emerson and had absorbed his teaching
without recalling the acrimony it had occasioned. Upon his death in 1882
Emerson was transformed into the Sage of Concord, shorn of his power as
a liberator and enrolled among the worthies of the very tradition he had
set out to destroy.
Emerson’s voice and rhetoric sustained the faith of thousands in the
American lecture circuits between 1834 and the American Civil War. He
served as a cultural middleman through whom the aesthetic and
philosophical currents of Europe passed to America, and he led his
countrymen during the burst of literary glory known as the American
renaissance (1835–65). As a principal spokesman for Transcendentalism,
the American tributary of European Romanticism, Emerson gave direction
to a religious, philosophical, and ethical movement that above all
stressed belief in the spiritual potential of every man.
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Henry David
Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau, (b. July 12,
1817, Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.—d.
May 6, 1862, Concord), American
essayist, poet, and practical
philosopher, renowned for having lived
the doctrines of Transcendentalism as
recorded in his masterwork, Walden
(1854), and for having been a vigorous
advocate of civil liberties, as
evidenced in the essay “Civil
Disobedience” (1849).
Early life
Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord,
Massachusetts. Though his family moved
the following year, they returned in
1823. Even when he grew ambivalent about
the village after reaching manhood, it
remained his world, for he never grew
ambivalent about its lovely setting of
woodlands, streams, and meadows. Little
distinguished his family. He was the
third child of a feckless small
businessman named John Thoreau and his
bustling, talkative wife, Cynthia Dunbar
Thoreau. His parents sent him in 1828 to
Concord Academy, where he impressed his
teachers and so was permitted to prepare
for college. Upon graduating from the
academy, he entered Harvard University
in 1833. There he was a good student,
but he was indifferent to the rank
system and preferred to use the school
library for his own purposes. Graduating
in the middle ranks of the class of
1837, Thoreau searched for a teaching
job and secured one at his old grammar
school in Concord. But he was no
disciplinarian, and he resigned after
two shaky weeks, after which he worked
for his father in the family
pencil-making business. In June 1838 he
started a small school with the help of
his brother John. Despite its
progressive nature, it lasted for three
years, until John fell ill.
A canoe trip that he and John took
along the Concord and Merrimack rivers
in 1839 confirmed in him the opinion
that he ought to be not a schoolmaster
but a poet of nature. As the 1840s
began, Thoreau took up the profession of
poet. He struggled to stay in it and
succeeded throughout the decade, only to
falter in the 1850s.
Friendship with Emerson
Sheer chance made his entrance to
writing easier, for he came under the
benign influence of the essayist and
poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had
settled in Concord during Thoreau’s
sophomore year at Harvard. By the autumn
of 1837, they were becoming friends.
Emerson sensed in Thoreau a true
disciple—that is, one with so much
Emersonian self-reliance that he would
still be his own man. Thoreau saw in
Emerson a guide, a father, and a friend.
With his magnetism Emerson attracted
others to Concord. Out of their heady
speculations and affirmatives came New
England Transcendentalism. In retrospect
it was one of the most significant
literary movements of 19th-century
America, with at least two authors of
world stature, Thoreau and Emerson, to
its credit. Essentially it combined
romanticism with reform. It celebrated
the individual rather than the masses,
emotion rather than reason, nature
rather than man. Transcendentalism
conceded that there were two ways of
knowing, through the senses and through
intuition, but asserted that intuition
transcended tuition. Similarly, the
movement acknowledged that matter and
spirit both existed. It claimed,
however, that the reality of spirit
transcended the reality of matter.
Transcendentalism strove for reform yet
insisted that reform begin with the
individual, not the group or
organization.
Literary career
In Emerson’s company Thoreau’s hope of
becoming a poet looked not only proper
but feasible. Late in 1837, at Emerson’s
suggestion, he began keeping a journal
that covered thousands of pages before
he scrawled the final entry two months
before his death. He soon polished some
of his old college essays and composed
new and better ones as well. He wrote
some poems—a good many, in fact—for
several years. Captained by Emerson, the
Transcendentalists started a magazine,
The Dial; the inaugural issue, dated
July 1840, carried Thoreau’s poem
“Sympathy” and his essay on the Roman
poet Aulus Persius Flaccus.
The Dial published more of Thoreau’s
poems and then, in July 1842, the first
of his outdoor essays, “Natural History
of Massachusetts.” Though disguised as a
book review, it showed that a nature
writer of distinction was in the making.
Then followed more lyrics, and fine
ones, such as “To the Maiden in the
East,” and another nature essay,
remarkably felicitous, “A Winter Walk.”
The Dial ceased publication with the
April 1844 issue, having published a
richer variety of Thoreau’s writing than
any other magazine ever would.
In 1840 Thoreau fell in love with and
proposed marriage to an attractive
visitor to Concord named Ellen Sewall.
She accepted his proposal but then
immediately broke off the engagement at
the insistence of her parents. He
remained a bachelor for life. During two
periods, 1841–43 and 1847–48, he stayed
mostly at the Emersons’ house. In spite
of Emerson’s hospitality and friendship,
however, Thoreau grew restless; his
condition was accentuated by grief over
the death in January 1842 of his brother
John, who died of lockjaw after cutting
his finger. Later that year he became a
tutor in the Staten Island household of
Emerson’s brother, William, while trying
to cultivate the New York literary
market. Thoreau’s literary activities
went indifferently, however, and the
effort to conquer New York failed.
Confirmed in his distaste for city life
and disappointed by his lack of success,
he returned to Concord in late 1843.
Move to Walden Pond
Back in Concord Thoreau rejoined his
family’s business, making pencils and
grinding graphite. By early 1845 he felt
more restless than ever, until he
decided to take up an idea of a Harvard
classmate who had once built a waterside
hut in which one could loaf or read. In
the spring Thoreau picked a spot by
Walden Pond, a small glacial lake
located 2 miles (3 km) south of Concord
on land Emerson owned.
Early in the spring of 1845, Thoreau,
then 27 years old, began to chop down
tall pines with which to build the
foundations of his home on the shores of
Walden Pond. From the outset the move
gave him profound satisfaction. Once
settled, he restricted his diet for the
most part to the fruit and vegetables he
found growing wild and the beans he
planted. When not busy weeding his bean
rows and trying to protect them from
hungry woodchucks or occupied with
fishing, swimming, or rowing, he spent
long hours observing and recording the
local flora and fauna, reading, and
writing A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers (1849). He also made
entries in his journals, which he later
polished and included in Walden. Much
time, too, was spent in meditation.
Out of such activity and thought came
Walden, a series of 18 essays describing
Thoreau’s experiment in basic living and
his effort to set his time free for
leisure. Several of the essays provide
his original perspective on the meaning
of work and leisure and describe his
experiment in living as simply and
self-sufficiently as possible, while in
others Thoreau describes the various
realities of life at Walden Pond: his
intimacy with the small animals he came
in contact with; the sounds, smells, and
look of woods and water at various
seasons; the music of wind in telegraph
wires—in short, the felicities of
learning how to fulfill his desire to
live as simply and self-sufficiently as
possible. The physical act of living day
by day at Walden Pond is what gives the
book authority, while Thoreau’s command
of a clear, straightforward but elegant
style helped raise it to the level of a
literary classic.
Thoreau stayed for two years at
Walden Pond (1845–47). In the summer of
1847 Emerson invited him to stay with
his wife and children again, while
Emerson himself went to Europe. Thoreau
accepted, and in September 1847 he left
his cabin forever.
Midway in his Walden sojourn Thoreau
had spent a night in jail. On an evening
in July 1846 he encountered Sam Staples,
the constable and tax gatherer. Staples
asked him amiably to pay his poll tax,
which Thoreau had omitted paying for
several years. He declined, and Staples
locked him up. The next morning a
still-unidentified lady, perhaps his
aunt, Maria, paid the tax. Thoreau
reluctantly emerged, did an errand, and
then went huckleberrying. A single
night, he decided, was enough to make
his point that he could not support a
government that endorsed slavery and
waged an imperialist war against Mexico.
His defense of the private, individual
conscience against the expediency of the
majority found expression in his most
famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,”
which was first published in May 1849
under the title “Resistance to Civil
Government.” The essay received little
attention until the 20th century, when
it found an eager audience. To many, its
message still sounds timely: there is a
higher law than the civil one, and the
higher law must be followed even if a
penalty ensues. So does its consequence:
“Under a government which imprisons any
unjustly, the true place for a just man
is also a prison.”
Later life and works
When Thoreau left Walden, he passed the
peak of his career, and his life lost
much of its illumination. Slowly his
Transcendentalism drained away as he
became a surveyor in order to support
himself. He collected botanical
specimens for himself and reptilian ones
for Harvard, jotting down their
descriptions in his journal. He
established himself in his neighbourhood
as a sound man with rod and transit, and
he spent more of his time in the family
business; after his father’s death he
took it over entirely. Thoreau made
excursions to the Maine woods, to Cape
Cod, and to Canada, using his
experiences on the trips as raw material
for three series of magazine articles:
“Ktaadn [sic] and the Maine Woods,” in
The Union Magazine (1848); “Excursion to
Canada,” in Putnam’s Monthly (1853); and
“Cape Cod,” in Putnam’s (1855). These
works present Thoreau’s zest for outdoor
adventure and his appreciation of the
natural environment that had for so long
sustained his own spirit.
As Thoreau became less of a
Transcendentalist he became more of an
activist—above all, a dedicated
abolitionist. As much as anyone in
Concord, he helped to speed fleeing
slaves north on the Underground
Railroad. He lectured and wrote against
slavery, with “Slavery in
Massachusetts,” a lecture delivered in
1854, as his hardest indictment. In the
abolitionist John Brown he found a
father figure beside whom Emerson paled;
the fiery old fanatic became his ideal.
By now Thoreau was in poor health, and
when Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry
failed and he was hanged, Thoreau
suffered a psychic shock that probably
hastened his own death. He died,
apparently of tuberculosis, in 1862.
Assessment
To all appearances, Thoreau lived a life
of bleak failure. His neighbours viewed
him with familiarity verging on
contempt. He had to pay for the printing
of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers; when it sold a mere 220 copies,
the publishers dumped the remaining 700
on his doorstep. Walden (the second and
last of his books published during his
lifetime) fared better but still took
five years to sell 2,000 copies. And yet
Thoreau is now regarded as both a
classic American writer and a cultural
hero of his country. The present opinion
of his greatness stems from the power of
his principal ideas and the lucid,
provocative writing with which he
expressed them.
Thoreau’s two famous symbolic
actions, his two years in the cabin at
Walden Pond and his night in jail for
civil disobedience, represent his
personal enactment of the doctrines of
New England Transcendentalism as
expressed by his friend and associate
Emerson, among others. In his writings
Thoreau was concerned primarily with the
possibilities for human culture provided
by the American natural environment. He
adapted ideas garnered from the
then-current Romantic literatures in
order to extend American libertarianism
and individualism beyond the political
and religious spheres to those of social
and personal life. “The life which men
praise and regard as successful is but
one kind. Why,” Thoreau asked in Walden,
where his example was the answer,
“should we exaggerate any one kind at
the expense of the others?” In a
commercial, conservative, expedient
society that was rapidly becoming urban
and industrial, he upheld the right to
self-culture, to an individual life
shaped by inner principle. He demanded
for all men the freedom to follow unique
lifestyles, to make poems of their lives
and living itself an art. In a restless,
expanding society dedicated to practical
action, he demonstrated the uses and
values of leisure, contemplation, and a
harmonious appreciation of and
coexistence with nature. Thoreau
established the tradition of nature
writing later developed by the Americans
John Burroughs and John Muir, and his
pioneer study of the human uses of
nature profoundly influenced such
conservationists and regional planners
as Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford.
More important, Thoreau’s life, so fully
expressed in his writing, has had a
pervasive influence because it was an
example of moral heroism and an example
of the continuing search for a spiritual
dimension in American life.
Major Works
The most significant and enduring works
by Thoreau are listed here in order of
original publication; when he made
substantial revisions, especially in the
essays, the volumes in which the revised
versions first appeared are likewise
noted:
“Ktaadn and the Maine Woods” (1848;
revised and expanded in The Maine Woods,
1864); A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers (1849); “Resistance to
Civil Government” (1849; republished as
“Civil Disobedience” in A Yankee in
Canada, 1866); Walden (1854); “The Last
Days of John Brown” (1860; republished
in A Yankee in Canada); “Walking” (1862;
republished in Excursions, 1863); “Life
Without Principle” (1863; republished in
A Yankee in Canada); and Faith in a
Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other
Late Natural History Writings
(posthumously, 1993).
The Writings of Henry Thoreau, 20
vol. (1906, reprinted 1982), is the
standard “Walden” edition of Thoreau’s
books, essays, and journal. It is being
replaced by the Princeton Edition of The
Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (starting
in 1971 with the publication of its
version of Walden) which is producing
books of high textual and editorial
quality. Collected Poems, ed. by Carl
Bode, enlarged ed. (1964, reissued
1970), brings together the many versions
of the poetry he wrote, particularly in
his younger days.
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Bronson Alcott
Bronson Alcott, in full Amos Bronson
Alcott (b. Nov. 29, 1799, Wolcott,
Conn., U.S.—d. March 4, 1888, Concord,
Mass.), American philosopher, teacher,
reformer, and member of the New England
Transcendentalist group.
The self-educated son of a poor
farmer, Alcott traveled in the South as
a peddler before establishing a series
of schools for children. His educational
theories owed something to Johann H.
Pestalozzi, the Swiss reformer, but more
to the examples of Socrates and the
Gospels. His aim was to stimulate
thought and “awaken the soul”; his
method was conversational, courteous,
and gentle. Questions of discipline were
referred to the class as a group, and
the feature of his school that attracted
most attention, perhaps, was his scheme
for the teacher’s receiving punishment,
in certain circumstances, at the hands
of an offending pupil, whereby the sense
of shame might be instilled in the mind
of the errant child.
These innovations were not widely
accepted, and before he was 40 he was
forced to close his last school, the
famous Temple School in Boston, and sell
its contents to ease his debts. In 1842
with money from Ralph Waldo Emerson he
visited England, where a similar school
founded near London was named Alcott
House in his honour. He returned from
England with a kindred spirit, the
mystic Charles Lane, and together they
founded a short-lived (June–December
1843) utopian community, Fruitlands, in
Massachusetts. Alcott served as
superintendent of schools in Concord,
Mass., from 1859 through 1864.
Alcott was a vegetarian, an
abolitionist, and an advocate of women’s
rights; his thought was vague, lofty,
and intensely spiritual. Always poor or
in debt, he worked as a handyman or
lived on the bounty of others until the
literary success of his second daughter,
Louisa May Alcott, and the popularity of
his lectures on the lyceum circuit
finally brought him financial security.
The best of Alcott’s writing is
available in The Journals of Bronson
Alcott (1938), selected and edited by
Odell Shepard.
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Margaret Fuller
Margaret Fuller, in full Sarah
Margaret Fuller, married name Marchesa
Ossoli (b. May 23, 1810, Cambridgeport
[now part of Cambridge], Mass., U.S.—d.
July 19, 1850, at sea off Fire Island,
N.Y.), American critic, teacher, and
woman of letters whose efforts to
civilize the taste and enrich the lives
of her contemporaries make her
significant in the history of American
culture. She is particularly remembered
for her landmark book Woman in the
Nineteenth Century (1845), which
examined the place of women within
society.
Fuller was an extremely precocious
child. Under the severe tutelage of her
father she more than compensated for the
inaccessibility of formal education to
females of the time; but, while she
acquired wide learning at a very early
age, the strain permanently impaired her
health.
Plagued by financial difficulties
after her father’s death in 1835, she
taught in Bronson Alcott’s Temple School
in Boston, 1836–37, and in Providence,
Rhode Island, 1837–39. In 1839 she
published a translation of Eckermann’s
Conversations with Goethe; her most
cherished project, never completed, was
a biography of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe. Fuller formed many important
friendships during this period,
including those with Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, William
Ellery Channing, and Orestes Brownson.
From 1840 to 1842 she was editor of The
Dial, a magazine launched by the
Transcendentalists. She wrote poetry,
reviews, and critiques for the
quarterly.
In Boston, for five winters
(1839–44), she conducted classes of
“conversations” for women on literature,
education, mythology, and philosophy, in
which venture she was reputed to be a
dazzling leader of discussion. Her
professed purpose was “to systematize
thought”; more generally, she attempted
to enrich the lives of women and to
dignify their place in society. The same
purpose guided her in writing Woman in
the Nineteenth Century, a tract on
feminism that was both a demand for
political equality and an ardent plea
for the emotional, intellectual, and
spiritual fulfillment of women. It was
published in 1845 by Horace Greeley, who
had admired her Summer on the Lakes, in
1843 (1844), a perceptive study of
frontier life in Illinois and Wisconsin.
In Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
Fuller urges young women to seek greater
independence from the home and family
and to obtain such independence through
education. She disdains the notion that
women should be satisfied with
domesticity, suggesting instead that
women should be allowed to fulfill their
personal potential by doing whatever
work appeals to them: “Let them be
sea-captains, if they will.” Woman in
the Nineteenth Century further advocated
the reform of property laws that were
unfair to women—a controversial and
unpopular idea in many quarters. The
book’s unprecedented and frank
discussions of marriage and relations
between men and women also scandalized
many. The first edition of the book sold
out in a week and sparked a heated
debate, bringing issues of women’s
rights to the nation’s attention.
In 1844 Fuller became literary critic
on Greeley’s newspaper, the New York
Tribune. She encouraged American writers
and crusaded for social reforms but made
her greatest contribution, she thought,
as an interpreter of modern European
literature.
Before she sailed for Europe in 1846,
some of her essays appeared as Papers on
Literature and Art, which assured the
cordial welcome she received in English
and French circles. America’s first
woman foreign correspondent, she
reported on her travels for the Tribune;
the “letters” were later published in At
Home and Abroad (1856). Settling in
Italy in 1847, she was caught up in the
cause of the Italian revolutionists, led
by Giuseppe Mazzini, whom she had met
earlier in England. She also met an
impoverished Italian nobleman and ardent
republican, Giovanni Angelo, Marchese
Ossoli. They were married secretly,
apparently in 1849. Following the
suppression of the republic the couple
fled to Rieti and then to Florence,
where Fuller wrote a history of the
revolution. In mid-1850 she sailed for
the United States with her husband and
infant son, Angelo. They all perished in
a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York,
and with them was lost her manuscript
history of the revolution.
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New England
reformers and historians
A worldwide movement for change that exploded in the
revolutions of 1848 naturally attracted numerous
Americans. Reform was in the air, particularly in
New England. At times even Brahmins and
Transcendentalists took part. William Lloyd
Garrison, ascetic and fanatical, was a moving
spirit in the fight against slavery; his weekly
newspaper, The Liberator (1831–65), despite a small
circulation, was its most influential organ. A
contributor to the newspaper—probably the greatest
writer associated with the movement—was John
Greenleaf Whittier. His simple but emotional
poems on behalf of abolition were collected in such
volumes as Poems Written During the Progress of the
Abolition Question … (1837), Voices of Freedom
(1846), and Songs of Labor, and Other Poems (1850).
The outstanding novelist of the movement—so far as
effect was concerned—was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) combined the elements of
contemporary humour and sentimental fiction to
dramatize the plight of the Negro.
One other group of
writers—and a great novelist—contributed to the
literature of New England in this period of its
greatest glory. The group consisted of several
historians who combined scholarly methods learned
abroad with vivid and dramatic narration. These
included George Bancroft, author of History
of the United States (completed in 12 volumes in
1882), and John Lothrop Motley, who traced
the history of the Dutch Republic and the United
Netherlands in nine fascinating volumes (1856–74).
The leading member of the group was Francis
Parkman, who, in a series of books (1851–92),
wrote as a historian of the fierce contests between
France and England that marked the advance of the
American frontier and vividly recorded his own
Western travels in The Oregon Trail (1849).
William Lloyd
Garrison
William
Lloyd Garrison, (b. December 10/12,
1805, Newburyport, Massachusetts,
U.S.—d. May 24, 1879, New York, New
York), American journalistic crusader
who published a newspaper, The Liberator
(1831–65), and helped lead the
successful abolitionist campaign against
slavery in the United States.
Garrison was the son of an itinerant
seaman who subsequently deserted his
family. The son grew up in an atmosphere
of declining New England Federalism and
lively Christian benevolence—twin
sources of the abolition movement, which
he joined at age 25. As editor of the
National Philanthropist (Boston) in 1828
and the Journal of the Times
(Bennington, Vermont) in 1828–29, he
served his apprenticeship in the moral
reform cause. In 1829, with a pioneer
abolitionist, Benjamin Lundy, he became
co-editor of the Genius of Universal
Emancipation in Baltimore; he also
served a short term in jail for libeling
a Newburyport merchant who was engaged
in the coastal slave trade. Released in
June 1830, Garrison returned to Boston
and, a year later, established The
Liberator, which became known as the
most uncompromising of American
antislavery journals. In the first issue
of The Liberator he stated his views on
slavery vehemently: “I do not wish to
think, or speak, or write, with
moderation . . . . I am in earnest—I
will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I
will not retreat a single inch—AND I
WILL BE HEARD.”
Like
most of the abolitionists he recruited,
Garrison was a convert from the American
Colonization Society, which advocated
the return of free blacks to Africa, to
the principle of “immediate
emancipation,” borrowed from English
abolitionists. “Immediatism,” however
variously it was interpreted by American
reformers, condemned slavery as a
national sin, called for emancipation at
the earliest possible moment, and
proposed schemes for incorporating the
freedmen into American society. Through
The Liberator, which circulated widely
both in England and the United States,
Garrison soon achieved recognition as
the most radical of American antislavery
advocates. In 1832 he founded the New
England Anti-Slavery Society, the first
immediatist society in the country, and
in 1833 he helped organize the American
Anti-Slavery Society, writing its
Declaration of Sentiments and serving as
its first corresponding secretary. It
was primarily as an editorialist,
however, excoriating slave owners and
their moderate opponents alike, that he
became known and feared. “If those who
deserve the lash feel it and wince at
it,” he wrote in explaining his refusal
to alter his harsh tone, “I shall be
assured that I am striking the right
persons in the right place.”
In
1837, in the wake of financial panic and
the failure of abolitionist campaigns to
gain support in the North, Garrison
renounced church and state and embraced
doctrines of Christian “perfectionism,”
which combined abolition, women’s
rights, and nonresistance, in the
biblical injunction to “come out” from a
corrupt society by refusing to obey its
laws and support its institutions. From
this blend of pacifism and anarchism
came the Garrisonian principle of “No
Union With Slaveholders,” formulated in
1844 as a demand for peaceful Northern
secession from a slaveholding South.
By 1840
Garrison’s increasingly personal
definition of the slavery problem had
precipitated a crisis within the
American Anti-Slavery Society, a
majority of whose members disapproved of
both the participation of women and
Garrison’s no-government theories.
Dissension reached a climax in 1840,
when the Garrisonians voted a series of
resolutions admitting women and thus
forced their conservative opponents to
secede and form the rival American and
Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Later that
year a group of politically minded
abolitionists also deserted Garrison’s
standard and founded the Liberty Party.
Thus, 1840 witnessed the disruption of
the national organization and left
Garrison in control of a relative
handful of followers loyal to his
“come-outer” doctrine but deprived of
the support of new antislavery converts
and of the Northern reform community at
large.
In the
two decades between the schism of 1840
and the Civil War, Garrison’s influence
waned as his radicalism increased. The
decade before the war saw his opposition
to slavery and to the federal government
reach its peak: The Liberator denounced
the Compromise of 1850, condemned the
Kansas-Nebraska Act, damned the Dred
Scott decision, and hailed John Brown’s
raid as “God’s method of dealing
retribution upon the head of the
tyrant.” In 1854 Garrison publicly
burned a copy of the Constitution at an
abolitionist rally in Framingham,
Massachusetts. Three years later he held
an abortive secessionist convention in
Worcester, Massachusetts.
The
Civil War forced Garrison to choose
between his pacifist beliefs and
emancipation. Placing freedom for the
slave foremost, he supported Abraham
Lincoln faithfully and in 1863 welcomed
the Emancipation Proclamation as the
fulfillment of all his hopes.
Emancipation brought to the surface the
latent conservatism in his program for
the freedmen, whose political rights he
was not prepared to guarantee
immediately. In 1865 he attempted
without success to dissolve the American
Anti-Slavery Society and then resigned.
In December 1865 he published the last
issue of The Liberator and announced
that “my vocation as an abolitionist is
ended.” He spent his last 14 years in
retirement from public affairs,
regularly supporting the Republican
Party and continuing to champion
temperance, women’s rights, pacifism,
and free trade. “It is enough for me,”
he explained in justifying his refusal
to participate in radical egalitarian
politics, “that every yoke is broken,
and every bondman set free.”
John L. Thomas
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John
Greenleaf Whittier
John
Greenleaf Whittier, (b. December 17,
1807, near Haverhill, Massachusetts,
U.S.—d. September 7, 1892, Hampton
Falls, Massachusetts), American poet and
abolitionist who, in the latter part of
his life, shared with Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow the distinction of being a
household name in both England and the
United States.
Born on
a farm into a Quaker family, Whittier
had only a limited formal education. He
became an avid reader of British poetry,
however, and was especially influenced
by the Scot Robert Burns, whose lyrical
treatment of everyday rural life
reinforced his own inclination to be a
writer.
Whittier’s career naturally divides into
four periods: poet and journalist
(1826–32), abolitionist (1833–42),
writer and humanitarian (1843–65), and
Quaker poet (1866–92). At age 19 he
submitted his poem “The Exile’s
Departure” to the abolitionist William
Lloyd Garrison for publication in the
Newburyport Free Press, and it was
accepted. Garrison encouraged other
poetic contributions from Whittier, and
the two men became friends and
associates in the abolitionist cause.
Whittier soon turned to journalism. He
edited newspapers in Boston and
Haverhill and by 1830 had become editor
of the New England Weekly Review in
Hartford, Connecticut, the most
important Whig journal in New England.
He also continued writing verse,
sketches, and tales, and he published
his first volume of poems, Legends of
New England, in 1831. In 1832, however,
a failed romance, ill health, and the
discouragement he felt over his lack of
literary recognition caused him to
resign and return to Haverhill.
Deciding that his rebuffs had been
caused by personal vanity, Whittier
resolved to devote himself to more
altruistic activities, and he soon
embraced Garrisonian abolitionism. His
fiery antislavery pamphlet Justice and
Expediency made him prominent in the
abolition movement, and for a decade he
was probably its most influential
writer. He served a term in the
Massachusetts legislature, spoke at
antislavery meetings, and edited the
Pennsylvania Freeman (1838–40) in
Philadelphia. In 1840 he returned to
live in Amesbury with his mother, aunt,
and sister.
By 1843
Whittier had broken with Garrison,
having decided that abolitionist goals
could be better accomplished through
regular political channels. He became
more active in literature, in which new
avenues of publication were now open to
him. In the next two decades he matured
as a poet, publishing numerous volumes
of verse, among them Lays of My Home
(1843), Voices of Freedom (1846), Songs
of Labor (1850), The Panorama (1856),
and Home Ballads and Poems (1860). Among
his best-known poems of this period is
“Maud Muller” (1854), with its lines “Of
all sad words of tongue and pen/ The
saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’
” Most of his literary prose, including
his one novel, Leaves from Margaret
Smith’s Journal (1849), was also
published during this time, along with
numerous articles and reviews.
Whittier’s mother and his beloved
younger sister died in the period from
1857 to 1864, but his personal grief,
combined with the larger national grief
of the Civil War, furthered his literary
maturity. The publication in 1866 of his
best-known poem, the winter idyll
Snow-Bound, was followed by other
triumphs in the verse collections The
Tent on the Beach (1867), Among the
Hills (1868), and The Pennsylvania
Pilgrim (1872). Whittier’s 70th birthday
was celebrated at a dinner attended by
almost every prominent American writer,
and his 80th birthday became an occasion
for national celebration.
After
outgrowing the Romantic verse he wrote
in imitation of Robert Burns, Whittier
became an eloquent advocate of justice,
tolerance, and liberal humanitarianism.
The lofty spiritual and moral values he
proclaimed earned him the title of
“America’s finest religious poet,” and
many of his poems are still sung as
church hymns by various denominations.
After the Civil War he changed his
focus, depicting nature and homely
incidents in rural life. Whittier’s
verse is often marred by sentimentality,
poor technique, or excessive preaching,
but his best poems are still read for
their moral beauty and simple
sentiments. He was not a literary figure
of the highest stature but was
nevertheless an important voice of his
age.
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George
Bancroft
George
Bancroft, (b. October 3, 1800,
Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.—d.
January 17, 1891, Washington, D.C.),
American historian whose comprehensive
10-volume study of the origins and
development of the United States caused
him to be referred to as the “father of
American history.”
Bancroft’s life presented a curious
blend of scholarship and politics.
Although he was educated at Harvard and
several German universities, he
initially eschewed an academic career
for an eight-year experiment in
elementary education at Round Hill, his
private school for boys at Northampton,
Massachusetts (1823–31). He then turned
to anti-Masonic and Democratic politics
in Massachusetts. He received his first
patronage post as collector of the Port
of Boston (1838) and became U.S.
secretary of the navy (1845–46) and
minister to England (1846–49). Though
not an abolitionist, Bancroft broke with
the Democrats over the slavery issue in
the 1850s and shifted his support to the
Republican Party. As a result, he served
as minister to Prussia (1867–71) and to
the German Empire (1871–74). While in
Germany he became closely identified
with the German intellectual community.
Throughout his lifetime he fitted his
research and writing around his
political requirements, so that the
compilation of his 10-volume History of
the United States extended over a period
of 40 years (1834–74). With a few
exceptions, earlier American historians
had been collectors or annalists,
concerned chiefly with state or
Revolutionary War histories. Bancroft
was the first scholar to plan a
comprehensive study of the nation’s
past, from its colonial foundations
through the end of its struggle for
independence. Influenced by the
nationalistic German school of
historians, he approached his subject
philosophically, molding it to fit his
preconceived thesis that the American
political and social system represented
the highest point yet reached in
humanity’s quest for the perfect state.
He placed great emphasis on the use of
original sources, building a vast
collection of documents and hiring
copyists to translate materials from
European archives.
Many
critics thought that, in the first three
volumes (1834–40), the writer was too
strongly influenced by the political
attitudes of President Andrew Jackson.
Nevertheless, Bancroft’s reputation as
the country’s leading historian was
firmly established by 1850. Seven
succeeding volumes were published
between 1852 and 1874. A revised
centenary edition (1876) reduced the
number of volumes to six, but the
author’s basic approach to American
history remained unchanged. A still
later edition (1885) included a
two-volume study, The History of the
Formation of the Federal Constitution
(1882).
Although Bancroft neglected economic and
social forces and wrote what are
essentially political and military
narratives, he was nevertheless the
first to recognize the importance of the
colonial period, foreign relations, and
the frontier as forces in the history of
the United States.
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Francis
Parkman
Francis
Parkman, (b. Sept. 16, 1823, Boston,
Mass., U.S.—d. Nov. 8, 1893, Jamaica
Plain, Mass.), American historian noted
for his classic seven-volume history of
France and England in North America,
covering the colonial period from the
beginnings to 1763.
Early
years.
Parkman was the son of Francis Parkman,
a leading Unitarian minister of Boston.
As a boy, he met many of his father’s
literary friends and read widely in the
family library. He was taught Greek,
Latin, and mathematics at the Chauncy
Place School in Boston.
At
Harvard, Parkman, a talented linguist,
read almost as many books in foreign
languages as in English, including the
original texts of great historians of
antiquity. He also devoured the major
works of French literature and history.
In serious archival studies he was
encouraged by his teacher, the renowned
historian Jared Sparks. Sparks, a man
drawn to adventure and exploration,
exerted an enormous influence on
Parkman.
Though
teachers and books helped to shape
Parkman’s thinking in his formative
years, he gathered data, as indicated by
his letters and journals, through direct
observation. During his college years he
exhausted friends who struggled to keep
pace with him on woodland expeditions
through New England and southeastern
Canada. Yet he did not neglect to
participate in whiskey punch and Indian
war cries that sometimes followed
dormitory suppers. Pretty girls and
horses, he concluded, were “the
‘first-ratest’ things in nature.” After
a breakdown in health during his last
year in college, he made a grand tour of
Europe in 1844. His particular interest
in the Roman Catholic church prompted
him to observe it at close range, even
living for a short time in a monastery
in Rome. In the following year, he
toured historic sites in the northwest
of America and, to please his father,
completed requirements for a law degree
at Harvard. In the summer of 1846 he
embarked on a journey to the Great
Plains in which he traveled a portion of
the Oregon Trail to Fort Laramie.
Literary career.
Parkman’s literary career had its real
beginning after he returned from the
West. Despite temporary illness and
partial loss of sight, he managed to
write a series of Oregon Trail
recollections for the Knickerbocker
Magazine. Published in 1849 as The
California and Oregon Trail, the book’s
title was misleading because Parkman had
ventured nowhere near California. He
keenly regretted the “publisher’s trick”
of the mention of California as a
stimulus to better sales. The book, in
later editions called The Oregon Trail;
Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain
Life, became one of the best-selling
personal narratives of the 19th century.
The
Oregon Trail served notice that a new
writer, at home on the frontier as well
as in staid, provincial Boston, had
appeared. Parkman’s History of the
Conspiracy of Pontiac, completed just
before his marriage to Catherine Scollay
Bigelow in 1851, was his first
historical work, a comprehensive survey
of Anglo-French history and Indian
affairs in North America, culminating in
the great Ottawa chief’s “conspiracy”
and Indian war of 1763. In the “dark
years” of illness following the death of
his young son (1857) and his wife
(1858), Parkman entered a period of
depression and semi-infirmity. His
complaints of heart trouble, insomnia,
painful headaches, semiblindness, water
on the knee, and finally arthritis and
rheumatism, which fill his
correspondence, were probably the result
of an underlying neurosis. By
personalizing his illness and calling it
the “enemy,” Parkman seems to have
forced himself to play the role of a man
of action at the cost of great tension.
His struggle against the “enemy” enabled
him to maintain his self-respect and
appears to be at least partly
responsible for the powerful drive and
creative force behind his writings.
By the
time the American Civil War ended,
Parkman had at least partly overcome his
personal “enemy” of illness to complete
his Pioneers of France in the New World
(1865), a vivid account of French
penetration of the North American
wilderness that created a setting for
his later volumes. In the 27 years
following the Civil War, Parkman (who
had to content himself with writing
militant, patriotic letters to the press
during the conflict) completed his
elaborate series by writing six more
historical works in addition to the
Pioneers. The Jesuits in North America
in the Seventeenth Century (1867) is a
powerful narrative of the tragedy of the
Jesuit missionaries whose missions among
the Hurons were destroyed by persistent
Iroquois attacks, and his La Salle and
the Discovery of the Great West, first
published in 1869 as The Discovery of
the Great West but later revised after
French documents were made available, is
in many respects one of the best
one-volume biographies in the English
language. René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de
La Salle, a hardy, gallant figure who
overcame almost every obstacle in his
path, was a heroic figure almost made
for Parkman’s pen. Count Frontenac and
New France Under Louis XIV (1877) tells
the story of New France, the early
French settlement in Canada, under its
most formidable governor, a man of
vanity, courage, and audacity. Yet it
was in Montcalm and Wolfe (1884)—a true
biography of the French general Marquis
de Montcalm and the English general
James Wolfe, both of whom died at the
Battle of Quebec in 1759—that Parkman
not only reached his highest achievement
in character portrayal but also showed
how great biography can be used to
penetrate the spirit of an age. By
contrast, Parkman’s The Old Régime in
Canada, published in 1874, provides a
sweeping panorama of New France in her
infancy and youth, a pioneer work in
social history that holds the interest
of the reader no less than his narrative
volumes. Parkman’s literary artistry is
perhaps best studied in A Half-Century
of Conflict (1892), completed shortly
before his death. This final link in his
history France and England in North
America is a fascinating but complex
account of events leading up to the
French and Indian War.
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Hawthorne,
Melville, and
Whitman
History also figured in tales and romances of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the leading New England
fictionist of the period. Many tales and longer
works—for example, his masterpiece, The Scarlet
Letter (1850)—were set against a background of
colonial America with emphasis upon its distance in
time from 19th-century New England. Others, such as
The House of the Seven Gables (1851), dealt with the
past as well as the present. Still others, such as
The Marble Faun (1860), were set in distant
countries. Remote though they were at times from
what
Hawthorne called “the light of common
day,” they showed deep psychological insight and
probed into complex ethical problems.
Another great
American fiction writer, for a time a neighbour and
associate of
Hawthorne, was
Herman
Melville. After relatively little schooling,
Melville went to sea; a whaling ship, as he put it,
was his “Yale College and his Harvard.” His first
books were fiction in the guise of factual writing
based upon experiences as a sailor—Typee (1846) and
Omoo (1847); so were such later works as Redburn
(1849) and White-Jacket (1850). Between 1846 and
1851, however,
Melville’s reading in
philosophy and literary classics, as well as in
Hawthorne’s allegorical and symbolic writings,
gave him new interests and aims. The first sign of
this interest was Mardi (1849), an uneven and
disjointed transitional book that used allegory
after the model of
Rabelais to
comment upon ideas afloat in the period—about
nations, politics, institutions, literature, and
religion. The new techniques came to fruition in
Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a richly symbolic
work, complex but brilliantly integrated. Only in
short stories, Benito Cereno—a masterpiece of its
genre—and others, in the psychological novel Pierre
(1852), and in the novelette Billy Budd (written
1890?) was Melville later to show sporadic flashes
of the genius that created Moby Dick.
An ardent singer of
the praise of Manhattan,
Walt Whitman saw
less of the dark side of life than
Melville
did. He was a believer in Jacksonian democracy, in
the splendour of the common man. Inspired by the
Romantic concept of a poet as prophet and also by
the Transcendental philosophy of Emerson,
Whitman
in 1855 published the first edition of Leaves of
Grass. As years passed, nine revised and expanded
editions of this work were published. This
autobiography in verse was intended to show the
ideas, beliefs, emotions, and experiences of the
common man in a great period of American
individualism.
Whitman had a hard time
winning a following because he was frank and
unconventional in his Transcendental thinking,
because he used free verse rather than rhymed or
regularly metred verse, and because his poems were
not conventionally organized. Nevertheless, he
steadily gained the approval of critics and in time
came to be recognized as one of the great poets of
America.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
American writer
born July 4, 1804, Salem, Mass., U.S.
died May 19, 1864, Plymouth, N.H.
Main
American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the
allegorical and symbolic tale. One of the greatest fiction writers in
American literature, he is best-known for The Scarlet Letter (1850) and
The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
Early years
Hawthorne’s ancestors had lived in Salem since the 17th century. His
earliest American ancestor, William Hathorne (Nathaniel added the w to
the name when he began to write), was a magistrate who had sentenced a
Quaker woman to public whipping. He had acted as a staunch defender of
Puritan orthodoxy, with its zealous advocacy of a “pure,” unaffected
form of religious worship, its rigid adherence to a simple, almost
severe, mode of life, and its conviction of the “natural depravity” of
“fallen” man. Hawthorne was later to wonder whether the decline of his
family’s prosperity and prominence during the 18th century, while other
Salem families were growing wealthy from the lucrative shipping trade,
might not be a retribution for this act and for the role of William’s
son John as one of three judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692.
When Nathaniel’s father—a ship’s captain—died during one of his voyages,
he left his young widow without means to care for her two girls and
young Nathaniel, aged four. She moved in with her affluent brothers, the
Mannings. Hawthorne grew up in their house in Salem and, for extensive
periods during his teens, in Raymond, Maine, on the shores of Sebago
Lake. He returned to Salem in 1825 after four years at Bowdoin College,
in Brunswick, Maine. Hawthorne did not distinguish himself as a young
man. Instead, he spent nearly a dozen years reading and trying to master
the art of writing fiction.
First works
In college Hawthorne had excelled only in composition and had determined
to become a writer. Upon graduation, he had written an amateurish novel,
Fanshawe, which he published at his own expense—only to decide that it
was unworthy of him and to try to destroy all copies. Hawthorne,
however, soon found his own voice, style, and subjects, and within five
years of his graduation he had published such impressive and distinctive
stories as “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “An Old Woman’s Tale.” By
1832, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” two of
his greatest tales—and among the finest in the language—had appeared.
“Young Goodman Brown,” perhaps the greatest tale of witchcraft ever
written, appeared in 1835.
His increasing success in placing his stories brought him a little
fame. Unwilling to depend any longer on his uncles’ generosity, he
turned to a job in the Boston Custom House (1839–40) and for six months
in 1841 was a resident at the agricultural cooperative Brook Farm, in
West Roxbury, Mass. Even when his first signed book, Twice-Told Tales,
was published in 1837, the work had brought gratifying recognition but
no dependable income. By 1842, however, Hawthorne’s writing had brought
him a sufficient income to allow him to marry Sophia Peabody; the couple
rented the Old Manse in Concord and began a happy three-year period that
Hawthorne would later record in his essay “The Old Manse.”
The presence of some of the leading social thinkers and philosophers
of his day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson
Alcott, in Concord made the village the centre of the philosophy of
Transcendentalism, which encouraged man to transcend the materialistic
world of experience and facts and become conscious of the pervading
spirit of the universe and the potentialities for human freedom.
Hawthorne welcomed the companionship of his Transcendentalist
neighbours, but he had little to say to them. Artists and intellectuals
never inspired his full confidence, but he thoroughly enjoyed the visit
of his old college friend and classmate Franklin Pierce, later to become
president of the United States. At the Old Manse, Hawthorne continued to
write stories, with the same result as before: literary success,
monetary failure. His new short-story collection, Mosses from an Old
Manse, appeared in 1846.
Return to Salem
A growing family and mounting debts compelled the Hawthornes’ return in
1845 to Salem, where Nathaniel was appointed surveyor of the Custom
House by the Polk administration (Hawthorne had always been a loyal
Democrat and pulled all the political strings he could to get this
appointment). Three years later the presidential election brought the
Whigs into power under Zachary Taylor, and Hawthorne lost his job; but
in a few months of concentrated effort, he produced his masterpiece, The
Scarlet Letter. The bitterness he felt over his dismissal is apparent in
“The Custom House” essay prefixed to the novel. The Scarlet Letter tells
the story of two lovers kept apart by the ironies of fate, their own
mingled strengths and weaknesses, and the Puritan community’s
interpretation of moral law, until at last death unites them under a
single headstone. The book made Hawthorne famous and was eventually
recognized as one of the greatest of American novels.
Determined to leave Salem forever, Hawthorne moved to Lenox, located
in the mountain scenery of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts.
There he began work on The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the story
of the Pyncheon family, who for generations had lived under a curse
until it was removed at last by love.
At Lenox he enjoyed the stimulating friendship of Herman Melville,
who lived in nearby Pittsfield. This friendship, although important for
the younger writer and his work, was much less so for Hawthorne.
Melville praised Hawthorne extravagantly in a review of his Mosses from
an Old Manse, and he also dedicated Moby Dick to Hawthorne. But
eventually Melville came to feel that the friendship he so ardently
pursued was one-sided. Later he was to picture the relationship with
disillusion in his introductory sketch to The Piazza Tales and depicted
Hawthorne himself unflatteringly as “Vine” in his long poem Clarel.
In the autumn of 1851 Hawthorne moved his family to another temporary
residence, this time in West Newton, near Boston. There he quickly wrote
The Blithedale Romance, which was based on his disenchantment with Brook
Farm. Then he purchased and redecorated Bronson Alcott’s house in
Concord, the Wayside. Blithedale was disappointingly received and did
not produce the income Hawthorne had expected. He was hoping for a
lucrative political appointment that would bolster his finances; in the
meantime, he wrote a campaign biography of his old friend Franklin
Pierce. When Pierce won the presidency, Hawthorne was in 1853 rewarded
with the consulship in Liverpool, Lancashire, a position he hoped would
enable him in a few years to leave his family financially secure.
Last years
The remaining 11 years of Hawthorne’s life were, from a creative point
of view, largely anticlimactic. He performed his consular duties
faithfully and effectively until his position was terminated in 1857,
and then he spent a year and a half sight-seeing in Italy. Determined to
produce yet another romance, he finally retreated to a seaside town in
England and quickly produced The Marble Faun. In writing it, he drew
heavily upon the experiences and impressions he had recorded in a
notebook kept during his Italian tour to give substance to an allegory
of the Fall of man, a theme that had usually been assumed in his earlier
works but that now received direct and philosophic treatment.
Back in the Wayside once more in 1860, Hawthorne devoted himself
entirely to his writing but was unable to make any progress with his
plans for a new novel. The drafts of unfinished works he left are mostly
incoherent and show many signs of a psychic regression, already
foreshadowed by his increasing restlessness and discontent of the
preceding half dozen years. Some two years before his death he began to
age very suddenly. His hair turned white, his handwriting changed, he
suffered frequent nosebleeds, and he took to writing the figure “64”
compulsively on scraps of paper. He died in his sleep on a trip in
search of health with his friend Pierce.
Major novels
The main character of The Scarlet Letter is Hester Prynne, a young
married woman who has borne an illegitimate child while living away from
her husband in a village in Puritan New England. The husband, Roger
Chillingworth, arrives in New England to find his wife pilloried and
made to wear the letter A (meaning adulteress) in scarlet on her dress
as a punishment for her illicit affair and for her refusal to reveal the
name of the child’s father. Chillingworth becomes obsessed with finding
the identity of his wife’s former lover. He learns that Hester’s
paramour is a saintly young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, and
Chillingworth then proceeds to revenge himself by mentally tormenting
the guilt-stricken young man. Hester herself is revealed to be a
compassionate and splendidly self-reliant heroine who is never truly
repentant for the act of adultery committed with the minister; she feels
that their act was consecrated by their deep love for each other. In the
end Chillingworth is morally degraded by his monomaniac pursuit of
revenge, and Dimmesdale is broken by his own sense of guilt and publicly
confesses his adultery before dying in Hester’s arms. Only Hester can
face the future optimistically, as she plans to ensure the future of her
beloved little girl by taking her to Europe.
The House of the Seven Gables is a sombre study in hereditary sin
based on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne’s own family by a
woman condemned to death during the witchcraft trials. The greed and
arrogant pride of the novel’s Pyncheon family down the generations is
mirrored in the gloomy decay of their seven-gabled mansion, in which the
family’s enfeebled and impoverished poor relations live. At the book’s
end the descendant of a family long ago defrauded by the Pyncheons lifts
his ancestors’ curse on the mansion and marries a young niece of the
family.
In The Marble Faun a trio of expatriate American art students in
Italy become peripherally involved to varying degrees in the murder of
an unknown man; their contact with sin transforms two of them from
innocents into adults now possessed of a mature and critical awareness
of life’s complexity and possibilities.
Assessment
Hawthorne’s high rank among American fiction writers is the result of at
least three considerations. First, he was a skillful craftsman with an
impressive arthitectonic sense of form. The structure of The Scarlet
Letter, for example, is so tightly integrated that no chapter, no
paragraph, even, could be omitted without doing violence to the whole.
The book’s four characters are inextricably bound together in the
tangled web of a life situation that seems to have no solution, and the
tightly woven plot has a unity of action that rises slowly but
inexorably to the climactic scene of Dimmesdale’s public confession. The
same tight construction is found in Hawthorne’s other writings also,
especially in the shorter pieces, or “tales.” Hawthorne was also the
master of a classic literary style that is remarkable for its
directness, its clarity, its firmness, and its sureness of idiom.
A second reason for Hawthorne’s greatness is his moral insight. He
inherited the Puritan tradition of moral earnestness, and he was deeply
concerned with the concepts of original sin and guilt and the claims of
law and conscience. Hawthorne rejected what he saw as the
Transcendentalists’ transparent optimism about the potentialities of
human nature. Instead he looked more deeply and perhaps more honestly
into life, finding in it much suffering and conflict but also finding
the redeeming power of love. There is no Romantic escape in his works,
but rather a firm and resolute scrutiny of the psychological and moral
facts of the human condition.
A third reason for Hawthorne’s eminence is his mastery of allegory
and symbolism. His fictional characters’ actions and dilemmas fairly
obviously express larger generalizations about the problems of human
existence. But with Hawthorne this leads not to unconvincing pasteboard
figures with explanatory labels attached but to a sombre, concentrated
emotional involvement with his characters that has the power, the
gravity, and the inevitability of true tragedy. His use of symbolism in
The Scarlet Letter is particularly effective, and the scarlet letter
itself takes on a wider significance and application that is out of all
proportion to its literal character as a scrap of cloth.
Hawthorne’s work initiated the most durable tradition in American
fiction, that of the symbolic romance that assumes the universality of
guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man’s choices.
His greatest short stories and The Scarlet Letter are marked by a depth
of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled by any American
writer.
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Herman
Melville
"Moby Dick or The Whale"
Illustrated by Rockwell Kent
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Herman
Melville
"Moby Dick or The Whale"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV,
PART V
Illustrated by Rockwell Kent
American author
born Aug. 1, 1819, New York City
died Sept. 28, 1891, New York City
Main
American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, best known for his
novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851).
Heritage and youth
Melville’s heritage and youthful experiences were perhaps crucial in
forming the conflicts underlying his artistic vision. He was the third
child of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill, in a family that was to
grow to four boys and four girls. His forebears had been among the
Scottish and Dutch settlers of New York and had taken leading roles in
the American Revolution and in the fiercely competitive commercial and
political life of the new country. One grandfather, Maj. Thomas Melvill,
was a member of the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and was subsequently a New
York importer. The other, Gen. Peter Gansevoort, was a friend of James
Fenimore Cooper and famous for leading the defense of Ft. Stanwix, in
upstate New York, against the British.
In 1826 Allan Melvill wrote of his son as being “backward in speech
and somewhat slow in comprehension . . . of a docile and amiable
disposition.” In that same year, scarlet fever left the boy with
permanently weakened eyesight, but he attended Male High School. When
the family import business collapsed in 1830, the family returned to
Albany, where Herman enrolled briefly in Albany Academy. Allan Melvill
died in 1832, leaving his family in desperate straits. The eldest son,
Gansevoort, assumed responsibility for the family and took over his
father’s felt and fur business. Herman joined him after two years as a
bank clerk and some months working on the farm of his uncle, Thomas
Melvill, in Pittsfield, Mass. About this time, Herman’s branch of the
family altered the spelling of its name. Though finances were
precarious, Herman attended Albany Classical School in 1835 and became
an active member of a local debating society. A teaching job in
Pittsfield made him unhappy, however, and after three months he returned
to Albany.
Wanderings and voyages
Young Melville had already begun writing, but the remainder of his youth
became a quest for security. A comparable pursuit in the spiritual realm
was to characterize much of his writing. The crisis that started Herman
on his wanderings came in 1837, when Gansevoort went bankrupt and the
family moved to nearby Lansingburgh (later Troy). In what was to be a
final attempt at orthodox employment, Herman studied surveying at
Lansingburgh Academy to equip himself for a post with the Erie Canal
project. When the job did not materialize, Gansevoort arranged for
Herman to ship out as cabin boy on the “St. Lawrence,” a merchant ship
sailing in June 1839 from New York City for Liverpool. The summer voyage
did not dedicate Melville to the sea, and on his return his family was
dependent still on the charity of relatives. After a grinding search for
work, he taught briefly in a school that closed without paying him. His
uncle Thomas, who had left Pittsfield for Illinois, apparently had no
help to offer when the young man followed him west. In January 1841
Melville sailed on the whaler “Acushnet,” from New Bedford, Mass., on a
voyage to the South Seas.
In June 1842 the “Acushnet” anchored in the Marquesas Islands in
present-day French Polynesia. Melville’s adventures here, somewhat
romanticized, became the subject of his first novel, Typee (1846). In
July Melville and a companion jumped ship and, according to Typee, spent
about four months as guest-captives of the reputedly cannibalistic Typee
people. Actually, in August he was registered in the crew of the
Australian whaler “Lucy Ann.” Whatever its precise correspondence with
fact, however, Typee was faithful to the imaginative impact of the
experience on Melville. Despite intimations of danger, Melville
represented the exotic valley of the Typees as an idyllic sanctuary from
a hustling, aggressive civilization.
Although Melville was down for a 120th share of the whaler’s
proceeds, the voyage had been unproductive. He joined a mutiny that
landed the mutineers in a Tahitian jail, from which he escaped without
difficulty. On these events and their sequel, Melville based his second
book, Omoo (1847). Lighthearted in tone, with the mutiny shown as
something of a farce, it describes Melville’s travels through the
islands, accompanied by Long Ghost, formerly the ship’s doctor, now
turned drifter. The carefree roving confirmed Melville’s bitterness
against colonial and, especially, missionary debasement of the native
Tahitian peoples.
These travels, in fact, occupied less than a month. In November he
signed as a harpooner on his last whaler, the “Charles & Henry,” out of
Nantucket, Mass. Six months later he disembarked at Lahaina, in the
Hawaiian Islands. Somehow he supported himself for more than three
months; then in August 1843 he signed as an ordinary seaman on the
frigate “United States,” which in October 1844 discharged him in Boston.
The years of acclaim
Melville rejoined a family whose prospects had much improved.
Gansevoort, who after James K. Polk’s victory in the 1844 presidential
elections had been appointed secretary to the U.S. legation in London,
was gaining political renown. Encouraged by his family’s enthusiastic
reception of his tales of the South Seas, Melville wrote them down. The
years of acclaim were about to begin for Melville.
Typee provoked immediate enthusiasm and outrage, and then a year
later Omoo had an identical response. Gansevoort, dead of a brain
disease, never saw his brother’s career consolidated, but the
bereavement left Melville head of the family and the more committed to
writing to support it. Another responsibility came with his marriage in
August 1847 to Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of
Massachusetts. He tried unsuccessfully for a job in the U.S. Treasury
Department, the first of many abortive efforts to secure a government
post.
In 1847 Melville began a third book, Mardi (1849), and became a
regular contributor of reviews and other pieces to a literary journal.
To his new literary acquaintances in New York City he appeared the
character of his own books—extravert, vigorous, “with his cigar and his
Spanish eyes,” as one writer described him. Melville resented this
somewhat patronizing stereotype, and in her reminiscences his wife
recalled him in a different aspect, writing in a bitterly cold, fireless
room in winter. He enjoined his publisher not to call him “the author of
Typee and Omoo,” for his third book was to be different. When it
appeared, public and critics alike found its wild, allegorical fantasy
and medley of styles incomprehensible. It began as another Polynesian
adventure but quickly set its hero in pursuit of the mysterious Yillah,
“all beauty and innocence,” a symbolic quest that ends in anguish and
disaster. Concealing his disappointment at the book’s reception,
Melville quickly wrote Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850) in the
manner expected of him. In October 1849 Melville sailed to England to
resolve his London publisher’s doubts about White-Jacket. He also
visited the Continent, kept a journal, and arrived back in America in
February 1850. The critics acclaimed White-Jacket, and its powerful
criticism of abuses in the U.S. Navy won it strong political support.
But both novels, however much they seemed to revive the Melville of
Typee, had passages of profoundly questioning melancholy. It was not the
same Melville who wrote them. He had been reading Shakespeare with “eyes
which are as tender as young sparrows,” particularly noting sombre
passages in Measure for Measure and King Lear. This reading struck
deeply sympathetic responses in Melville, counterbalancing the
Transcendental doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose general optimism
about human goodness he had heard in lectures. A fresh imaginative
influence was supplied by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, a novel
deeply exploring good and evil in the human being, which Melville read
in the spring of 1850. That summer, Melville bought a farm, which he
christened “Arrowhead,” near Hawthorne’s home at Pittsfield, and the two
men became neighbours physically as well as in sympathies.
Melville had promised his publishers for the autumn of 1850 the novel
first entitled The Whale, finally Moby Dick. His delay in submitting it
was caused less by his early-morning chores as a farmer than by his
explorations into the unsuspected vistas opened for him by Hawthorne.
Their relationship reanimated Melville’s creative energies. On his side,
it was dependent, almost mystically intense—“an infinite fraternity of
feeling,” he called it. To the cooler, withdrawn Hawthorne, such depth
of feeling so persistently and openly declared was uncongenial. The two
men gradually drew apart. They met for the last time, almost as
strangers, in 1856, when Melville visited Liverpool, where Hawthorne was
American consul.
Moby Dick was published in London in October 1851 and a month later
in America. It brought its author neither acclaim nor reward. Basically
its story is simple. Captain Ahab pursues the white whale, Moby Dick,
which finally kills him. At that level, it is an intense, superbly
authentic narrative of whaling. In the perverted grandeur of Captain
Ahab and in the beauties and terrors of the voyage of the “Pequod,”
however, Melville dramatized his deeper concerns: the equivocal defeats
and triumphs of the human spirit and its fusion of creative and
murderous urges. In his private afflictions, Melville had found
universal metaphors.
Increasingly a recluse to the point that some friends feared for his
sanity, Melville embarked almost at once on Pierre (1852). It was an
intensely personal work, revealing the sombre mythology of his private
life framed in terms of a story of an artist alienated from his society.
In it can be found the humiliated responses to poverty that his youth
supplied him plentifully and the hypocrisy he found beneath his father’s
claims to purity and faithfulness. His mother he had idolized; yet he
found the spirituality of her love betrayed by sexual love. The novel, a
slightly veiled allegory of Melville’s own dark imaginings, was rooted
in these relations. When published, it was another critical and
financial disaster. Only 33 years old, Melville saw his career in ruins.
Near breakdown, and having to face in 1853 the disaster of a fire at his
New York publishers that destroyed most of his books, Melville
persevered with writing.
Israel Potter, plotted before his introduction to Hawthorne and his
work, was published in 1855, but its modest success, clarity of style,
and apparent simplicity of subject did not indicate a decision by
Melville to write down to public taste. His contributions to Putnam’s
Monthly Magazine—“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), “The Encantadas”
(1854), and “Benito Cereno” (1855)—reflected the despair and the
contempt for human hypocrisy and materialism that possessed him
increasingly.
In 1856 Melville set out on a tour of Europe and the Levant to renew
his spirits. The most powerful passages of the journal he kept are in
harmony with The Confidence-Man (1857), a despairing satire on an
America corrupted by the shabby dreams of commerce. This was the last of
his novels to be published in his lifetime. Three American lecture tours
were followed by his final sea journey, in 1860, when he joined his
brother Thomas, captain of the clipper “Meteor,” for a voyage around
Cape Horn. He abandoned the trip in San Francisco.
The years of withdrawal
Melville abandoned the novel for poetry, but the prospects for
publication were not favourable. With two sons and daughters to support,
Melville sought government patronage. A consular post he sought in 1861
went elsewhere. On the outbreak of the Civil War, he volunteered for the
Navy, but was again rejected. He had apparently returned full cycle to
the insecurity of his youth, but an inheritance from his father-in-law
brought some relief and “Arrowhead,” increasingly a burden, was sold. By
the end of 1863, the family was living in New York City. The war was
much on his mind and furnished the subject of his first volume of verse,
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), published privately. Four
months after it appeared, an appointment as a customs inspector on the
New York docks finally brought him a secure income.
Despite poor health, Melville began a pattern of writing evenings,
weekends, and on vacations. In 1867 his son Malcolm shot himself,
accidentally the jury decided, though it appeared that he had quarrelled
with his father the night before his death. His second son, Stanwix, who
had gone to sea in 1869, died in a San Francisco hospital in 1886 after
a long illness. Throughout these griefs, and for the whole of his 19
years in the customs house, Melville’s creative pace was understandably
slowed.
His second collection of verse, John Marr, and Other Sailors; With
Some Sea-Pieces, appeared in 1888, again privately published. By then he
had been in retirement for three years, assisted by legacies from
friends and relatives. His new leisure he devoted, he wrote in 1889, to
“certain matters as yet incomplete.” Among them was Timoleon (1891), a
final verse collection. More significant was the return to prose that
culminated in his last work, the novel Billy Budd, which remained
unpublished until 1924. Provoked by a false charge, the sailor Billy
Budd accidentally kills the satanic master-at-arms. In a time of
threatened mutiny he is hanged, going willingly to his fate. Evil has
not wholly triumphed, and Billy’s memory lives on as an emblem of good.
Here there is, if not a statement of being reconciled fully to life, at
least the peace of resignation. The manuscript ends with the date April
19, 1891. Five months later Melville died. His life was neither happy
nor, by material standards, successful. By the end of the 1840s he was
among the most celebrated of American writers, yet his death evoked but
a single obituary notice.
In the internal tensions that put him in conflict with his age lay a
strangely 20th-century awareness of the deceptiveness of realities and
of the instability of personal identity. Yet his writings never lost
sight of reality. His symbols grew from such visible facts, made
intensely present, as the dying whales, the mess of blubber, and the
wood of the ship, in Moby Dick. For Melville, as for Shakespeare, man
was ape and essence, inextricably compounded; and the world, like the
“Pequod,” was subject to “two antagonistic influences . . . one to mount
direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal.”
It was Melville’s triumph that he endured, recording his vision to the
end. After the years of neglect, modern criticism has secured his
reputation with that of the great American writers.
D.E.S. Maxwell
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Walt Whitman
"Leaves of Grass"
American poet
in full Walter Whitman
born May 31, 1819, West Hills, Long Island, N.Y., U.S.
died March 26, 1892, Camden, N.J.
American poet, journalist, and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of
Grass is a landmark in the history of American literature.
Early life.
Walt Whitman was born into a family that settled in North America in the
first half of the 17th century. His ancestry was typical of the region:
his mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was Dutch, and his father, Walter
Whitman, was of English descent. They were simple farm people, with
little formal education. The Whitman family had at one time owned a
large tract of land, but it was so diminished by the time Walt was born
that his father had taken up carpentering, though the family still lived
on a small section of the ancestral estate. In 1823 Walter Whitman, Sr.,
moved his growing family to Brooklyn, which was enjoying a boom. There
he speculated in real estate and built cheap houses for artisans, but he
was a poor manager and had difficulty in providing for his family, which
increased to nine children.
Walt, the second child, attended public school in Brooklyn, began
working at the age of 12, and learned the printing trade. He was
employed as a printer in Brooklyn and New York City, taught in country
schools on Long Island, and became a journalist. At the age of 23 he
edited a daily newspaper in New York, and in 1846 he became editor of
the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a fairly important newspaper of the time.
Discharged from the Eagle early in 1848 because of his support for the
Free Soil faction of the Democratic Party, he went to New Orleans, La.,
where he worked for three months on the Crescent before returning to New
York via the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. After another
abortive attempt at Free Soil journalism, he built houses and dabbled in
real estate in New York from about 1850 until 1855.
Whitman had spent a great deal of his 36 years walking and observing
in New York City and Long Island. He had visited the theatre frequently
and seen many plays of William Shakespeare, and he had developed a
strong love of music, especially opera. During these years he had also
read extensively at home and in the New York libraries, and he began
experimenting with a new style of poetry. While a schoolteacher,
printer, and journalist he had published sentimental stories and poems
in newspapers and popular magazines, but they showed almost no literary
promise.
By the spring of 1855 Whitman had enough poems in his new style for a
thin volume. Unable to find a publisher, he sold a house and printed the
first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense. No publisher’s
name, no author’s name appeared on the first edition in 1855. But the
cover had a portrait of Walt Whitman, “broad shouldered, rouge fleshed,
Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr.” Though little appreciated upon
its appearance, Leaves of Grass was warmly praised by the poet and
essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote to Whitman on receiving the
poems that it was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom”
America had yet contributed.
Whitman continued practicing his new style of writing in his private
notebooks, and in 1856 the second edition of Leaves of Grass appeared.
This collection contained revisions of the poems of the first edition
and a new one, the “Sun-down Poem” (later to become “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry”). The second edition was also a financial failure, and once again
Whitman edited a daily newspaper, the Brooklyn Times, but was unemployed
by the summer of 1859. In 1860 a Boston publisher brought out the third
edition of Leaves of Grass, greatly enlarged and rearranged, but the
outbreak of the American Civil War bankrupted the firm. The 1860 volume
contained the “Calamus” poems, which record a personal crisis of some
intensity in Whitman’s life, an apparent homosexual love affair (whether
imagined or real is unknown), and “Premonition” (later entitled
“Starting from Paumanok”), which records the violent emotions that often
drained the poet’s strength. “A Word out of the Sea” (later entitled
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”) evoked some sombre feelings, as
did “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.” “Chants Democratic,” “Enfans
d’Adam,” “Messenger Leaves,” and “Thoughts” were more in the poet’s
earlier vein.
Civil War years.
After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Whitman’s brother was
wounded at Fredericksburg, and Whitman went there in 1862, staying some
time in the camp, then taking a temporary post in the paymaster’s office
in Washington. He spent his spare time visiting wounded and dying
soldiers in the Washington hospitals, spending his scanty salary on
small gifts for Confederate and Unionist soldiers alike and offering his
usual “cheer and magnetism” to try to alleviate some of the mental
depression and bodily suffering he saw in the wards.
In January 1865 he became a clerk in the Department of the Interior;
in May he was promoted but in June was dismissed because the secretary
of the Interior thought that Leaves of Grass was indecent. Whitman then
obtained a post in the attorney general’s office, largely through the
efforts of his friend, the journalist William O’Connor, who wrote a
vindication of Whitman in The Good Gray Poet (published in 1866), which
aroused sympathy for the victim of injustice.
In May 1865 a collection of war poems entitled Drum Taps showed
Whitman’s readers a new kind of poetry, moving from the oratorical
excitement with which he had greeted the falling-in and arming of the
young men at the beginning of the Civil War to a disturbing awareness of
what war really meant. “Beat! Beat! Drums!” echoed the bitterness of the
Battle of Bull Run, and “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”
had a new awareness of suffering, no less effective for its quietly
plangent quality. The Sequel to Drum Taps, published in the autumn of
1865, contained his great elegy on President Abraham Lincoln, “When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” His horror at the death of
democracy’s first “great martyr chief ” was matched by his revulsion
from the barbarities of war. Whitman’s prose descriptions of the Civil
War, published later in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83), are no less
effective in their direct, moving simplicity.
Later life.
The fourth edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1867, contained much
revision and rearrangement. Apart from the poems collected in Drum Taps,
it contained eight new poems, and some poems had been omitted. In the
late 1860s Whitman’s work began to receive greater recognition.
O’Connor’s The Good Gray Poet and John Burroughs’ Notes on Walt Whitman
as Poet and Person (1867) were followed in 1868 by an expurgated English
edition of Whitman’s poems prepared by William Michael Rossetti, the
English man of letters. During the remainder of his life Whitman
received much encouragement from leading writers in England.
Whitman was ill in 1872, probably as a result of long-experienced
emotional strains related to his sexual ambiguity; in January 1873 his
first stroke left him partly paralyzed. By May he had recovered
sufficiently to travel to his brother’s home in Camden, N.J., where his
mother was dying. Her subsequent death he called “the great cloud” of
his life. He thereafter lived with his brother in Camden, and his post
in the attorney general’s office was terminated in 1874.
Whitman’s health recovered sufficiently by 1879 for him to make a
visit to the West. In 1881 James R. Osgood published a second Boston
edition of Leaves of Grass, and the Society for the Suppression of Vice
claimed it to be immoral. Because of a threatened prosecution, Osgood
gave the plates to Whitman, who, after he had published an author’s
edition, found a new publisher, Rees Welsh of Philadelphia, who was
shortly succeeded by David McKay. Leaves of Grass had now reached the
form in which it was henceforth to be published. Newspaper publicity had
created interest in the book, and it sold better than any previous
edition. As a result, Whitman was able to buy a modest little cottage in
Camden, where he spent the rest of his life. He had many new friends,
among them Horace Traubel, who recorded his talk and wrote his
biography. The Complete Poems and Prose was published in 1888, along
with the eighth edition of Leaves of Grass. The ninth, or “authorized,”
edition appeared in 1892, the year of Whitman’s death.
Leaves of Grass.
Walt Whitman is known primarily for Leaves of Grass, though his prose
volume Specimen Days contains some fine realistic descriptions of Civil
War scenes. But Leaves of Grass is actually more than one book. During
Whitman’s lifetime it went through nine editions, each with its own
distinct virtues and faults. Whitman compared the finished book to a
cathedral long under construction, and on another occasion to a tree,
with its cumulative rings of growth. Both metaphors are misleading,
however, because he did not construct his book unit by unit or by
successive layers but constantly altered titles, diction, and even
motifs and shifted poems—omitting, adding, separating, and combining.
Beginning with the third edition (1860), he grouped the poems under such
titles as “Chants Democratic,” “Enfans d’Adam” (later “Children of
Adam”), “Calamus,” “Poems of Joy,” and “Sea-Drift.” Some of his later
group titles were highly connotative, such as “Birds of Passage,” “By
the Roadside,” “Autumn Rivulets,” “From Noon to Starry Night,” and
“Songs of Parting,” suggesting a life allegory. But the poems were not
arranged in order of composition, either within a particular group or
from one group to another. After 1881 Whitman made no further shifts in
groups or revisions of poems within the groups, merely adding the poems
of “Sands at Seventy” and “Good-Bye My Fancy.”
Under the influence of the Romantic movement in literature and art,
Whitman held the theory that the chief function of the poet was to
express his own personality in his verse. The first edition of Leaves of
Grass also appeared during the most nationalistic period in American
literature, when critics were calling for a literature commensurate with
the size, natural resources, and potentialities of the North American
continent. “We want” shouted a character in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
Kavanagh (1849), “a national literature altogether shaggy and unshorn,
that shall shake the earth, like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the
prairies.” With the same fervour, Whitman declared in his 1855 preface,
“Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance
that the soul loves.” In Leaves of Grass he addressed the citizens of
the United States, urging them to be large and generous in spirit, a new
race nurtured in political liberty, and possessed of united souls and
bodies.
It was partly in response to nationalistic ideals and partly in
accord with his ambition to cultivate and express his own personality
that the “I” of Whitman’s poems asserted a mythical strength and
vitality. For the frontispiece to the first edition, Whitman used a
picture of himself in work clothes, posed nonchalantly with cocked hat
and hand in trouser pocket, as if illustrating a line in his leading
poem, “Song of Myself”: “I cock my hat as I please indoors and out.” In
this same poem he also characterized himself as:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs,
a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . eating drink-
ing and breeding,
. . . Divine am I inside and out, and I make
holy whatever I touch or am touched from . . .
From this time on throughout his life Whitman attempted to dress the
part and act the role of the shaggy, untamed poetic spokesman of the
proud young nation. For the expression of this persona he also created a
form of free verse without rhyme or metre, but abounding in oratorical
rhythms and chanted lists of American place-names and objects. He
learned to handle this primitive, enumerative style with great subtlety
and was especially successful in creating empathy of space and movement,
but to most of his contemporaries it seemed completely “unpoetic.” Both
the content and the style of his verse also caused Whitman’s early
biographers, and even the poet himself, to confuse the symbolic self of
the poems with their physical creator. In reality Whitman was quiet,
gentle, courteous; neither “rowdy” (a favourite word) nor lawless. In
sexual conduct he may have been unconventional, though no one is sure,
but it is likely that the six illegitimate children he boasted of in
extreme old age were begotten by his imagination. He did advocate
greater sexual freedom and tolerance, but sex in his poems is also
symbolic—of natural innocence, “the procreant urge of the world,” and of
the regenerative power of nature. In some of his poems the poet’s own
erotic emotions may have confused him, but in his greatest, such as
parts of “Song of Myself” and all of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking,” sex is spiritualized.
Whitman’s greatest theme is a symbolic identification of the
regenerative power of nature with the deathless divinity of the soul.
His poems are filled with a religious faith in the processes of life,
particularly those of fertility, sex, and the “unflagging pregnancy” of
nature: sprouting grass, mating birds, phallic vegetation, the maternal
ocean, and planets in formation (“the journey-work of stars”). The
poetic “I” of Leaves of Grass transcends time and space, binding the
past with the present and intuiting the future, illustrating Whitman’s
belief that poetry is a form of knowledge, the supreme wisdom of
mankind.
Reputation.
At the time of his death Whitman was more respected in Europe than in
his own country. It was not as a poet, indeed, but as a symbol of
American democracy that he first won recognition. In the late 19th
century his poems exercised a strong fascination on English readers who
found his championing of the common man idealistic and prophetic.
Whitman’s aim was to transcend traditional epics, to eschew normal
aesthetic form, and yet by reflecting American society to enable the
poet and his readers to realize themselves and the nature of their
American experience. He has continued to hold the attention of very
different generations because he offered the welcome conviction that
“the crowning growth of the United States” was to be spiritual and
heroic and because he was able to uncompromisingly express his own
personality in poetic form. Modern readers can still share his
preoccupation with the problem of preserving the individual’s integrity
amid the pressures of mass civilization. Scholars in the 20th century,
however, find his social thought less important than his artistry. T.S.
Eliot said, “When Whitman speaks of the lilacs or the mockingbird his
theories and beliefs drop away like a needless pretext.” Whitman
invigorated language; he could be strong yet sentimental; and he
possessed scope and inventiveness. He portrayed the relationships of
man’s body and soul and the universe in a new way, often emancipating
poetry from contemporary conventions. He had sufficient universality to
be considered one of the greatest American poets.
Alexander Norman Jeffares
Gay Wilson Allen
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