A History of American Literature

In 1890 the English poetry-reading world was chiefly conscious of the passing of its leading singers for the last half century. It was a period when they were recalling Emerson’s “Terminus” and Longfellow’s “Ultima Thule,” Whitman’s “November Boughs” and Whittier’s “A Lifetime,” Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” and Browning’s “Asolando.” There was no group in the prime of life who were adequate successors to this greater choir. Stedman, Aldrich, and Stoddard had courted the muse as a kind of alien divinity and enjoyed excursions into the distant land of her dwelling-place. But their poetry was a poetry of accomplishment; an embellishment of life, and not an integral part of it (see pp. 324–326). It was a period when people were tempted with some reason to dwell on the “good old days,” and for a while it seemed as though it would be long before the world would see their like again.

The spirit of the times seemed to be expressed by a group of younger artists who were in conscious revolt against Victorian literature and rather noisily assertive on their favorite theme of art for art’s sake. They were occupied in composing intricate and ingenious poems. They were engrossed like Masters’s “Petit, the Poet” in inditing

Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

Some of them did pastels in prose, and many edited transitory little periodicals like The Yellow Book, The Chap Book, The Lark, and Truth in Boston. Fourteen of these came into existence in the United States in the first two months of 1897, and almost none of them survived till the Fourth of July of that year. Probably the only lines in any of them recalled by the readers of to-day are Gelett Burgess’s quatrain on the purple cow. The burden of these young poets was many words fairly spoken of “organic growth,” “development,” “progress,” “liberalism,” “freedom of speech,” and “independent thought”; and the chief product of their thinking was a frank and free Bohemianism, an honest unconventionality much more real than the diluted thing about which Stedman and Aldrich had rimed thirty years before.

The most vigorous and enduring of the new group was Richard Hovey (1864–1900). He was Western-born, schooled at Washington, and a graduate of Dartmouth in 1885. His next years included study in the General Theological Seminary in New York, an assistantship in a New York ritualistic church, excursions into journalism and acting, and then, after some years as poet and dramatist, a professorship of English literature in Barnard College, Columbia University. Hovey grew perceptibly during his eager enjoyment of these various pursuits. For a while he seemed content to sing the praises of convivial comradeship:

For we know the world is gloriousAnd the goal a golden thing,And that God is not censoriousWhen his children have their fling;

but he passed before long to the stage in which the good fellowship of youth was a symbol of something far larger than itself – nothing less than the promise of humankind. The ode delivered before his fraternity convention in 1896 quite transcends the sort of effusion usually evoked by such occasions. The spring in the air, in the world, and in the heart of youth culminate in the oft-sung “Stein Song”; and after it the poem goes on to “The first low stirring of that greater spring,”

Of something potent burning through the earth,Of something vital in the procreant air.

This potent something is the “unceasing purpose” of Tennyson, but with a difference, for in Hovey’s mind it is not the purpose of a detached God who imposes his will benevolently on mankind from without, but the creative impulse which is inherent in life itself, the evidence of the divine spirit in the heart of man. Comradeship, then, became to Hovey a symbol of altruism, and he looked beyond this springtide of the year and of the youthful collegians to the time when science, art, and religion should emancipate men in the truth that should set them free and bring them, in spite of delays, in the fullness of time to “the greater to-morrow.”

Yet while Hovey was uplifted by the fine fervor of such a faith, he experienced a reaction with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. In the sudden self-righteousness of an inflamed patriotism he nationalized God and deified war. Excited beyond measure by the immediate issue, he not only justified America against Spain but, forgetting all the lessons of evolution, he declared that the race could develop only through the repetition of old experiences.

By strife as well as loving – strife,The Law of Life, —In brute and man the climbing has been doneAnd shall be done hereafter. Since man wasNo upward-climbing causeWithout the sword has ever yet been won.

His mistake lay in justifying all wars in order to justify the national altruism of the war with Spain, and his fallacy came in his assumption that biological and physical life were governed by the same laws. For the moment Hovey turned “jingo,” as most of his countrymen did, yet even then he invoked the sword for the suppression of tyranny and not in the name of nationalistic ambition.

The home of Hovey’s imagination was where the true poet’s always is – “far in the vast of sky, … too high for sound of strife, or any violation of the town.” From this high vantage point he sang the glories of the things he loved the best, but with maturity he moved from the world of material pleasure to the realms of spiritual adventure. In 1893 he wrote

Down the world with Marna!That’s the life for me!Wandering with the wandering wind,Vagabond and unconfined!

Five years later he could no longer catalogue his places on the map, for his goal was “the unknown” and “the wilderness” in pursuit of the high human adventure which Moody was to celebrate in his “Road Hymn for the Start.” In a parallel way Hovey’s first conception of fellowship rose from the early relish for beer and song to the fellowship of kindred souls of which the fine flowering is the love of man and woman.

Spirit to spirit finds its voiceless way,As tone melts meeting in accordant tone, —Oh, then our souls, far in the vast of sky,Look from a tower, too high for sound of strifeOr any violation of the town,Where the great vacant winds of God go by,And over the huge misshapen city of lifeLove pours his silence and his moonlight down.

At the age of thirty-six, just on the threshold of maturity, Hovey died.

William Vaughn Moody (1869–1910) was another son of the Middle West. Born in southern Indiana, he lost his mother in his fifteenth year and his father, a river-steamboat captain, in his seventeenth. By alternate study and teaching he prepared himself for Harvard, and entering at somewhat more than the average age he completed his college work in three years and followed these with a year in Europe as private tutor. In addition to a receptiveness for learning he had the capacity for a rich and varied culture which is sometimes mistakenly thought to belong only to blue-blooded inheritors of family tradition. From the close of his residence in Cambridge till his death, seventeen years later, Moody’s life included long and extended travels, varied and profound study, eight years’ teaching at the University of Chicago, from which President Harper was reluctant to accept his resignation, and distinguished work as painter, poet, and dramatist. Suddenly stricken with a fatal illness, he died in 1910.

Mention has already been made of his work as playwright (see pp. 445, 446). His lyric and narrative poems all have the same breadth of view which is inherent in his poetic dramas. He was familiar with a wide range of the world’s art and literature, but in the work which he chose to collect for republication he was imitative of none. His imagination roved freely through all time and space. “Gloucester Moors” were the vantage point from which he conceived the earth as a “vast, outbound ship of souls”; “Old Pourquoi” challenged the scheme of creation from beneath the Norman sky; “The Death of Eve” is derived from the Hebrew past, “The Masque of Judgment” from the Greek, “A Dialogue in Purgatory” from the Italian, “The Fountain” from early American legend, “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” from a current event. Thus he did not maintain his citizenship of the world by any denial of allegiance to America. In the third section of “An Ode in Time of Hesitation” he sketched as splendid a pageant of America as has ever been devised. The Cape Ann children seeking the arbutus, the hill lads of Tennessee harking to the wild geese on their northern flight, are one with the youth of Chicago, the renewing green of the wheat fields, the unrolling of the rivers from the white Sierras, the downward creep of Alaskan glaciers, and the perennial palm-crown of Hawaii. It is in very truth

the eagle nation Milton saw,Mewing its mighty youth.

Moody’s love of America did not lead him to embrace the “manifest destiny” illusion. He was quite as conscious of the misdirection of human leadership as he was of the riches with which God had endowed the natural land. “Gloucester Moors” is deeply solicitous for a future which seems to be insured for the grasping capitalist; “The Brute” is both more vigorous and more hopeful in its certitude that the factory system in its worst forms is a short-lived social abortion. The demon of the machine is sure to be caught and subdued:

He must give each man his portion, each his pride and worthy place;He must batter down the arrogant and lift the weary face.On each vile mouth set purity, on each low forehead grace.

These poems were of life within America or without it, but in “An Ode in Time of Hesitation” and “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” Moody warned the rulers in Washington that the country, now awake to its duties in the world, would forgive blindness, but baseness it would smite. Finally, in “The Quarry” he cried out in pride at America’s fine part in preventing the partitioning of helpless China by the grasping European empires, – the achievement of the poet-diplomat, John Hay.

Throughout all Moody’s work is a constant undercurrent of evolutionary thought – not the brutal mechanism associated with the term “Darwinism,” but the aspiring impulse within all life which makes it rise not through struggle against outer forces so much as through the innate impulse to develop. In the sardonic “Menagerie” the idea is ironically stated:

Survival of the fittest, adaptation,And all their other evolution terms,Seem to omit one small consideration,

which is no less than the existence of souls:

Restless, plagued, impatient things,All dream and unaccountable desire;

and these souls are expressions of the universal soul which finds its own salvation in unceasing “groping, testing, passing on,” – the creative struggle described by Raphael in “The Masque of Judgment” as

The strife of ripening suns and withering moons,Marching of ice-floes, and the nameless warsOf monster races laboring to be man.

In his attitude toward and his literary treatment of woman Moody was emphatically modern. He was far beyond the supercilious and hollow amenities with which eighteenth-century poetry was filled, and he was not satisfied with the sincerer expression of deep personal tributes to individual women. In his philosophy woman was the dominant influence in the development of humankind. Eve and Prometheus were one in seeking the knowledge and power to lift man above brute creation and in producing the clash between God and man which was the price of knowledge and the cost of progress. But Prometheus was a poor and defeated character in comparison; for Moody, in Eve and Pandora, presented woman not only as the donor and the fulfillment of love but as the final agent of reconciliation between the human and the divine. In the various poems there are acknowledgments of awe, of reverence, of spiritual love, and of passion; taken together they show the same breadth of view that belongs to the human equation in which Moody regards woman as the greatest factor. It is most significant that the dramatic trilogy was planned to conclude with a song of Eve, and that twice – in “I am the Woman” and part five of “The Death of Eve” – Moody composed studies toward that final song that was never perfected. Both progress through the ages when woman was subtly molded by man’s conception of her, so that her happiness and her very being consisted in conforming herself to him.

Still, still with prayer and ecstasy she stroveTo be the woman they did well approve,That narrowed to their love,She might have done with bitterness and blame.

And in both she appears as the indomitable Promethean spirit who in the end was to fulfill that plan which in the beginning she had endangered. There is no reference to any woman in any of Moody’s poems which is out of harmony with this dominating and progressive idea.

For several reasons Moody’s poetry is not easy to read and is therefore undestined to wide popularity (see pp. 263, 264). He was not interested to compose simple lyrics or narratives. Seldom does he aid the reader by means of even an implied narrative thread. The poems inspired by history are not self-explanatory nor accompanied by footnotes. Moody consistently employed events, whether actual or imagined, as mere avenues of approach to emotional and spiritual experiences, and he expected the reader to contribute to the poems from his own resourceful imagination. It is because the whole meaning is not laid out on the surface of his verses – like Christmas-card sentiments – that Moody has become very largely a poet’s poet. Their instinctive grasp of the figurative deeper meanings, their immediate response to elusive metaphor, and their understanding of his vigorous, exact, but sometimes recondite diction make them his best audience. For they too can most nearly appreciate the distinguished beauties of his work – his wide and intimate knowledge of world literature, the opulence of his style, the firmness of his structure, the scrupulousness of his detail. Through the rising and the risen poets of the present generation Moody’s influence is exerted on thousands who are all unconscious of it.

An approach to contemporary American poetry in a fraction of a chapter at the end of a general history can be justified on only one ground: it serves the purpose of a guideboard on a transcontinental highway. American literature was not concluded with the deaths of the great New England group nor has it come to an end since then. The student should recognize this in his respect for the fine promise of what is now being written, and he should recognize that the study of our past literature can bear no richer fruit than a sane understanding of the literature of the day. Furthermore he should be intelligent enough to see that literature need not be old to be fit for study – that it is not only absurd but vicious to assume (as used to be said, with a difference, of the Indian) that there is no good poet but a dead poet. These few pages are therefore devoted to a half-dozen writers who represent tendencies. They are arbitrarily selected as the contemporary dramatists in the preceding chapter were. Yet their weight is greatly reënforced by the many others to whom no allusion can be made. A comparison of the three books on recent American poetry suggests the speed of the literary current. Miss Rittenhouse’s “The Younger American Poets” (1904) includes eighteen poets of whom thirteen were born before 1865. Miss Lowell’s “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry” (1917) includes six poets, none of whom were mentioned in the earlier book, and the oldest of whom was born in the closing days of 1869. Of the sixteen poets indicated by name in the chapter headings of Mr. Louis Untermeyer’s “New Era in American Poetry” (1919), only three were born before 1875.

The reading of contemporary poetry should be done with zest and without calculation, but the study of the same material must be approached with self-conscious deliberateness and with a definite resolve not to be carried away by the cheap and easy generalizations current on the lips of the careless talker. Contemporary poetry is not all of one kind nor is it chiefly characterized by defiant revolt against old forms and old ideas. It is true that in all branches of artistic endeavor new methods and new points of view are being advanced. In music Debussy and Schoenberg, in painting Cézanne and Matisse, in sculpture Rodin and his disciples, in stage setting and costuming Gordon Craig and Leon Bakst, have shocked and surprised quite as many as they have edified, and have given rise to the same sort of querulous protest indulged in by those who talk as if all modern poetry were typified by the most extravagant verses of Alfred Kreymborg, or “Anne Knish.” But in poetry most of the recent work has not been wantonly bizarre, most of the more distinguished verse has not been “free,” and most of the men and women who have written free verse have shown and have practiced a firm mastery of the established forms. The point, then, is to maintain an open mind and to make sure of conclusions before adopting them, and the surest method of doing these two student-like things is to read and study authors by the bookful and not by the pseudo-royal road of anthologies and eclectic magazines. If you want to become acquainted with a man you will sit down at leisure with him in his study, instead of forming snapshot judgments from contact at afternoon teas, and you will form your own opinion in preference to gleaning it from the conversation of others.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869- ), the oldest of this latter group, was born in the same year with Moody and is now in the prime of life. The Tilbury of many of his poems is really the town of his upbringing – Gardiner, Maine. It is an unusual but not a unique village in America – a colonial old-world village. The atmosphere of Puritanism had not been blown away from it, and it still felt the subtle influence of a preëminent family. When “the squire” passed,

We people on the pavement looked at him;He was a gentleman from sole to crown,Clean-favored, and imperially slim.

It is easy to think of Tilbury as an English town; it is utterly different from Lindsay’s Springfield or Masters’s Spoon River. It is not without significance that the clearest single picture presents a little boy of twelve as the companion of “Isaac and Archibald,” two old men on the ominous verge of superannuation. It was life in Gardiner that gives so real a sense of the town on the Avon in “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford.” In 1891 Mr. Robinson entered Harvard, withdrawing at the end of two years and entering business in New York City. Here he remained till 1910, the last five years as an appointee of President Roosevelt in the New York Customhouse, and since the latter date he has lived again in Gardiner, bearing some resemblance in his mellowed maturity, perhaps, to Larry Scammon in his play “The Porcupine.”

As a matter of literary history the most striking fact about Mr. Robinson is that the poetry-reading public has been redeveloped since he began to write. Although his first volume, “The Children of the Night,” appeared in 1897, and his second, “Captain Craig,” in 1902, it was possible for him to be omitted from “The Younger American Poets” of 1904. With “The Town down the River” in 1910 his recognition began to come, and with the republication of “Captain Craig” the public became aware of a volume which they could have been reading for full thirteen years.

Miss Lowell displays a mild contempt for the title poem of this book, and Mr. Phelps – in his “Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century” – echoes her verdict. Yet for many readers there is a splendor in it and a richness that brings them back to it again and again. It is doubtless long, discursive, and condensible. In fact it is already condensed in such a bit as “Flammonde.” It is an elaboration of the title lyric for “The Children of the Night”; but only a wanton perversion of criticism will discount a philosophical poem for not submitting to lyric standards. It is a poem of childhood, sunlight, laughter, and hope declaimed by an indomitable old vagabond of eternity who is invincible in death and is fittingly borne to the grave while the trombones of the Tilbury band blare the Dead March in “Saul.” Captain Craig is a character who would not be his complete self without his verbosity. His type, in fact, is never succinct. They are extravagant of time, of gesture, of vocal and rhetorical emphasis, of words themselves. Out of the abundance of their hearts their mouths speak all sorts of irresponsible, whimsical, exalted, and splendid extravagance. They give voice to the dumb, and they amuse and stimulate the good listeners, but they bore the cleverly communicative, who dislike any consecutive talk but their own. Thus, for example, the captain writes on one May day:

I have yearnedIn many another season for these days,And having them with God’s own pageantryTo make me glad for them, – yes, I have cursedThe sunlight and the breezes and the leavesTo think of men on stretchers and on beds,…Or of women working where a man would fall —Flat-breasted miracles of cheerfulnessMade neuter by the work that no man countsUntil it waits undone; children thrownTo feed their veins and souls with offal…Yes,I have had half a mind to blow my brains outSometimes; and I have gone from door to doorRagged myself, trying to do something —Crazy, I hope. – But what has this to doWith Spring? Because one half of humankindLives here in hell, shall not the other halfDo any more than just for conscience’ sakeBe miserable? Is this the way for usTo lead these creatures up to find the light,Or the way to be drawn down to find the darkAgain?

Captain Craig, in a word, is self-expression in very being and condemns in joyous scorn the man who believes that life is best fulfilled through discipline and renunciation. Instead he offers something positive:

Take on yourselfBut your sincerity, and you take onGood promise for all climbing; fly for truth,And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight,No laughter to vex down your loyalty.

This is the note throughout all Robinson’s poems and plays. His disbelief in negativism leads him often to be impatient and caustic and leads the cloudy minded to timid deprecation of his cynicism, not knowing the difference between this and irony; but Mr. Robinson is never cynical toward the things that are more excellent. He is only convinced that people’s Puritan convictions as to what is more excellent result in a perverted estimate; he is only attempting to substitute light for shadow, laughter for gloom; he is only saying with Larry Scammon:

“Stop me if I am too cheerful; but at the same time, if I can instil the fertile essence of Hope into this happy household, for God’s sake, let me do it… You had far better – all of you – begin to get yourselves out of your own light, and cease to torment your long-bedevilled heads with the dark doings of bogies that have no real existence.”

As a craftsman Mr. Robinson has won distinction by his simple, direct realism. He employs for the most part the old iambic measures, a sentence structure which is often conversational, and a diction which is severe in its restraint. There are few “purple patches” in his poetry, but there are many clear flashes of incisive phrasing. His work is like a May day in his own seacoast town – not balmy, but bracing, with lots of sparkle on the blue, and the taste of the east wind through it all.

Robert Frost (1875-) is known as the author of three books of verse: “A Boy’s Will,” 1913, “North of Boston,” 1914, and “Mountain Interval,” 1916. He is known also – and rightly – as the voice and embodiment of rural New England. Yet he was born in San Francisco, his mother was born in Edinburgh, he first came to New England at the age of ten, and he lived for the next eight schoolboy years in a mill town, Lawrence, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, in his capacity for receiving impressions, he seemed to have a selective memory which made him sensitive to the aspects of country life in the regions north of Boston – the regions trod by nine generations of forbears on his father’s side of the family. And so it was that though his first two volumes were published in London, there is no local trace of the old country in them, nothing in them that he had not known in farm or village between 1885 and 1912, when he set sail with his wife and children toward a residence of two and a half years in England. On his return to America he bought a farm in New Hampshire. Since 1916 he has taught in Amherst College.