A History of American Literature

Southern Literary Messenger, 1834–1865. A Richmond monthly.

Founded at Richmond, Virginia, in August, 1834, by Thomas W. White, as a semimonthly, but changed to a monthly almost at once. Poe contributed to the seventh number and from then on in each number till he became assistant editor from July, 1835, to January, 1837. During this period the circulation increased from 700 to 5000. Well established by this time, it continued as the most substantial and longest lived of the Southern magazines. A vehicle for literature between the too heavy and the frivolous, and an honest review. Poe’s contributions outrank those of any other writer, but the list of contributors includes N. P. Willis, C. F. Hoffman, R. W. Griswold, J. G. Holland, R. H. Stoddard, W. M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens, G. P. R. James, John Randolph, R. H. Bird, Philip P. Cooke, J. W. Legare, P. H. Hayne, Henry Timrod, John P. Kennedy, and Sidney Lanier. (See “The Southern Literary Messenger,” by B. B. Minor.)

Southern Magazine, The, 1871–1875. A Baltimore monthly.

The most distinguished of the several short-lived Southern magazines established in the Civil War reconstruction period. It was a continuation of the New Eclectic, but included, in addition to the English reprints, original work by many Southern authors. These were, among others, Margaret Preston, Malcolm Johnson, Sidney Lanier, Paul Hamilton Hayne, and Professors Gildersleeve and Price. It could pay nothing for manuscript, however, and the new interest in Southern writing awakened by Scribner’s in 1873, and responded to by Harper’s, the Atlantic, Lippincott’s, the Independent, and others, furnished support as well as stimulation to its best contributors and hastened its death at the end of five years.

Western Messenger, The (Cincinnati), 1835–1841.

Begun by Reverend Ephraim Peabody. Published by Western Unitarian Society aided by American Unitarian Association. Purposed to make it a vehicle for clear, rational discussion of important and interesting topics. Discussed reform movements, religious questions and creeds, and encouraged expression of all cultural ideas, – literary articles, poetry, book reviews, etc. Contributors: Mann Butler, W. D. Gallagher, James H. Perkins, R. W. Emerson, J. S. Dwight, Elizabeth P. Peabody, Jones Very, James Freeman Clarke, Dr. Lyman Beecher, Professor Calvin E. Stowe, Margaret Fuller, C. P. Cranch. Sought to make it Western in spirit with many Western contributors and articles on history of the West. 1836–1839 in Louisville, under J. F. Clarke, then back to Cincinnati, under William H. Channing, till April, 1841.

Western Monthly Magazine, The (Cincinnati), 1833–1836.

Edited for two and one-half years by James Hall and for six months by Joseph R. Foy. Thirty-seven contributors, of whom six were women and only three from east of the Alleghenies. Harriet Beecher won “the prize tale” in April, 1834, and contributed another story in July. The contents made up largely of expository articles on art, history, biology, travel, education, economics, and modern sociology. The book notices were independent and discriminating.

Yale Review, The, 1892–1911, 1911 – . Issued quarterly.

Continued New Englander and Yale Review. G. P. Fisher and others, editors. In 1900 changed from a “journal of history and political science” to a “Journal for the Scientific Discussion of Economic, Political, and Social Questions”; 1911 – “a quarterly magazine devoted to Literature, Science, History, and Public Opinion.” Yale Publishing Association, Inc., Wilbur D. Cross, chief editor. Not an official publication of Yale University. Made up of serious articles and essays, some light essays and verse, and literary criticism. Leading contributors, prose: W. H. Taft, Norman Angell, Walter Lippman, Simeon Strunsky, Vida D. Scudder; verse: Witter Bynner, Louis Untermeyer, Sara Teasdale, Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, John Masefield. Thus its place as a literary periodical has been assumed only within the last decade. The old New Englander (1843–1892) was a substantial and dignified journal but included the work of no writer of even minor literary achievement.

1

Rev. ii, 17.

2

This same discipline was enjoyed – among later American authors – by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Walt Whitman, all of whom were scrupulously careful writers.

3

Also in Representative American Plays (edited by A. H. Quinn). 1917.

4

Lines addressed to Messrs. Dwight and Barlow.

5

Fitzgreene Halleck, “Fanny,” stanza lviii.

6

Mason and Slidell, ll. 155–165.

7

“Fanny,” stanzas cxxi, cxxii.

8

“Wyoming,” stanza iv.

9

“Among the Hills” (Prelude, 71 ff.).

10

Lowell, “Fable for Critics.”

11

An interesting tribute is paid this poem by Ezra Pound in a footnote to “L’Homme Moyen Sensuel,” in “Pavannes and Divisions,” p. 33. “I would give these rhymes now with dedication ‘To the Anonymous Compatriot Who Produced the Poem “Fanny” Somewhere About 1820,’ if this form of centennial homage be permitted me. It was no small thing to have written, in America, at that distant date, a poem of over forty pages which one can still read without labor.”

12

It was reserved for Poe to write a genuinely critical estimate of it. See The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. II, pp. 326 ff. Reprinted in “The Literati,” p. 374.

13

Found in the volume “Nature, Addresses and Lectures.”

14

“Self-Reliance” Essays, First Series.

15

Such abstruse poems as the following are really expounded in corresponding essays: “Written in Naples” and “Written in Rome” – the essay on “History”; “Each and All” – the essay on “Compensation”; “The Problem” – the essays on “Art” and “Compensation”; “Merlin” – the essay on “The Poet”; “The World-Soul” – the essays on “Nominalist and Realist” and “The Over-Soul”; “Hamatreya” – the essay on “Compensation”; “Musketaquid” – the essay on “Nature”; “Étienne de la Boéce” – the essay on “Friendship”; “Brahma” – the essays on “Circles” and “The Over-Soul.”

16

See his own acknowledgment in the “Proem” to the poems of 1842.

17

See the first chapter of Holmes’s “Elsie Venner” for a discussion of this New England aristocracy of birth and learning rather than of wealth.

18

A short list of the chief titles will include Longfellow’s “Hyperion” (1839), Willis’s “Loiterings of Travel” (1840), Taylor’s “Views Afoot” (1846), Curtis’s “Nile Notes of a Howadji” (1851), Mrs. Stowe’s “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands” (1854), Emerson’s “English Traits” (1856), Bryant’s “Letters from Spain and Other Countries” (1859), Norton’s “Notes of Travel and Study in Italy” (1859), Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home” (1863), Howells’s “Venetian Life” (1866), Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” (1869), and so on down to and beyond Holmes’s “Our Hundred Days in Europe” (1887).

19

See pages 2–7 in T. W. Higginson’s “Longfellow,” American Men of Letters Series.

20

See Bliss Perry’s “Park Street Papers,” “The Editor who Never was Editor,” pp. 205–277.

21

W. C. Brownell, “American Prose Masters,” pp. 271, 272.

22

W. D. Howells, “My Mark Twain,” p. 46.

23

In view of the lack of any copyright protection it is interesting to record that three of the London publishers offered Mrs. Stowe an interest in the sales of their editions.

24

See “Theological Tea,” chap. iv.

25

New York Tribune, June 13, 1859.

26

This distinction is valid even though the Oldtown folks belonged to Mrs. Stowe’s childhood. The Andover of her later years was Oldtown in all essential respects.

27

“Elsie Venner,” chap. i, “The Brahmin Caste of New England.”

28

Meeting of the American Medical Association, May, 1853. The response was a poem.

29

For a direct statement on the resumption of the old attempt, see “The Autocrat’s Autobiography” printed as a foreword to the volume. For an indirect account, see the passages on Byles Gridley and his “Thoughts on the Universe” in Holmes’s “The Guardian Angel.”

30

For varying sentiments about “Bohemia” see the following passages: Ferris Greenslet, “Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich,” pp. 37–47; W. D. Howells, “Literary Friends and Acquaintances,” pp. 68–76; Stedman and Gould, “Life of Edmund Clarence Stedman,” pp. 208, 209; William Winter, “Old Friends,” pp. 291–297.

31

In reply to this and like passages William Winter wrote: “No literary circle comparable with the Bohemian group of that period, in ardor of genius, variety of character, and singularity of achievement, has since existed in New York, nor has any group of writers anywhere existent in our country been so ignorantly and grossly misrepresented and maligned” (“Old Friends,” p. 138).

32

A corresponding danger on the other hand is that a people who abjure all such phrases will abjure also the things for which they stand, until they become irredeemably prosaic and matter of fact.

33

This was the second time that President Gilman had placed a poet in the position of teacher, for he had already done this with Edward Rowland Sill at the University of California (see p. 397).

34

“Mark Twain, a Biography,” by Albert Bigelow Paine. 3 vols. 1912.

35

See his essay “How to Tell a Story” in “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg,” pp. 225–230.

36

James Russell Lowell, “Ode on Agassiz.”

37

See chap. ii, “His Life at College,” in W. B. Parker’s Life.

38

See “American Neglect of American Literature” by Percy H. Boynton. Nation (1916), Vol. CII, pp. 478–480.

39

In the “Sketch Book” Washington Irving concludes “Rural Life in England” with a poem by the Reverend Rann Kennedy, A.M., a great-uncle of the dramatist.