A History of American Literature

Lanier’s abiding conviction put the poet on the same plane with the prophet and the seer. He was far from according with Poe’s total subordination of intellect and moral sense to the feeling for beauty. He seldom or never wrote a didactic poem, but he usually composed over a strong moralistic counterpoint. In “Corn” the poet

leads the vanward of his timid timeAnd sings up cowards with commanding rhyme.

In “The Bee” he will wage wars for the world. In “The Marshes of Glynn” he is

the catholic man who hath mightily wonGod out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain.

The poet’s judgments are, therefore, certain to surpass those of his age, certain to reap a harvest of derision and abuse, and certain to approach the right because they are made in the light of eternity rather than in the ephemeral shadow of any passing day.

The tolling of the bell of time which resounds throughout Lanier’s poems does not deafen him to the harmonies or the discords of the moment. With all his consciousness of literary tradition he was far more alive to the present than many of his Southern contemporaries, who were not so genuinely literary as imitatively bookish. “Corn” tells the tale of the improvident cotton-grower who becomes “A gamester’s catspaw and a banker’s slave.” “The Symphony” is an arraignment of the industrial system.

If business is battle, name it so:War-crimes less will shame it so,And widows less will blame it so.

“Acknowledgment” (first sonnet) and “Remonstrance” were written of the troublous period which was wracked between doubts that merely disturbed and dogmas which were still advocated with all the subtleties of persecution that – in an enlightened age – will substitute ostracism for the stake and social boycott for excommunication.

In the modest volume of his collected work – for his writing was mainly done in his last eight years, and he was not a garrulous poet – there is a marked variety. “The Revenge of Hamish” is a clear reflection of his zest for heroic story. It is one of the notably successful attempts of his day to emulate the old ballad, and it is the better for restoring the spirit of balladry without imitating the manner. “How Love Looked for Hell,” without being imitative of anyone, is distinctly pre-Raphaelite in tone. Rossetti might have written it. In “The Stirrup-Cup” there is an Elizabethan note, and “Night and Day” and the “Marsh Song – at Sunset” are literary lyrics for the readers of “Othello” and “The Tempest.” These and their like give token of Lanier’s versatility, just as the “Song of the Chattahoochee” displays his command of certain obvious devices in diction and rhythm; but the poems most distinctive of Lanier and most generally quoted are the longer meditations already mentioned, and, in particular, “The Symphony” and “The Marshes of Glynn.” Of these the earlier is much quoted by social reformers for the vigor of its protests at the exploitation of labor; by musicians, because of the sustained metaphor – though it might better have been named “The Orchestra”; and by those who love a certain fulsomeness of sensuous appeal in verse. This last trait gains friends also for “The Marshes of Glynn,” though its supreme passage, the last forty lines, is free from the decorative elaborations which in the earlier portion distract the reader from the content they adorn.

In the development of artistic power the formative period is the most open to influence and the most likely to be formal and self-conscious. Early and full maturity bring the nicest balance between the thing said and the manner of saying it; and a later period often is marked by overcompression or over-elaboration, a neglect of form in favor of content. Lanier, who died on the approach to middle life, had just published “The Science of English Verse” and was studiously aware of poetic processes, from the ingenious conceits of the “Paradise of Dainty Devices” to the metrical experiments of Swinburne and his contemporaries. In the compound of factors which were blending into the matured Lanier there was still a good measure of Elizabethan ingenuity. He felt a pleasant thrill in riding a metaphor down the page. He played repeatedly, for example, with the concept of the passage of time. In the second sonnet of “Acknowledgment” this age is a comma, and all time a complex sentence (four lines); in “Clover” the course-of-things is a browsing ox (twenty-five lines); in “The Symphony” the leaves are dials on which time tells his hours (three lines); in the first of the “Sonnets on Columbus” prickly seconds and dull-blade minutes mark three hours of suspense (three lines); and in “The Stirrup-Cup” death is a cordial compounded by time from the reapings of poets long dead (twelve lines). These all are picturesquely suggestive, but they are rather imposed on the idea than derived from it. Other poets, to be sure, have erred in the same way and then perhaps redeemed themselves. Lanier, however, said nothing so fundamentally true and compact as Pope’s “Years following years steal something every day,” or Shakespeare’s “And that old common arbitrator, Time,” or his “whirligig of time.” There is a similar reaching for effect in the rhythmical quality of many well-known passages. The twelve-line description of the velvet flute-note in “The Symphony” is more deft and intricate than convincing. The figures stumble on each other’s heels, and the alliterations, assonances, and three- and five-fold rimes are intrusively gratuitous. In like manner the opening lines of “The Marshes of Glynn” illustrate the over-luxuriance of Lanier. He delighted in tropical exuberance; he rioted in his letters with less restraint than in his verse, and in one written to his wife in 1874 he confessed parenthetically: “In plain terms – sweet Heaven, how I do abhor these same plain terms – I have been playing ‘Stradella.’” When he wrote this Lanier was thirty-two. Before his death he had approached the point of liking the plain term better and employing it oftener.

“The Marshes of Glynn” is a personal utterance of Lanier in its form, in its sensuous opulence, in its social sympathies, and in its religion; but in these latter respects it is emphatically the utterance also of the period that produced Lanier. It was written in 1878, the year of Bryant’s death; it was written in the structural sequence of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”; and in its applications it indicates the changes that had taken place in religious thought since Bryant’s youth. In the earlier poem the various language that Nature speaks is expounded in general terms, before “Thoughts of the last bitter hour” lead to the monody on death and the resolve so to live that death shall have no fears. The latter poem differentiates the tones of Nature, lingering first in the cloistral depths of the woods during the heat of a June day. In the cool and quiet the poet’s

… heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the strokeOf the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,And belief overmasters doubt.

So, toward sunset, he leaves the protected green colonnades and goes out unafraid to face the expanse of “a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.” Here Nature, who has consoled him in the forest, fills him with a great exhilaration.

Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?Somehow my soul seems suddenly freeFrom the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.

From the marshes he learns a lesson of life rather than of death – the spiritual value of aspiration and the emancipating gift of a broad faith. “Thanatopsis” ends with a nobly stated but restraining admonition; “The Marshes” with a song of liberty:

I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen fliesIn the freedom that fills all the space ’twixt the marsh and the skies:By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sodI will heartily lay me a-hold of the greatness of God.

This is written in the positive mood – and in the measure, too – of Browning’s “Saul.” Both poems record the throwing off of paralyzing restraint and the substitution of hope for dread that resulted from the religious struggles of the nineteenth century.

Lanier went far toward representing the South by the best of all methods, which is to write as a citizen of the world and not as a sectionalist. He was not at the height of his maturity, and he wrote at times with the exuberance and at times with the self-consciousness that he would in all likelihood have outgrown in the fullness of years. He was an aggressive thinker. Only the indifference of his generation to poetry can account for the fact that he was not persecuted for the courage of many utterances. And he was essentially the poet in artistry as well as in vision.

BOOK LIST

General References

Collections

Clarke, Jennie T. Songs of the South (Introduction by J. C. Harris). 1913.

Fulton, N. G. Southern Life in Southern Literature. 1917.

Kent, C. W. (literary editor). Library of Southern Literature. 1907. 15 vols.

Manly, Louise. Southern Literature. 1895.

Moore, Frank. Songs and Ballads of the Southern People. 1886.

Trent, W. P. Southern Writers. Selections in Prose and Verse. 1905.

Wauchope, G. A. Writers of South Carolina, 1910.

History and Criticism

Baskervill, W. M. Southern Writers: Biographical and Critical Studies. 1898–1903. 2 vols.

Davidson, J. W. Living Writers of the South. 1869.

De Menil, A. N. Literature of the Louisiana Territory. 1904.

Holliday, Carl. History of Southern Literature. 1906.

Link, S. A. Pioneers of Southern Literature. 1903. 2 vols.

Orgain, Kate A. Southern Authors in Poetry and Prose. 1908.

Painter, F. V. N. Poets of the South. 1903.

Painter, F. V. N. Poets of Virginia. 1907.

Among periodical articles some of the more important are as follows:

Baskervill, W. M. Southern Literature. Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc., Vol. VII, p. 89.

Coleman, C. W. Recent Movement in Southern Literature. Harper’s, Vol. LXXIV, p. 837.

Henneman, J. B. National Element in Southern Literature. Sewanee Review, Vol. XI, p. 345.

Mabie, H. W. The Poetry of the South. International Monthly, Vol. V, p. 200.

Smith, C. A. Possibilities of Southern Literature. Sewanee Review, Vol. VI, p. 298.

Snyder, H. N. The Matter of Southern Literature. Sewanee Review, Vol. XV, p. 218.

Trent, W. P. Dominant Forces in Southern Life. Atlantic, Vol. LXXIX, p. 42.

Woodberry, G. E. The South in American Letters. Harper’s, Vol. CVII, p. 735.

Individual Authors

Henry Timrod. Works. Memorial Edition. 1899, 1901. These appeared in book form originally as follows: Poems, 1860. Complete edition (edited by Paul Hamilton Hayne), 1873, 1874; Katie, 1884.

Biography and Criticism

Memoir prefixed to editions of 1899 and 1901. Sketch with edition of 1872, by P. H. Hayne.

Austin, H. Henry Timrod. International Review, September, 1880.

Hayne, P. H. Sketch with edition of 1872.

Ross, C. H. The New Edition of Timrod. Sewanee Review, October, 1899.

Routh, J. E. Some Fugitive Poems of Timrod. South Atlantic Quarterly, January, 1903.

Wauchope, G. A. Henry Timrod, Laureate of the Confederacy. North Carolina Review, May 5, 1912.

Wauchope, G. A. Henry Timrod: Man and Poet, a Critical Study. 1915.

See also volumes of history and criticism under General References, above.

Paul Hamilton Hayne. Works. Poems of. Complete edition (his own selection), with biographical introduction by Margaret Preston. 1882. The work appeared in book form originally as follows: Poems, 1855; Sonnets, and Other Poems, 1857, 1859; Avolio, 1860; Legends and Lyrics, 1872; The Mountain of the Lovers, 1875; Life of Robert Y. Hayne, 1878; Life of Hugh S. Legare, 1878.

Biography and Criticism

There is no adequate biography of Hayne.

Allan, Elizabeth Preston. The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston. 1903.

Brown, J. T., Jr. Paul Hamilton Hale. Sewanee Review, April, 1906.

Lanier, Sidney. Essays. 1899.

Mims, E. Sidney Lanier. 1905.

Preston, Margaret Junkin. Introduction to edition of 1882 (see above).

See also the Library of Southern Literature, in which the introduction to the selections from Hayne is well supplemented by his own reminiscences reprinted from the Southern Bivouac. See also Paul Hamilton Hayne (edited by S. A. Link) and the passages in the survey histories.

Sidney Lanier. Works. Poems of Sidney Lanier, edited by his wife, with a memorial by William Hayes Ward. 1884. Select poems of Sidney Lanier, edited with an introduction, notes, and bibliography, by Morgan Callaway. 1895. (The critical edition.) Lanier’s works appeared in book form originally as follows: Tiger Lilies, a Novel, 1867; Florida, its Scenery, Climate, and History, 1876; Poems, 1877; The Boy’s Froissart, 1878; The Science of English Verse, 1880; The Boy’s King Arthur, 1880; The Boy’s Mabinogion, 1881; The Boy’s Percy, 1882; The English Novel, 1883; Music and Poetry: Essays, 1898; Retrospects and Prospects, 1899; Shakespeare and his Forerunners, 1902.

Bibliographies

A bibliography prepared for the Southern History Association by G. S. Wills, July, 1899.

A bibliography appended to Select Poems of Lanier (edited by Morgan Callaway). 1895. Also Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 600–603.

Biography and Criticism

The standard life is by Edwin Mims. 1905. (A. M. L. Ser.)

See also Letters of Sidney Lanier. Selections from his Correspondence, 1866–1881. 1911.

Carroll, C. C. Synthesis and Analysis of the Poetry of Sidney Lanier. 1910.

Clarke, G. H. Some Reminiscences and Early Letters of Sidney Lanier. 1907.

Gilman, D. C. Sidney Lanier, Reminiscences and Letters. South Atlantic Quarterly, April, 1905.

Gosse, Edmund. Questions at Issue. 1893.

Higginson, T. W. Contemporaries. 1899.

Kent, C. W. A Study of Lanier’s Poems. Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc., Vol. VII, pp. 33–63.

Moses, M. J. The Literature of the South. 1910.

Northrup, M. H. Sidney Lanier, Recollections and Letters. Lippincott’s, March, 1905.

Tolman, A. H. Views about Hamlet and Other Essays.

Trent, W. P. Southern Writers. 1905.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Read the poems or passages alluded to in the text on sentimentalism by Irving (p. 126), Cooper (p. 148), Bryant (p. 163), Longfellow (p. 269), and compare with the statement on Timrod.

Compare Timrod’s “Cotton Boll” with Bryant’s “The Sower” or Lanier’s “Corn” for the imaginative grasp of what had ordinarily been considered a prosaic subject.

Read the war lyrics of Timrod or Hayne and compare in subject, treatment, and temper with the corresponding work of a Northern poet.

Read several poems of Lanier taken at random for the allusions to music.

Read Lanier for the evident influence of Shakespeare in supplying him with poetic material. Is there evidence that he was affected by Shakespeare’s poetic form?

Read the Taylor-Lanier correspondence with reference to the Centennial Cantata. Does the poem fulfill Lanier’s intentions?

Read Lanier’s poems and passages on poetry and the poet and compare them with similar passages in the work of another poet.

Read Lanier, Timrod, or Hayne for the presence of nature allusions which would be natural only for a poet of the South.

CHAPTER XXIV

WALT WHITMAN

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Mark Twain are the two authors whom the rest of the world have chosen to regard as distinctively American. They are in fact more strikingly different from European writers than any other two in their outer and inner reaction against cultural tradition, though it is an error to regard Americanism as an utterly new thing instead of a compound of new and old elements. Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819:

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and their parents the same.

They were simple, natural, country people, – the mother, mild-mannered and competent, and the father, “strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger’d, unjust,” – people with the kind of stalwart naïveté who would christen three of their sons Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Walt was the second of nine children. From boyhood he was quite able to take care of himself – amiable, slow-going, fond of chatting with the common folk of his own kind, and happy out of doors, whether on the beach or among the Long Island hills. At twelve he began to work for his living – in a lawyer’s office and a doctor’s, in printing shops and small newspaper offices, and in more than one school. Newspaper work included writing as well as typesetting and everything between, and writing resulted in his sending accepted contributions to such respected publications as the Democratic Review and George P. Morris’s popular Mirror.

From 1841 to 1850 he was more steadily using his pen. He wrote some eighteen stories for the periodicals and, though he worked in defiance of the usual schedule, made his way in journalism to the point of becoming editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1848 he moved in a wider orbit, going down to New Orleans through the Ohio valley to work on the new Crescent, and coming back by way of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. In 1850 he was living with his family in Brooklyn. By this time he had done a great deal of reading, starting with “The Arabian Nights” and Scott, and moving on by his own choice through the classics. Always, when he could, he read alone and out of doors; but seldom has man more completely fulfilled Emerson’s behest to compensate for solitude with society, for he was one of the great comrades of history. He found his society in places of his own selection – on the Broadway stages, in the Brooklyn ferryboats, and in the gallery at the Italian opera.

Here is his own testimony: “ – the drivers – a strange, natural quick-eyed and wondrous race – (not only Rabelais and Cervantes would have gloated upon them, but Homer and Shakspere would) – how well I remember them, and must here give a word about them… They had immense qualities, largely animal – eating, drinking, women – great personal pride, in their way – perhaps a few slouches here and there, but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their simple good-will and honor, under all circumstances.” And of the harbor: “Almost daily, later (’50 to ’60), I cross’d on the boats, often up in the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings.” There was a time when he affected fine clothes, but as he matured his dress and the dress of his ideas became strikingly informal, more like that of his comrades.

Of the five years before the “Leaves of Grass” appeared too little is known. At thirty-one he was a natural Bohemian, independent enough not even to do the conventional Bohemian things like drinking and smoking, but he had shown no marked promise of achieving anything more than his own personal freedom. His writing and public speaking had been commonplace, and his journalistic work respectably successful. Then in 1855 came the evidence of an immensely expansive development, a development so great and so unusual that it met the fate of its kind, receiving from all but a very few neglect, derision, or contempt. John Burroughs tells of the staff of a leading daily paper in New York, assembled on Saturday afternoon to be paid off, greeting the passages that were read aloud to them with “peals upon peals of ironical laughter.” Whitman’s family were indifferent. His brother George said he “didn’t read it at all – didn’t think it worth reading – fingered it a little. Mother thought as I did … Mother said that if ‘Hiawatha’ was poetry, perhaps Walt’s was.” Obscure young men like Thoreau and Burroughs were moved to early admiration, but their opinion counted for nothing with the multitude. Emerson was the single man of influence to “greet [Whitman] at the beginning of a great career.” The larger public paid no attention to him; the smaller, artistic public did what they always do to a defiantly independent artist. Whitman determined his own reception when he wrote,

Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck’d, forbidding, I have arrived,To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

In 1856, in a new form and with added material but under the same title, there came a second edition that received more attention and correspondingly more abuse. His frank and often wanton treatment of sex gave pause to almost every reader, qualifying the approval of his strongest champions. Emerson wrote to Carlyle: “One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster, which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American – which I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet I believe now again I shall.” In the meanwhile the ultra-respectable – of the Jaffrey Pyncheon type – were eager to hound Whitman and his publishers out of society. Undoubtedly the advertising given by his enemies contributed no little to the circulation of the third and again enlarged edition of 1860. Of this between four and five thousand copies were sold in due time.

In 1862, when his brother George was seriously wounded at Fredericksburg, Whitman became a hospital nurse in Washington. With his peculiar gifts of comradeship and his life-long acquaintance with the common man, he was able to give thousands of sufferers the kind of personal, affectionate attention that helped all, who were not doomed, to fight their way to recovery. From every side has come the testimony as to his unique relationship with them. One must be quoted:

Never shall I forget one night when I accompanied him on his rounds through a hospital, filled with those wounded young Americans whose heroism he has sung in deathless numbers. There were three rows of cots, and each cot bore its man. When he appeared, in passing along, there was a smile of affection and welcome on every face, however wan, and his presence seemed to light up the place as it might be lit by the presence of the Son of Love. From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or in whispers; they embraced him, they touched his hand, they gazed at him… He did the things for them which no nurse or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a benediction at every cot as he passed along. The lights had gleamed for hours in the hospital that night before he left it, and as he took his way towards the door, you could hear the voice of many a stricken hero calling, “Walt, Walt, Walt, come again! come again!”

The fruits in poetry from these years of duress were in some ways the richest of his lifetime. They were included in the edition of 1865 under the title “Drum-Taps.” Here were new poems “of the body and of the soul,” telling of his vigils on the field and in the hospital, not shrinking from details of horror and death; and here also were poems that dealt with the implications of the war and of nationalism militant. “Drum-Taps” – the title poem – and “Beat! Beat! Drums!” sound the call to arms. “The Song of the Banner at Daybreak” contrasts the patriotism of the philistine with the patriotism of the idealist. “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” sings of America for the world, with its thrillingly prophetic fourth stanza,

Have the elder races halted?Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond the seas?We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson,Pioneers! O pioneers!

And “President Lincoln’s Burial Hymn” (“When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d”) with “O Captain! My Captain!” are preëminent among the multitude of songs in praise of Lincoln. Whitman wrote fairly in a letter: “The book is therefore unprecedently sad (as these days are, are they not?), but it also has the blast of the trumpet and the drum pounds and whirrs in it, and then an undertone of sweetest comradeship and human love threads its steady thread inside the chaos and is heard at every lull and interstice thereof. Truly also, it has clear notes of faith and triumph.”