The American Literary Blog

Hoffman: let me see the blush divine

2012-02-14T07:44:00.002-05:00

Though the New York poet/editor Charles Fenno Hoffman never married, and seemingly never had a significant lover in his life, he did write a poetic tribute simply titled "St. Valentine's Day," published in 1842. The poem is more of a celebration of loving nature than loving another person and notes that the date is often a transitional tease between the end of winter and the beginning of spring:

The snow yet in the hollow lies;
   But, where by shelvy hill 'tis seen,
In myriad rills it trickling flies
   To lace the slope with threads of green;
Down in the meadow glancing wings
   Flit in the sunshine round a tree,
Where still a frosted apple clings,
   Regale for early Chickadee:

And chestnut buds begin to swell,
   Where flying squirrels peep to know
If from the tree-top, yet, 'twere well
   To sail on leathery wing below—
As gently shy and timorsome,
   Still holds she back who should be mine;
Come, Spring, to her coy bosom, come,
   And warm it toward her Valentine!

Come, Spring, and with the breeze that calls
   The wind-flower by the hill-side rill,
The soft breeze that by orchard walls
   First dallies with the daffodil—
Come lift the tresses from her cheek,
   And let me see the blush divine,
That mantling there, those curls would seek
   To hide from her true Valentine.

Come, Spring, and with the Red-breast's note,
   That tells of bridal tenderness,
Where on the breeze he'll warbling float
   Afar his nesting mate to bless—
Come, whisper, 'tis not always Spring!
   When birds may mate on every spray—
That April boughs cease blossoming!
   With love it is not always May!

Come, touch her heart with thy soft tale,
   Of tears within the floweret's cup,
Of fairest things that soonest fail,
   Of hopes we vainly garner up—
And while, that gentle heart to melt,
   Like mingled wreath, such tale you twine,
Whisper what lasting bliss were felt
   In lot shared with her Valentine.

Cawein: words the whole world reads

2012-02-12T07:44:00.000-05:00

Nothing defines Kentucky poetry like Madison Cawein. Born in Louisville in 1865, his prolific career as a poet earned him the nicknamed "the Keats of Kentucky." Echoing classic English poets like John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he carved a niche for himself as describing the unique nature of his home state during the late 19th century into the early 20th.

One of his many poems celebrating Kentucky life was presented in New York City on February 12, 1913 at a gathering of displaced Kentuckians, aptly named the New York Society of Kentuckians. The poem was simply titled "Kentucky" and it reminds his listeners of the ideal world they left behind:

You, who are met to remember
Kentucky and give her praise;
Who have warmed your hearts at the ember
Of her love for many days!
Be faithful to your mother,
However your ways may run,
And, holding one to the other,
Prove worthy to be her sons.

Worthy of her who brought you;
Worthy in dream and deed;
Worthy her love that taught you,
And holds your work in heed;
Your work she weighs and watches,
Giving it praise and blame,
As to her heart she catches,
Or sets aside in shame.

One with her heart's devotion,
One with her soul's firm will,
She holds to the oldtime notion
Of what is good, what ill;
And still in unspoiled beauty,
With all her pioneer pride,
She keeps to the path of duty,
And never turns aside.

She dons no new attire
Of modern modes and tricks,
And stands for something higher
Than merely politics;
For much the world must think on—
For dreams as well as deeds;
For men, like Clay and Lincoln,
And words the whole world reads.

Not for her manners gracious,
Nor works, nor courage of
Convictions, proud, audacious,
Does she compel our love—
But for her heart's one passion,
Old as democracy,
That holds to the ancient fashion
Of hospitality.

Dunbar: an immortality in this world

2012-02-11T07:44:00.000-05:00

When Paul Laurence Dunbar died in Dayton, Ohio in 1906, several gathered for a memorial service. One who could not attend was a friend of Dunbar's who was also the mayor of Toledo, Brand Whitlock. His letter to the memorial chairperson is dated February 11, 1906 (the day before the service):

I wish I could be with you all to-morrow to pay my tribute to poor Paul. But I cannot, and feeling as I do his loss, I cannot now attempt any estimate of his wonderful personality that would be at all worthy. If friendship knew obligation, I would acknowledge my debt to you for the boon of knowing Paul Dunbar. It is one of the countless good deeds to your credit that you were among the first to recognize the poet in him and help him to a larger and freer life.
For Paul was a poet: and I find that when I have said that I have said the greatest and most splendid thing that can be said about a man.

Whitlock's letter was addressed to Dr. Henry Archibald Tobey, who had assisted Dunbar financially and help promote his writing. In fact, it was Tobey that help publish Dunbar's second book, Majors and Minors, in 1895. Tobey read Mayor Whitlock's letter at the memorial gathering. The letter included praise not only because of Dunbar's ability to impress his own people (i.e. African Americans) but all people, regardless of race. "The true poet is universal," Whitlock wrote, and Dunbar was a true poet whose best quality was universality.

Whitlock also noted that he knew what really killed Dunbar, not the disease of tuberculosis, but melancholy. In saying so, he alluded to the poet's drinking problem and his marital strife. Whitlock singled out some of his favorites not only to read, but to hear Dunbar present aloud, including "We Wear the Mask" and "Ships that Pass in the Night." Whitlock's letter concluded:

We shall hear that deep, melodious voice no more: his humor, his drollery, his exquisite mimicry—these are gone. And to-morrow you will lay his tired body away, fittingly enough, on [Abraham] Lincoln's birthday. But his songs will live and give his beautiful personality an immortality in this world.

Silas Jackson: the hollowness of his life

2012-02-10T07:43:00.002-05:00

Unbeknownst to him, it was six years and one day shy of his death that Paul Laurence Dunbar published "Silas Jackson" in the New York Evening Post, February 10, 1900. It was the beginning of the end for Dunbar. That year he finally would be diagnosed with tuberculosis and spiral more fully into his alcoholism. Two years later, he and his wife would separate. Two years after that, he would return to the city of his birth (Dayton, Ohio) to live out his remaining two years with his mother before his death at age 33.

"Silas Jackson" was one of Dunbar's many short stories, though he is primarily remembered as a poet. In the story, the title character is born on a Virginia farm but, as told in the opening lines, is destined for fame. Silas, a black boy, obtains work in a hotel with the help of a benefactor. He instantly learns to hate his humble ways as a farmhand, saw that his family was dirty, and looked forward to moving to the big city (despite being warned of its "wickedness"). But, when his benefactor comes to see him, he finds something about the boy has changed, and not for the better.

Silas is soon recognized for his singing skills and an opera producer recruits him. In New York, he becomes a star, develops an ego, and forgets to send money home to his struggling family. When Silas suddenly becomes sick, however, he is no longer able to sing — and is instantly replaced. Only then does he realize how far he has fallen from his humble family life:

Silas gazed blankly at the wall. The hollowness of his life all came suddenly before him. All his false ideals crumbled, and he lay there with nothing to hope for. Then came back the yearnings for home, for the cabin and the fields, and there was no disgust in his memory of them.

When his strength partly returned, he sold some of the few things that remained to him from his prosperous days, and with the money purchased a ticket for home; then spent, broken, hopeless, all contentment and simplicity gone, he turned his face toward his native fields.

Death of Howe: the friend our earth has lost

2012-02-08T07:44:00.001-05:00

Samuel Gridley Howe was an active abolitionist (he was a member of the Secret Six which financed John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry) along with his wife Julia Ward Howe. He was also well-respected as a physician and educator who worked particularly with the blind. When he died in 1876, Boston's elite mourned him in a three-hour ceremony at Boston Music Hall. At that program, held February 8, 1876, fellow physician Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes offered a poem titled "A Memorial Tribute":

Leader of armies, Israel's God,
   Thy soldier's fight is won!
Master, whose lowly path he trod,
   Thy servant's work is done!

No voice is heard from Sinai's steep
   Our wandering feet to guide;
From Horeb's rock no waters leap,
   No Jordan's waves divide;

No prophet cleaves our western sky
   On wheels of whirling fire;
No shepherds hear the song on high
   Of heaven's angelic choir.

Yet here as to the patriarch's tent
   God's angel conies a guest;
He comes on Heaven's high errand sent,
   In earth's poor raiment drest.

We see no halo round his brow
   Till love its own recalls,
And like a leaf that quits the bough,
   The mortal vesture falls.

In autumn's chill declining day,
   Ere winter's killing frost,
The message came; so passed away
   The friend our earth has lost.

Still, Father, in thy love we trust;
   Forgive us if we mourn
The saddening hour that laid in dust
   His robe of flesh outworn.

How long the wreck-strewn journey seems
   To reach the far-off past
That woke his youth from peaceful dreams
   With Freedom's trumpet-blast!

Along her classic hillsides rung
   The Paynim's battle-cry,
And like a red-cross knight he sprung
   For her to live or die.

No trustier service claimed the wreath
   For Sparta's bravest son;
No truer soldier sleeps beneath
   The mound of Marathon;

Yet not for him the warrior's grave
   In front of angry foes;
To lift, to shield, to help, to save,
   The holier task he chose.

He touched the eyelids of the blind,
   And lo! the veil withdrawn,
As o'er the midnight of the mind
   He led the light of dawn.

He asked not whence the fountains roll
   No traveller's foot has found,
But mapped the desert of the soul
   Untracked by sight or sound.

What prayers have reached the sapphire throne,
   By silent fingers spelt,
For him who first through depths unknown
   His doubtful pathway felt.

Who sought the slumbering sense that lay
   Close shut with bolt and bar,
And showed awakening thought the ray
   Of reason's morning star!

Where'er he moved, his shadowy form
   The sightless orbs would seek,
And smiles of welcome light and warm
   The lips that could not speak.

No labored line, no sculptor's art,
   Such hallowed memory needs;
His tablet is the human heart,
   His record loving deeds.

The rest that earth denied is thine,—
   Ah, is it rest? we ask,
Or, traced by knowledge more divine,
   Some larger, nobler task?

Had but those boundless fields of blue
   One darkened sphere like this;
But what has heaven for thee to do
   In realms of perfect bliss?

No cloud to lift, no mind to clear,
   No rugged path to smooth,
No struggling soul to help and cheer,
   No mortal grief to soothe!

Enough; is there a world of love,
   No more we ask to know;
The hand will guide thy ways above
   That shaped thy task below.

Birth of Hoffman: takes away a hope from life

2012-02-07T07:44:00.000-05:00

Born in New York City on February 7, 1806, Charles Fenno Hoffman later had a short-lived career of influence among the New York literati as a novelist, poet, and editor. His life was full of hardship, certainly, and he outlived his fame.

In 1831, however, Hoffman was 25 years old and still unknown.Though he had passed the bar, he only rarely practiced law and instead hoped to become a writer. His poem "Birthday Thoughts" reflects his aspirations and, more importantly, his worry that fame will be fleeting, if it is ever achieved at all:

At twenty-five—at twenty-five,
The heart should not be cold;
It still is young in deeds to strive,
Though half life's tale be told;
And Fame should keep its youth alive,
If Love would make it old.

But mine is like that plant which grew
And wither'd in a night,
Which from the skies of midnight drew
Its ripening and its blight—
Matured in Heaven's tears of dew,
And faded ere her light.

Its hues, in sorrow's darkness born,
In tears were foster'd first;
Its powers, from passion's frenzy drawn,
In passion's gloom were nurs'd—
And perishing ere manhood's dawn,
Did prematurely burst.

Yet all I've learnt from hours rife
With painful brooding here
Is that, amid this mortal strife,
The lapse of every year
But takes away a hope from life,
And adds to death a fear.

Despite his youth at the time, Hoffman already pessimistically considers his approaching death. Two years later, Hoffman was one of the founders of The Knickerbocker, a literary magazine that boasted contributions from Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and others. Hoffman relinquished his editorial duties to Lewis Gaylord Clark after only three issues. Two years after that, he published his first book, A Winter in the Far West, which documented his travels to Missouri and elsewhere. His work was cut short when, in 1849, he was declared insane.

McCabe on Pegram: our gentle knight

2012-02-06T07:44:00.000-05:00

John Pegram (pictured) was a graduate of West Point from Virginia who he joined the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War. He eventually rose to the rank of Major-General and married in January 1865 (Confederate President Jefferson Davis was in attendance). Less than three weeks later, Pegram was killed during the Battle of Hatcher's Run on February 6, 1865.

Pegram's death inspired fellow Virginian William Gordon McCabe to write a poem two days later in camp. It is titled "John Pegram, Fell at the Head of His Division, February 6, 1865":

What shall we say now of our gentle knight?
Or how express the measure of our woe
For him who rode the foremost in the fight,
Whose good blade flashed so far amid the foe?

Of all his knightly deeds what need to tell—
That good blade now lies fast within its sheath—
What can we do but point to where he fell,
And, like a soldier, met a soldier's death.

We sorrow not as those who have no hope,
For he was pure in heart as brave in deed —
God pardon us, if blind with tears we grope,
And love be questioned by the hearts that bleed.

And yet — O foolish and of little faith ! —
We cannot choose but weep our useless tears —
We loved him so I we never dreamed that Death
Would dare to touch him in his brave young years.

Ah! dear bronzed face, so fearless and so bright!
As kind to friend as thou wast stern to foe —
No more we'll see thee radiant in the fight,
The eager eyes — the flush on cheek and brow.

No more we'll greet the lithe, familiar form
Amid the surging smoke with deaf'ning cheer —
No more shall soar above the iron storm
Thy ringing voice in accents sweet and clear.

Douglass, Nell, and The North Star

2012-02-05T07:45:00.000-05:00

With the publication of his autobiography about his own escape from enslavement, Frederick Douglass dedicated himself to speaking out against slavery. He also established an abolitionist newspaper in New York called The North Star in December 1847. Soon after, however, his lecture duties took him to Massachusetts and he left his newspaper in the capable hands of William Cooper Nell (who was born free in Boston). In a letter to Nell dated February 5, 1848 (also meant for publication in The North Star), Douglass apologized for his absence:

I very much regret the necessity which just at this time requires me to be absent from my editorial duties: for though the North Star should grow brighter as the night grows older and darker, I deem it of considerable importance that it appear bright at its very dawn. At this time more than at any other period of our enterprise, the Star will be subject to unfriendly as well as friendly criticism. I however feel confident that with the friendly aid which surrounds you, the paper will lack nothing of interest during my unavoidable absence.

The newspaper was then only about a month old and Douglass took the opportunity to add subscribers during his travels. He particularly hoped to "interest and enlist the energies of our colored fellow countrymen" to sustain the newspaper for their "improvement and elevation." As editor and publisher, he was particularly proud to note that The North Star was "the only permanently established periodical in the hands of the oppressed and enslaved of this land." Even so, Douglass noted, white subscribers outnumbered blacks five to one. "Though this fact indicates a most gratifying interest in our enterprise by our white friends," he wrote, "it reveals a palpable deficiency of interest on the part of our colored friends."

One black supporter was Henry Highland Garnet, a man born enslaved in Maryland. In his letter to Nell, Douglass notes that Garnet attended one of his lectures and expressed an interest in their newspaper. Garnet particularly praised the publication's lack of affiliations; most newspapers at the time were connected either to political parties or religious sects. The North Star, however, was separate from both "slaveholding government" and "slaveholding church."

Douglass's anti-slavery lecture tour took him from Springfield to Lynn to Fall River in Massachusetts. He was disappointed by his varying amounts of success. Even so, he looked forward to his upcoming stop in New Bedford. There, he noted, was "the only town in which I have felt myself really at home since I left the South." New Bedford was where Douglass settled after freeing his enslavers and he proudly and fondly recalled it as the place of his first freedom and where he earned his first dollar. It also is where he assumed his name "Douglass."

Birth of Lanier: Go, trembling song

2012-02-03T07:44:00.002-05:00

The short life of Sidney Lanier began with his birth in Macon, Georgia on February 3, 1842. He became interested in music early in his boyhood, and that interest was sustained for the rest of his life. As he said, "since then the very deepest of my life has been filled with music." In fact, he later claimed that he could play several instruments before he learned how to write legibly. But he did learn to write, and infused his interest in music into his poetry (he also wrote only one novel).

At age 14, Lanier took his first job working in a post office and, that year, went to Oglethorpe College (around the same time, he sat for the photograph here). It was there that his interest in music was compounded with a deep interest in literature. After graduating at 18, he was hired as a teacher himself, but the job was cut short by the Civil War, during which Lanier joined the Confederate Army. In camp with the Second Georgia Battalion (alongside his brother Clifford), Lanier always kept his flute and a steady supply of books. He was eventually captured and, after his release, returned to his home in Georgia in ill health. From then on, he held a series of jobs, all while writing poetry, until his death at age 39.

His poem, "A Song of the Future":

               Sail fast, sail fast,
     Ark of my hopes, Ark of my dreams;
     Sweep lordly o'er the drowned Past,
     Fly glittering through the sun's strange beams;
               Sail fast, sail fast.
Breaths of new buds from off some drying lea
With news about the Future scent the sea:
My brain is beating like the heart of Haste:
I'll loose me a bird upon this Present waste;
               Go, trembling song,
     And stay not long; oh, stay not long:
     Thou 'rt only a gray and sober dove,
     But thine eye is faith and thy wing is love.

Birth of Cotter: a tiny song

2012-02-02T07:43:00.000-05:00

Joseph Seamon Cotter was born in Kentucky on February 2, 1861. Raised in Louisville, he had very little schooling and mostly self-taught; he claimed he could read before the age of four. He got his first job at age eight. Over the years he was a brick-layer, worked in a distillery, then, at age 20, he decided to go to night school in a program especially for "colored" people. Soon, he became a teacher himself and, along the way, became a writer (and an advocate for education for blacks).

Cotter's published works include collections of short stories, a few closet dramas, and several books of poetry. His first collection of verse, A Rhyming, was published in 1895 and included several poems dedicated to fellow educators. Some are humorous, some are lengthy, and the shortest is a mere two lines. The book closed with "A Song":

I sang me a song, a tiny song,
   A song that was sweet to my soul,
And set it a-float on the sea of chance
   In search of a happy goal.

I said to my song: "Go on, go on
   And lodge in a tender spot
Of some human soul where the fires of hate
   And selfishness are not."

My song went on but a little space
   And hied it back to me;
And fell at my feet in a sorry plight—
   The victim of cruelty.

I gazed a moment and quickly saw
   Just how it had come about,
A cruel critic had caught my song
   And probed the soul of it out.

O, poor indeed is the human mind
   (And why was it ever wrought?)
That can thrie on husk in the form of words,
   And not on a sturdy thought.

Incidentally, Cotter claimed that his son, also a writer, was born in the room where Paul Laurence Dunbar gave his first reading in the South. That reading happened to have been in the Cotter home.

McCreery and Bulwer-Lytton

2012-01-31T07:44:00.000-05:00

As John Luckey McCreery wrote in a preface to a reluctantly-published collection of poetry, he never wrote poems for public consumption. Instead, he shared them only with his family and close friends. Imagine his surprise, however, when he heard one of his poems was read before the United States Congress.

As McCreery explained,the poem "There Is No Death" was written in late 1862. Encouraged by friends, he sent it to a Philadelphia newspaper, which published it the next summer. A reader from Illinois, identified only as "E. Bulmer," copied it an sent it to a newspaper in Chicago, which printed it with his name instead of McCreery's. In turn, a Wisconsin newspaper saw the same poem and though "E. Bulmer" was a typesetting error — and so, the poem became credited to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the well-known English poet and novelist. It became immensely popular amid the Civil War and was reprinted throughout the next couple decades.

Nearly twenty years later, on January 31, 1880, McCreery was sitting in the visitors gallery during a meeting of the House of Representatives. Pennsylvania Congressman Alexander Hamilton Coffroth quoted a few lines in honor of a recently-deceased colleague, again noting its author as Bulwer-Lytton. It spurred him to finally respond and, with the help of friends advocating on his behalf, he proved his authorship.

McCreery eventually took the confusion all in stride. As he wrote, "Every reader can decide for himself whether this wide-spread popularity has its basis in the merits of the poem or in the celebrity of its supposed author." The poem:

There is no death! the stars go down
   To rise upon some other shore,
And bright in heaven's jewelled crown
   They shine for evermore.

There is no death! the forest leaves
   Convert to life the viewless air;
The rocks disorganize to feed
   The hungry moss they bear.

There is no death! the dust we tread
   Shall change, beneath the summer showers.
To golden grain, or mellow fruit,
   Or rainbow-tinted flowers.

There is no death! the leaves may fall,
   The flowers may fade and pass away—
They only wait, through wintry hours,
   The warm, sweet breath of May.

There is no death! the choicest gifts
   That heaven hath kindly lent to earth
Are ever first to seek again
   The country of their birth;

And all things that for growth or joy
   Are worthy of our love or care,
Whose loss has left us desolate,
   Are safely garnered there.

Though life become a desert waste,
   We know its fairest, sweetest flowers,
Transplanted into paradise,
   Adorn immortal bowers.

The voice of birdlike melody
   That we have missed and mourned so long
Now mingles with the angel choir
   In everlasting song.

There is no death! although we grieve
   When beautiful, familiar forms
That we have learned to love are torn
   From our embracing arms,—

Although with bowed and breaking heart,
   With sable garb and silent tread,
We bear their senseless dust to rest,
   And say that they are " dead,"—

They are not dead! they have but passed
   Beyond the mists that blind us here,
Into the new and larger life
   Of that serener sphere.

They have but dropped their robe of clay
   To put their shining raiment on;
They have not wandered far away,—
   They are not "lost," nor " gone."

Though disenthralled and glorified,
   They still are here and love us yet;
The dear ones they have left behind
   They never can forget.

And sometimes, when our hearts grow faint
   Amid temptations fierce and deep,
Or when the wildly raging waves
   Of grief or passion sweep,

We feel upon our fevered brow
   Their gentle touch, their breath of balm,
Their arms enfold us, and our hearts
   Grow comforted and calm.

And ever near us, though unseen,
   The dear, immortal spirits tread—
For all the boundless universe
   Is Life:—there are no dead!

Pike: the soul of the Universe

2012-01-30T07:44:00.000-05:00

Albert Pike wrote two poems he titled "Love," one which he never republished and another which was reprinted posthumously by his family. The latter was first published in the Boston Pearl on January 30, 1836. In it, "Love" tells its own story of how great a role it plays:

I am the soul of the Universe,
        In Nature's pulse I beat;
To Doom and Death I am a curse,
        I trample them under my feet.

Creation's every voice is mine,
        I breathe in its every tone;
I have in every heart a shrine,
        A consecrated throne.

The whisper that sings in the summer leaves,
        The hymn of the star-lit brook,
The martin that nests in the ivied eaves,
        The dove in his shaded nook,

The quivering heart of the blushing flower,
        The thick Aeolian grass,
The harmonies of the summer shower,
        The south wind's soft, sweet mass,

The psalm of the great grave sea,—are mine;
        The cataract's thunder tongue,
The monody of the mountain pine,
        Moaning the cliffs among.

I kiss the snowy breasts of the maiden,
        And they thrill with a new delight;
While the crimson pulses flush and redden,
        Along the forehead's white.

I fill the restless heart of the boy,
        As a sphere is filled with fire,
Till it quivers and trembles with hope and joy,
        Like the strings of a golden lyre.

I touch the poet's soul with my wing,
        It yields to my magic power,
And the songs of his mighty passions ring,
        Till the world is full of the shower.

The heart of the soldier bows to me,
        His arms aside are flung,
Unheeded the wild sublimity
        Of the silver trumpet's tongue.

I brood on the soul like a golden thrush,
        My music to it clings,
And its purple fountains throb and flush,
        In the crimson light of my wings.

Deep in a lovely woman's soul
        I love to build my throne,
For the harmonies that through it roll
        Are the echoes of one tone.

The sounds of its many perfect strings
        Have but one key-note ever,
Its passions are the thousand springs,
        All flowing to one river.

Interestingly, Pike (pictured above in Masonic regalia) was born in Massachusetts and it was in Boston that he published his first works. Nevertheless, he is more associated with Arkansas, where he lived for many years and was a member of the Confederacy.

Music did not sing as poets say she sung

2012-01-28T07:44:00.001-05:00

The Harvard Musical Association was founded in Boston in 1837 by John Sullivan Dwight, a minister, former Brook Farmer, editor, and musical critic. On January 28, 1874, the annual dinner of the Association was held at the historic Parker House in Boston. The evening included a poem by Christopher Pearse Cranch (pictured). A friend of Dwight's, Cranch was an artist and musician as well as a poet. Years earlier, both were also in the same circle of Transcendentalists. Cranch's poetic contribution to the dinner was the simply titled "Music":

When "Music, Heavenly Maid," was very young,
She did not sing as poets say she sung.
Unlike the mermaids of the fairy tales,
She paid but slight attention to her scales.
Besides, poor thing! she had no instruments
But such as rude barbaric art invents.

In those early days, Cranch writes, there were no well-known instrument makers like Steinway or Chickerings - in fact, many instruments did not yet exist. After all, "Music was then an infant." Other arts developed more quickly, including painting and architecture.

But she, the Muse who in these latter days
Lifts us and floats us in the golden haze
Of melodies and harmonies divine,
And steeps our souls and senses in such wine
As never Ganymede nor Hebe poured
For gods, when quaffing at the Olympian board, —
She, Heavenly Maid, must ply her music thin,
And sit and thrum her tinkling mandolin,
Chant her rude staves, and only prophesy
Her far-off days of immortality.

Like Cinderella waiting for her prince, Music sits idly somewhat impatiently. As "the years and centuries rolled on," slowly the world of music grew and new instruments evolved:

But every rare and costly instrument
That skill can fabricate or art invent, —
Pianos, organs, viols, horns, trombones,
Hautboys, and clarinets with reedy tones,
Boehm-flutes and cornets, bugles, harps, bassoons,
Huge double-basses, kettle-drum half-moons,
And every queer contrivance made for tunes.

Through these the master-spirits round her throng,
And Europe rings with instruments and song.
Through these she breathes her wondrous symphonies,
Enchanting airs, and choral litanies.
Through these she speaks the word that never dies,
The universal language of the skies.
Around her gather those who held their art
To be of life the clearest, noblest part.

The great composers, like Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (chief of all) swarm to her in long processions of, as Cranch writes, "the lords of Tone," who come to attend her "like a queen enthroned."

Ah! greater than all words of mine can say,
The heights, the depths, the glories, of that sway.
No mortal tongue can bring authentic speech
Of that enchanted world beyond its reach;
No tongue but hers, when, lifted on the waves
Of Tone and Harmony, beyond the graves
Of all we lose, we drift entranced away
Out of the discords of the common day;
And she, the immortal goddess, on her breast
Lulls us to visions of a sweet unrest,
Smiles at the tyrannies of time and space,
And folds us in a mother's fond embrace,
Till, sailing on upon that mystic sea,
We feel that Life is Immortality.

Dickinson and the modern consciousness

2012-01-27T07:44:00.005-05:00

Because only a few of her poems were published during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson was not a major figure in American literature in the 19th century. Her first book of poems was published four years after her death in 1890, though they were heavily edited. The public (and critics) were suddenly interested, partly because of the poet's reputation as a recluse and partly because of how she played with standard syntax and punctuation. New editions were put out in rapid succession.

In fact, this turn-of-the-century curiosity was not restricted merely to the United States. The January 27, 1905 issue of the Manchester Guardian noted:

The place of Emily Dickinson among poets is not yet definitely fixed, but the fact that a seventeenth edition of her Poems has appeared shows that in spite of her disregard of form her thoughts appeal to the modern consciousness... This quality may secure remembrance, for some of her work will pass into the common inheritance.

The Guardian disagreed with Dickinson's posthumous promoter Thomas Wentworth Higginson that her work was similar to that of William Blake ("beyond originality they have little in common"). In fact, the Guardian was right in noting the appeal to "modern" consciousness; Dickinson's unique style of poetry was a turning point for poetry and today she is considered among the first "modern" poets — in part due to her willingness to play with standard rules of the language. Still, the newspaper's hesitation in predicting her longevity did allow that some day she would be anthologized alongside Blake's "The Lamb," particularly singling out this poem (as it appeared at the time):

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain:
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

*Some of the information for this post comes from Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History (1989) by Willis J. Buckingham.

Birth of Dawes: his heart is always young

2012-01-26T07:43:00.000-05:00

Born in Boston on January 26, 1803, Rufus Dawes was the youngest of sixteen children. His family for generations had been important politicians, patriots, and judges. A teenaged Rufus, however, was kicked out of Harvard College for what turned out to be a false accusation of impropriety. Nevertheless, the incident pushed him into poetry - his first verses were a satire on the college and faculty that had scorned him.

During his lifetime, Dawes was most recognized for his long poem Geraldine. His poems are generally highly-wrought, often focused on themes of romance, history, nature, or mythology. Among his most tolerable is "The Poet":

The poet's heart is always young,
   And flows with love's unceasing streams;
Oh, many are the lays unsung,
   Yet treasured with his dreams!

The spirits of a thousand flowers,—
   The loved,—the lost, — his heart enshrine;
The memory of blessed hours,
   And impulses divine.

Like water in a crystal urn,
   Sealed up forever, as a gem,
That feels the sunbeams while they burn,
   But never yields to them; —

His heart may fire —his fevered brain
   May kindle with concentrate power,
But kind affections still remain
   To gild his darkest hour.

The world may chide — the heartless sneer, —
   And coldly pass the Poet by,
Who only sheds a sorrowing tear
   O'er man's humanity.

From broken hearts and silent grief,
   From all unutterable scorn,
He draws the balm of sweet relief,
   For sufferers yet unborn.

His lyre is strung with shattered strings, —
   The heart-strings of the silent dead, —
Where memory hovers with her wings,
   Where grief is canopied.

And yet his heart is always young,
   And flows with love's unceasing streams;
Oh, many are the lays unsung,
   And treasured with his dreams!

Birth of Edith Wharton

2012-01-24T07:45:00.000-05:00

It was 150 years ago today that the "grand dame" of American letters, Edith Wharton was born. Upon her birth in New York City on January 24, 1862, her given name was Edith Jones; she later married Edward "Teddy" Wharton. Though they eventually divorced, she kept the married name. Her identity, she recalled later in her 1934 autobiography A Backward Glance, was born shortly after her more literal birth:

It was on a bright day of midwinter, in New York. The little girl who eventually became me, but as yet was neither me nor anybody else in particular, but merely a soft anonymous morsel of humanity — this little girl, who bore my name, was going for a walk with her father. The episode is literally the first thing I can remember about her, and therefore I date the birth of her identity from that day.

Today, Wharton is particularly remembered for novels like The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome (1911); her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence earned her the Pulitzer Prize, making her the first woman recipient of that award. Earlier, however, her first published work was a book on interior design, The Decoration of Houses (1897), which she co-authored with Ogden Codman. Her first work of fiction, perhaps surprisingly, was a book of poetry, simply titled Verses. The book was self-published in 1878 when she was still a teenager, subsidized by her mother. In addition to her writing on interior design, her novels, and her poetry, she also wrote short stories. One of her longest is "Bunner Sisters." Like many of her works, the tale subtly comments on social class, society, and women's roles and relationships. Here is a portion of a birthday scene:

"Why, Ann Eliza," she exclaimed, in a thin voice pitched to chronic fretfulness, "what in the world you got your best silk on for?"

..."Why, Evelina, why shouldn't I, I sh'ld like to know? Ain't it your birthday, dear?" She put out her arms with the awkwardness of habitually repressed emotion...

"Oh, pshaw," she said, less peevishly. "I guess we'd better give up birthdays. Much as we can do to keep Christmas nowadays."

"You hadn't oughter say that, Evelina. We ain't so badly off as all that. I guess you're cold and tired. Set down while I take the kettle off: it's right on the boil."

She pushed Evelina toward the table..."Why, Ann Eliza!" Evelina stood transfixed by the sight of the parcel beside her plate... The younger sister had rapidly untied the string, and drawn from its wrappings a round nickel clock of the kind to be bought for a dollar-seventy-five.

"Oh, Ann Eliza, how could you?" She set the clock down, and the sisters exchanged agitated glances across the table.

"Well," the elder retorted, "ain't it your birthday?"

*Recommended reading: Edith Wharton (2008) by Hermione Lee.

Dawson on O'Brien: time should not assail

2012-01-23T07:44:00.000-05:00

Though born in Ireland, Fitz James O'Brien moved to the United States in the early 1850s and consider it his adopted home. He soon began contributed poems and short stories to various journals and newspapers, bringing him in association with the Bohemians in New York who frequented the famous literary/artistic circle at Pfaff's.

O'Brien's literary life was cut short by the American Civil War; his short stint in the Union Army ended with a mortal wound in 1862. A quarter century later, O'Brien was honored in a poem by Daniel Lewis Dawson. "Uncrowned" is dated January 23, 1887:

While the round sun forgets its noonday glare,
       And following after clouds the evening comes,
And sounds of city feet more fleetly fare
       To some kind haven, in the town of homes,
I stop to look along these shabby walls,
       And almost naked floor, I claim as mine.
No priceless hanging to the wainscot falls,
       No marvels painted out of oil divine
Look at this sad, worn, weary face with love.
       Only a rug or twain lies here or there,
And from its case peeps out a boxing-glove.
       I see the long black easel's horns still wear
My colors,—black and gold. Above the bed,
       Dusk Cleopatra foils the folded snake
That drives across her golden thigh its head,
       And the strange love-dreams in her eyes awake;
And on the other wall, Lucretia, slim,
       Beautiful, bare except of gauzy veil
That cannot hide the shapely breast and limb
       And those wild eyes that time should not assail.

The poem - thick with allusions to folklore, mythology, and history - is Dawson's response to a story O'Brien often told that he was descended from a heroic chief prophesied to rule the Ithians in Ireland for eternity. In "a ruined castle by an Irish sea," the speaker hears Cleena (queen of the Banshees in Irish folklore) is sad and "calling for her king." He alludes to the holder of the pen, a writer who follows Shakespeare, Morris, and Ovid as well as the Bible. This figure "serves" the Queen of Song, uncomplainingly compelled into the service of writing. But, he is destined for more:

Scant in her favor, but I serve her still;
       The measure of my toil is incomplete;
She drapes these bare walls at her fickle will,
       To fill me with her presence over-sweet.
Ah, mighty mother, I have drunk thy milk!
       I cannot turn me from thy service now.
A priest forever, robed in rag or silk,
       According to Melchisedec, my vow
Calls me to worship on the bended knee,
       And such Gregorian chanted melodies
Should rise upon a western slope to thee,
       As once, more virile, by the Grecian seas,
Saner and worthier than these weaker words,
       And fuller of the pictured thought of gods
Who dwelt 'mid trees, and watched the moving herds,
       And saw those nymphs divine on Delian sods,
Who loved, ah me! who loved in greater wise,
       With stronger bodies, in a fairer clime,
Beneath the beauty of Idalian skies
       And in the fair creation of a time.

Futile belike my toil, my theme, my song;
       Wasted my effort, incomplete my toil;
And in the turf cast with a larger throng,
       My works and I shall be Time's common spoil.
But on these western ways my days endure,
       And from yon castle ruined by the sea
The spirit warders of a life secure
       Call o'er the white waves, calling faithfully:
"Cease not, O kinsman, till the toil be done;
       Saint Kieran gave us rule for evermore;
Our names are now unknown beneath the sun;
       A barren sceptre in our hands we bore;
But you, you have not asked for land or power,
       Or gold, or much of love or anything,
And thus you gain the guerdon from this hour,
       That you, not we, henceforward shall be King."

The earth for his pillow, his curtain the skies

2012-01-22T07:44:00.001-05:00

Sarah Louisa Forten published only a couple handfuls of poems, usually inspired by her anti-slavery leanings. Among her earliest known works is "The Grave of the Slave," published in William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper The Liberator on January 22, 1831. In much of her work, Forten plays with the humanity of her subjects despite their inhumane treatment. In this poem, she assets that death for an enslaved person is a substitute for true freedom:

The cold storms of winter shall chill him no more,
His woes and his sorrows, his pains are all o'er;
The sod of the valley now covers his form,
He is safe in his home at last, he feels not the storm.

The poor slave is laid all unheeded and lone,
Where the rich and the poor find a permanent home;
Not his master can rouse him with voice of command;
He knows not, he hears not, his cruel demand.

Not a tear, not a sigh to embalm his cold tomb,
No friend to lament him, no child to bemoan;
Not a stone marks the place, where he peacefully lies,
The earth for his pillow, his curtain the skies.

Poor slave! shall we sorrow that death was thy friend,
The last, and the kindest, that heaven could send?
The grave to the weary is welcomed and blest;
And death, to the captive, is freedom and rest.

Death of Prentice: though I am far away

2012-01-21T07:44:00.000-05:00

The accounts of George D. Prentice's death in 1870 are unclear; contemporary sources say he died on January 21, others list his death as January 22. His grave is marked as January 20. Either way, it was pneumonia that ended his life at the age of 68.

Though born in Connecticut, Prentice remains much more associated with Kentucky, where he served as editor of the Louisville Journal for most of his life (it eventually merged with the Courier). A graduate of Brown University (where he was tutored by Horace Mann), he practiced law only briefly before turning to journalism. His writings were so satirical and caustic that he was invited to write the campaign biography of Henry Clay. He served minor roles with various newspapers before published the first issue of the Louisville Journal in 1830. His reputation was soon made, thanks to his biting wit — particularly in response to critics or to his competitors. To quote a couple:

The editor of the —— says more villainy is on foot. We suppose the editor has lost his horse.

The editor of the —— speaks of his 'lying curled up in bed these cold mornings.' This verifies what we said of him some time ago—'he lies like a dog.'

After his death, Prentice's body laid in state at a Masonic temple (he was a long-standing member of the Masons) before his burial at Cave Hill Cemetery. Efforts were soon made to memorialize Prentice. The resulting statue, dedicated in 1912, today sits across from the Louisville Public Library. Its existence remains controversial (and not only because it is somewhat unflattering); Prentice was also a bigoted, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic advocate. He was also a poet, and John James Piatt edited a posthumous collection of his complete poems. Including in that collection was "The Parting":

The signal from the distant strand
   Streams o'er the waters blue—
It bids me press thy parting hand,
   And breathe my last adieu;
But oft on fancy's glowing wing
   My heart will love to stray,
And still to thee with rapture spring,
   Though I am far away.

With thee I've wandered oft to hear,
   On Summer's quiet eves,
The wild-bird's music, soft and clear,
   Borne through the whispering leaves,
Or see the moon's bright shadow laid
   Upon the waveless bay:
Those eves—their memory can not fade,
   Though I am far away.

My life may feel Hope's withering blight,
   Yet Fancy's tearful eye
Will turn to thee—the dearest light .
   In retrospection's sky;
And still the memory of our love,
   While life was young and gay,
Will sweetly o'er my spirit move,
   Though I am far away.

'T is hard, when Spring's first flower expands,
   To pass it coldly by,
Or see upon the desert sands
   The gem unheeded lie;
The gentle thoughts that bless the hours
   Of love can ne'er decay,
And thou wilt live in memory's bowers,
   Though I am far away.

The sun has sunk, with fading gleam,
   Down evening's shadowy vale,
But see—his softened glories stream
   From yonder crescent pale;
And thus affection's chastened light
   Will memory still display,
To gild the gloom of sorrow's night,
   Though I am far away.

The Sea-Wolf: Then everything happened

2012-01-20T07:44:00.002-05:00

After having signed up just over a week earlier, a teenaged Jack London shipped out from San Francisco aboard the Sophia Sutherland on January 20, 1893. The sealing expedition was bound for Japan and many experiences on board were later translated into The Sea-Wolf, a novel which London published in 1904, the year after his more famous book The Call of the Wild.

The Sea-Wolf features a character named Humphrey van Weydon, nicknamed "Sissy" for his lack of masculinity. A gentleman and occasional literary critic with a substantial inheritance, van Weydon starts the story aboard a ferry, living a calm, boring upper-class life. "Then everything happened, and with inconceivable rapidity": his ship is destroyed and he is cast adrift before blacking out in the cold water.

When he awakens, he is aboard a sealing vessel named Ghost. Within moments, he witnesses the callous removal of the dead first mate, who is unceremoniously cast into the sea (London himself witnessed a similar burial at sea aboard the Sophia Sutherland). Another crew member is promoted in his place, leaving room for "Hump," as the protagonist is now renamed - though his membership in the crew is not voluntary. The captain, described as a gorilla or tiger (or later, "devil"), is Wolf Larsen, a powerhouse of a man who takes Hump under his wing. Throughout the book, the two debate "immortality" versus "materialism"; the human soul versus animalistic survival instincts; the nature of manhood and masculinity. According to the captain:

"I believe that life is a mess... It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all."

Wolf Larsen is, without doubt, one of the most horrifically compelling characters in American literature. He is manipulative, cruel, intense, and unstoppable. Soon enough, Hump sees his old "sissy" nature being replaced by one closer to Wolf Larsen's image, at the same time gaining power and influence (as well as animosity) aboard the Ghost. Both allies and enemies, the tension between the two never ends and the reader of The Sea-Wolf is in constant fear that one will kill the other. Contemporary Gilded Age readers were shocked by the violence, cruelty, and nihilistic philosophical debate; readers today might feel equally shocked and equally enthralled. As Hump describes to a newcomer aboard the Ghost:

"You must understand... and understand clearly, that this man is a monster. He is without conscience. Nothing is sacred to him, nothing is too terrible for him to do. It was due to his whim that I was detained aboard in the first place. It is due to his whim that I am still alive. I do nothing, can do nothing, because I am a slave to this monster."

Harris: Ole Satun is loose

2012-01-18T07:44:00.002-05:00

Joel Chandler Harris was not among the first American authors to write with an authentic dialect, nor was he the first to try it out in the form of vernacular poetry. Nevertheless, the Georgia-born author is remembered for his "Uncle Remus" stories employing the style which defined him. His first attempt at dialect in poetry is "Revival Hymn," published in the Constitution for January 18, 1877. It was soon reprinted, particularly in Southern newspapers, occasionally with the variation on the title "Revival Song," and was later set to music. It also inspired at least one attempt at a copy of the style but the critics quickly judged it as sub-par to Harris's own work.

Oh, whar shill we go w'en de great day comes,
Wid de blowin' er de trumpits en de bangin' er de drums?
How many po' sinners'll be kotched out late
En fine no latch ter de golden gate?
No use fer ter wait twel ter-morrer!
De sun musn't set on yo' sorrer,
Sin's ez sharp ez a bamboo-brier—
Oh, Lord! fetch de mo'ners up higher!

W'en de nashuns er de earf is a stan'in all aroun,
Who's a gwineter be choosen fer ter w'ar de glory-crown?
Who's a gwine fer ter stan' stiff-kneed en bol'
En answer to der name at de callin' er de roll?
You better come now ef you comm—
Ole Satun is loose en a bummin'—
De wheels er distruckshun is a hummin'—
Oh, come long, sinner, ef you comin'!

De song er salvashun is a mighty sweet song,
En de Pairidise win' blow fur en blow strong,
En Aberham's bosom, hit's saft en hit's wide,
En right dar's de place whar de sinners oughter hide!
Oh, you nee'nter be a stoppin' en a lookin';
Ef you fool wid ole Satun you'l git took in;
Youil hang on de aidge en get shook in,
Ef you keep on a stoppin' en a lookin'.

De time is right now, en dish yer's de place—
Let de sun er salvashun shine squar' in yo' face;
Fight de battles er de Lord, fight soon en fight late,
En you'll allers fine a latch ter de golden gate.
No use fer ter wait twel ter-morrer,
De sun musn't set on yo' sorrer—
Sin's ez sharp ez a bamboo-brier,
Ax de Lord fer ter fetch you up higher!

* For information in this post, I am paticularly indebted to Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the 'Cornfield Journalist': The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris (2000) by Walter M. Brasch.

Death of Bancroft: a world of truth

2012-01-17T07:43:00.001-05:00

George Bancroft was 90 years old when he died in Washington, D.C., on January 17, 1891. Though his most well-known role was probably as the Secretary of the Navy, appointed by President James K. Polk, he was also an author. His writings are almost exclusively focused on the history of the United States and in that field he was highly regarded.

He also wrote an essay called "The Last Moments of Eminent Men" (1834), in which he described advice on dying mostly from famous political leaders and writers. He begins by stating his disagreement with Lord Byron that heaven prefers the young. Instead, he says, that "length of days" is desirable and, further, that "gray hairs are a crown of glory: the only object of respect that can never excite envy." By then, Bancroft suggests, ambition transitions to observation, and an old man can be satisfied with their experience, and the happy man always wishes to prolong life.

Even so, Bancroft notes, despite this love for life, one need not look at death "with abjectness." He refers to the bravery of soldiers or of sailors who venture into stormy seas as a sign that death can be faced with courage. His essay further discusses deathbed superstitions, those who seek death through suicide, and men who vainly build their monuments while yet living. The essay, really, talks about the value of life and the peace of death. Bancroft concludes with a paragraph dedicated to people like himself:

A tranquil death becomes the man of science, or the scholar. He should cultivate letters to the last moment of life; he should resign public honors as calmly as one would take off a domino on returning from a mask. He should listen to the signal for his departure, not with exultation, and not with indifference. Respecting the dread solemnity of the change, and reposing in hope on the bosom of death, he should pass without boldness and without fear, from the struggles of inquiry to the certainty of knowledge, from a world of doubt to a world of truth.

Elia W. Peattie: from the thrall of the forest

2012-01-15T07:44:00.001-05:00

Elia Wilkerson Cahill was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan on January 15, 1862. As a child, she and her family (including four sisters) moved to Chicago. She stopped her schooling in sixth grade and became a typesetter in her father's print shop. After her 1883 marriage to Robert Burns Peattie, she became more involved in the literary scene. Under the name Elia W. Peattie, she became the art and society editor for the Chicago Tribune, later worked for a newspaper in Nebraska, and contributed to various journals and magazines. By the end of her life, she was a published journalist, short story writer, poet, novelist, and playwright.

Among her works is the short story "Michigan Man," and it is tempting to consider the work a reflection on her own life. The story follows Luther Dallas, an experienced "axe-man" who has spent 25 years of his 40-year life among the solemn pine trees of Michigan. The setting is a depressing one, described as "perennial gloom," but which allows a quiet, peaceful solitude.

More importantly, Luther is good at his job chopping down trees with the skills "of an executioner." He had no knowledge of the "progress" that inspired him to take so many lives, yet he feared a tree would some day return the favor. Sure enough, a large tree nearly crushes him and, in need of time to recover, he travels to Chicago to find his sister. Once there, however, the city confuses him and leaves him in a daze. He misses the solitude of the woods, but feels equally alone surrounded by tall, menacing buildings. He runs out of money and is sent to jail, still seriously injured from the tree. The lack of humanity in the urban environment is emphasized by the tale's closing lines:

The next morning the lock-up keeper opened the cell door. Luther lay with his head in a pool of blood. His soul had escaped from the thrall of the forest.

"Well, well!" said the little fat police justice, when he was told of it. "We ought to have a doctor around to look after such cases."

Howells and Webb: safe-harbored!

2012-01-14T07:44:00.001-05:00

After the publication of Vagrom Verse by Charles Henry Webb, critics were quick to praise the well-established New York writer. The influential William Dean Howells wrote to Webb (who occasionally used the pen name "John Paul") just how much respect he earned by the book's publication. In a letter dated January 14, 1889, Howells wrote to Webb:

The low standard of literature in Boston may be guessed from the following paragraph out of the Transcript: —

"No book of poems has touched the people's heart for a long time like Charles Henry Webb's (John Paul) 'Vagrom Verse,' from which we copied 'Alec Dunham's Boat' the other day.

Webb already had a long career in the literary world, including serving as an editor in California for a time (his writers included Mark Twain and Bret Harte). Some of his work was humorous (including his dedication to Vagrom Verse, which included the lines, "I dedicate my verse to those / Who really do not like my prose"), though much was serious. The poem which Howells reference, "Alec Dunham's Boat," got a fair amount of attention.

There she lies at her moorings,
    The little two-master,
Answering not now
    The call of disaster.
Loose swings the rudder,
    Unshipped the tiller;
Crossing the Bar so,
    One sea would fill her!

Foresail and mainsail
    In loose folds are lying:
Naked the mast-heads —
    No pennon flying;
Seaweed and wreck
    Alike may drift past her;
There lies the pilot-boat —
    Where is her master?

Lantern at Great Point,
    Brightly it burns;
Beacon on Brant Point
    The signal returns.
Far out to sea
    Sankoty flashes;
White on the shore
    The crested wave dashes.

Strident No'th-easter
    And smoky Sou'-wester
Call for the pilot-boat,
    Eager to test her.
And a ship on the Bar,
    Just where the waves cast her!
Moored lies the pilot-boat —
    Where is her master?

Oh, barque driving in,
    God send that you lee get,
Past Tuckernuck shoals,
    The reefs of Muskeget.
There go minute guns;
    Now faster and faster —
But no more to their aid
    Flies the little two-master.

For the pilot one night
    Left his boat as you see her —
Light moored, that at signal
    He ready might free her.
But not from her moorings
    Came the pilot to cast her,
Though a signal he answered —
    One set by the Master.

Gone, say you, and whither?
    Do you ask me which way
Went good pilot as ever
    Brought ship into bay?
Who shall say how he cast off,
    If to starboard or larboard?
But of one thing I'm sure —
    The pilot's safe-harbored!

Birth of Horatio Alger, Jr.

2012-01-13T07:44:00.000-05:00

Horatio Alger, Jr. was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on January 13, 1832. Today, he is remembered for two things: the "Ragged Dick" series which virtually invented the "rags-to-riches" story, and "unnatural familiarity with boys."

A graduate of Harvard College and member of Phi Beta Kappa, Alger became a journalist and teacher before returning to Harvard to attend its Divinity School. Publishing occasional poems, tales, and novels, his full-time minister job was in Brewster, Massachusetts, in the center of Cape Cod. About two years later, in 1866, Alger was forced to resign. It was later revealed that the parish found his relationship with some of the boys in the congregation was a "gross immorality." He moved to New York to start anew.

No further accusations were ever made against Alger, but his writing began to follow a very specific pattern. The first was his 1867 novel Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks. In Alger's fiction, the main character, always a boy, rises from poverty through hard work and moral behavior (though, in reality, few of his characters became supremely wealthy, they were financially comfortable). By the end of the 19th century, he had written over 100 novels following this theme. Some scholars today suggest his prolific yet formulaic output was to make up for his prior misdeeds.

The first physical description of the shoe-shining Ragged Dick gives an idea not only of his look, but his cleverness:

His pants were torn in several places, and had apparently belonged in the first instance to a boy two sizes larger than himself. He wore a vest, all the buttons of which were gone except two, out of which peeped a shirt which looked as if it had been worn a month. To complete his costume he wore a coat too long for him, dating back, if one might judge from its general appearance, to a remote antiquity.

Washing the face and hands is usually considered proper in commencing the day, but Dick was above such refinement. He had no particular dislike to dirt, and did not think it necessary to remove several dark streaks on his face and hands. But in spite of his dirt and rags there was something about Dick that was attractive. It was easy to see that if he had been clean and well dressed he would have been decidedly good-looking. Some of his companions were sly, and their faces inspired distrust; but Dick had a frank, straight-forward manner that made him a favorite.

Dick's business hours had commenced. He had no office to open. His little blacking-box was ready for use, and he looked sharply in the faces of all who passed, addressing each with, "Shine yer boots, sir?"

"How much?" asked a gentleman on his way to his office.

"Ten cents," said Dick, dropping his box, and sinking upon his knees on the sidewalk, nourishing his brush with the air of one skilled in his profession

"Ten cents! Isn't that a little steep?"

"Well, you know 'taint all clear profit," said Dick, who had already set to work. "There's the slacking costs something, and I have to get a new brush pretty often."

"And you have a large rent too," said the gentleman quizzically, with a glance at a large hole in Dick's coat.

"Yes, sir," said Dick, always ready to joke...

"What tailor do you patronize?" asked the gentleman, surveying Dick's attire.

"Would you like to go to the same one?" asked Dick, shrewdly.

"Well, no; it strikes me that he didn't give you a very good fit."

Jack London: the reign of primitive law

2012-01-12T07:44:00.003-05:00

On January 12, 1876, Flora Wellman gave birth to a son (it is unclear if she was married at the time, or if William Chaney was or was not the boy's father). After injuring herself, she left the baby with a caretaker until after her second marriage, when she took him back and re-named him Jack London.

London's most famous book was certainly The Call of the Wild (1903), a story of Alaskan adventures told through the eyes of a dog named Buck. London originally planned it to be a short story of about 4,000 words but it quickly became a novel. Full of both pathos and violence, the book was a gritty and dark look at the nature of both man and beast:

He was beaten (he knew that), but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his afterlife he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law... The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect, and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused. (From Chapter 1)

The work was first published by the Saturday Evening Post, which paid the cash-strapped London $750. When printed in book form, Macmillan publishers worried about taking a risk on the relatively unknown writer. Instead of offering royalties, they paid London $2,000 outright. When it became a huge success, London made no additional money.

But when still a teenager, London already had cash problems — that and a need for adventure propelled him to sea. On his 17th birthday, January 12, 1893, he acquired a space on board the schooner Sophie Sutherland, bound for Japan to hunt seals. Already known locally as a bit of a ne'er-do-well with a drinking problem, London set sail about a week later. This experience inspired the next novel he published in his own name after The Call of the Wild. He named this one The Sea-Wolf, published in 1904.

*I must acknowledge a debt to James L. Haley, who provided some of the infomration in this post in his 2010 book Wolf: The Lives of Jack London.

Prescott: I have kept my resolve

2012-01-11T07:43:00.001-05:00

It wasn't quite a New Year's resolution that propelled William Hickling Prescott forward in writing his history of Peru - it was a bet. His friend Edmund B. Otis had wagered $50 that Prescott could not write 100 pages in 100 days. After that 100 days was over, the bet was renewed for another 100 days until writing was finished.

But it was not mere laziness that was slowing down the project. "If I can once get in harness and work I shall do well," Prescott wrote, "but my joints are stiff, I think, as I grow old." The bet was his motivation. "Shame on me if I fail."

On January 11, 1846, a journal entry gives an update on his progress: "A miracle — I have kept my resolve thus far and been industrious three whole days! Now, meliora spero." (Translation: "I am better"). By then, Prescott was only 49 years old, but not in the best health. His eyes were always a concern. After an accident while a student at Harvard, he had lost sight in one eye and too much work left him blind in the other one as well.

Prescott's efforts were also hampered by a lack of interest in his subject, which he concluded was "second-rate." Still, he worked hard. By April, he admitted the book's "great defect is want of unity." He hoped the book would read like an adventure tale alone the lines of the Iliad, though he earlier warned himself, "It would not be decent, nor politic, to turn out histories like romances." Finally, in 1847, Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru was published in two volumes. I haven't found for sure how much Otis paid him for its completion.

Campbell: beneath the sun's eclipse

2012-01-09T07:44:00.002-05:00

The death of African-American poet and author Alfred Gibbs Campbell was recorded as January 9, 1884. During his life, he was an advocate of temperance, religious individualism, as well as civil rights for both blacks and women. His most famous role was as editor of The Alarm Bell, the newspaper he founded which lasted only about 15 months from 1851 to 1852. The newspaper was published in Paterson, New Jersey; Campbell's three decades later was in Newark. His poems were collected into a complete edition just a few months before his death — including his powerful Independence Day poem, "Lines" (1855):

Wake not again the cannon's thundrous voice,
Nor to the breeze throw out the stars and stripes;
'Tis not the time to revel and rejoice
Beneath the shadow of our nation's types —
Types of her ancient glory, present shame.
The stars have faded of her old renown,
For Liberty is but an empty name,
While Slavery wields the sceptre, wears the crown.

In verse, Campbell echoes sentiments which Frederick Douglass had expressed only a few years earlier: America is a lie so long as it does not practice the freedom it preaches. Slavery, Campbell says, is a "sterner tyrant" than the king who was overthrown. Man was created in God's image, but some are transformed "into merchandise" which is denied "God-given liberties." He continues:

We are not free! In every Southern State
Speech and the Press are fettered; — and for him
Who dares speak out, the martyr-fires await,
Or hangman's rope from tallest pine-tree's limb.
We are not free! One man in every seven,
Throughout our false Republic, groans beneath
The vilest despotism under heaven,
Which leaves no hope of freedom but in death.

Nearly four million in our land in chains!
One-half our country slave-land! and the whole
Man-hunting ground! And Kansas' virgin plains,
(Once pledged to Freedom,) under the control
Of the Slave Power! Say, Boaster, are we free?
See if the huge lie blister not your lips:
Where Slavery reigns, there Freedom cannot be!
Light vanishes beneath the sun's eclipse.

Woodworth and the hunters of Kentucky

2012-01-08T07:44:00.000-05:00

The Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815 was the final major battle of the War of 1812. The American victory pushed the British troops to withdraw from Louisiana. Commanding the battle was Andrew Jackson, future President of the United States. A significant portion of Jackson's troops were from Kentucky, mostly riflemen.

Some sources suggest that Kentucky poet Samuel Woodworth wrote his poem, "Hunters of Kentucky," immediately after the battle. It was certainly sung at a public commemoration of the battle about six years later.

Ye gentlemen and ladies fair,
   Who grace this famous city,
Just listen, if ye've time to spare,
   While I rehearse a ditty;
And for the opportunity,
   Conceive yourselves quite lucky,
For't is not often that you see,
   A hunter from Kentucky.
Oh! Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky,
   The hunters of Kentucky.

We are a hardy free-born race,
   Each man to fear a stranger,
Whate'er the game, we join in chase,
   Despising toil and danger;
And if a daring foe annoys,
   Whate'er his strength.and forces,
We'll show him that Kentucky boys
   Are "alligator horses."
Oh! Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky,
   The hunters of Kentucky.

I s'pose you've read it in the prints,
   How Packenham attempted
To make Old Hickory Jackson wince,
   But soon his scheme repented;
For we with rifles ready cocked,
   Thought such occasion lucky,
And soon around the general flocked
   The hunters of Kentucky.
Oh! Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky,
   The hunters of Kentucky.

You've heard, I s'pose, how New Orleans
   Is famed for wealth and beauty —
There's girls of every hue, it seems,
   From snowy white to sooty:
So Packenham he made his brags,
   If he in fight was lucky,
He'd have their girls and cotton bags,
   In spite of Old Kentucky.
Oh! Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky,
   The hunters of Kentucky.

But Jackson, he was wide awake,
   And was n't scared at trifles;
For well he knew what aim we take,
   With our Kentucky rifles;
So he led us down to Cypress swamp,
   The ground was low and mucky;
There stood John Bull, in martial pomp,
   And here was Old Kentucky.
Oh! Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky,
   The hunters of Kentucky.

A bank was raised to hide our breast,
   Not that we thought of dying,
But then we always like to rest,
   Unless the game is flying;
Behind it stood our little force —
   None wished it to be greater,
For every man was half a horse,
   And half an alligator.
Oh! Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky,
   The hunters of Kentucky.

They did not let our patience tire,
   Before they showed their faces —
We did not choose to waste our fire,
   So snugly kept our places;
But when so near we saw them wink,
   We thought it time to stop them;
And't would have done you good, I think,
   To see Kentucky pop them.
Oh! Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky,
   The hunters of Kentucky.

They found at last, 't was vain to fight
   Where lead was all their booty,
And so they wisely took to flight,
   And left us all the beauty.
And now, if danger e'er annoys,
   Remember what our trade is,
Just send for us Kentucky boys,
   And we'll protect you, ladies.
Oh! Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky,
   The hunters of Kentucky.

During his campaign for the presidency, Jackson used Woodworth's work as his campaign song. Jackson himself was nicknamed "the Hero of New Orleans" (Jackson himself was from Tennessee, not Kentucky).

Birth of Kirkland: it takes a full bag

2012-01-07T07:44:00.000-05:00

Joseph Kirkland was born in Geneva, New York on January 7, 1830. By age 5, however, he and his family relocated to Michigan. Inspired by their travels, his mother Caroline Kirkland published a book, A New Home. The family's attempts at settling in the west, however, failed and they eventually moved back to New York.

As Joseph Kirkland grew up, he moved to Chicago, joined the Union Army during the Civil War, and worked as a lawyer. He also became a writer, publishing his first book in 1887. Zury; The Meanest Man in Spring County, subtitled "A Novel of Western Life." Though set in Illinois, the novel makes a quick jab at Michigan and the Kirkland family's inability to be financially successful there, referring specifically to "when a Massychusetts caounterfeit one dollar bill wuz worth more than a ginuyne Michigan ten!"

The title character, Zury, certainly draws curiosity but Kirkland answers a reader's most important question in one of the book's chapters, "How the Meanest Man Got So Mean, and How Mean He Got." Much of it was the influence of his father Ephraim; the competed severely to save more money than the other. On his death bed, for example, Ephraim tells Zury he hopes to die on Thursday so that his funeral can be held on Sunday. That way, Zury doesn't have to go to mass twice and miss extra work. When Ephraim instead died on a Saturday, he held the funeral on Sunday anyway. Yet, despite his "meanness," Zury was not disliked and was noted for his honesty:

"Honest? Me? Wal, I guess so. Fustly, I wouldn't be noth'n' else, nohoaw; seck'ndly, I kin 'fford t' be, seein' 's haow it takes a full bag t' stand alone; thirdly, I can't 'fford t' be noth'n' else, coz honesty's th' best policy."

Hamlin Garland saw Kirkland's novel as the birth of a new nationalist type of literature. Zury, he said, "is completely unconventional" and had "not a trace of the old-world literature or society, — and every character is new and native."

Bryant: a day-dream by the dark blue deep

2012-01-05T07:44:00.001-05:00

Though he wrote it in Italy in 1858, William Cullen Bryant did not publish his poem "A Day-Dream" until 1861, when the New York Ledger included it in its issue for January 5. Inspired by a walk through Naples, the poem expresses Bryant's love of Italy and its seashore:

A day-dream by the dark-blue deep;
   Was it a dream, or something more?
I sat where Posilippo's steep,
   With its gray shelves, o'erhung the shore.

On ruined Roman walls around
   The poppy flaunted, for 'twas May;
And at my feet, with gentle sound,
   Broke the light billows of the bay.

I sat and watched the eternal flow
   Of those smooth billows toward the shore,
While quivering lines of light below
   Ran with them on the ocean-floor:

Till, from the deep, there seemed to rise
   White arms upon the waves outspread,
Young faces, lit with soft blue eyes,
   And smooth, round cheeks, just touched with red.

Their long, fair tresses, tinged with gold,
   Lay floating on the ocean-streams,
And such their brows as bards behold—
   Love-stricken bards — in morning dreams.

Then moved their coral lips; a strain
   Low, sweet and sorrowful, I heard,
As if the murmurs of the main
   Were shaped to syllable and word.

"The sight thou dimly dost behold,
   Oh, stranger from a distant sky!
Was often, in the days of old,
   Seen by the clear, believing eye.

"Then danced we on the wrinkled sand,
   Sat in cool caverns by the sea,
Or wandered up the bloomy land,
   To talk with shepherds on the lea.

"To us, in storms, the seaman prayed,
   And where our rustic altars stood,
His little children came and laid
   The fairest flowers of field and wood.

"Oh woe, a long, unending woe!
   For who shall knit the ties again
That linked the sea-nymphs, long ago,
   In kindly fellowship with men?

"Earth rears her flowers for us no more;
   A half-remembered dream are we;
Unseen we haunt the sunny shore,
   And swim, unmarked, the glassy sea.

"And we have none to love or aid,
   But wander, heedless of mankind,
With shadows by the cloud-rack made,
   With moaning wave and sighing wind.

"Yet sometimes, as in elder days,
   We come before the painter's eye,
Or fix the sculptor's eager gaze,
   With no profaner witness nigh.

"And then the words of men grow warm
   With praise and wonder, asking where
The artist saw the perfect form
   He copied forth in lines so fair."

As thus they spoke, with wavering sweep
   Floated the graceful forms away;
Dimmer and dimmer, through the deep,
   I saw the white arms gleam and play.

Fainter and fainter, on mine ear,
   Fell the soft accents of their speech,
Till I, at last, could only hear
   The waves run murmuring up the beach.

At the time of the poem's composition, the newly-bearded Bryant was relieved that his wife had recovered from an illness. He was also happily surrounded by friends (including the sojourning Nathaniel Hawthorne and family). By the time of its publication, the poet was absorbed in the coming conflict that became the Civil War. His poetry soon took a more political turn.

Death of Wynne: peculiarly ethereal

2012-01-04T07:44:00.000-05:00

Madeline Yale Wynne died on January 4, 1918. Today, she is mostly remembered as a leader in the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly in metalworking. However, she was also an author. Perhaps her most famous work remains the supernatural story "The Little Room," first published in 1895. Her final published work, however, was Si Briggs Talks (1917), a collection of character sketches in verse using Yankee dialect. The selections are fairly pointless doggerel, including "Black List":

I've jest seen Ed Buzzell's black-list.
   It's a caution to snakes!
      He keeps a list of all the folks to hate;
      Keeps it strictly up to date,
   'Cause he makes
Changes from time to time,
As 'fusion warrants, and
Won't trust his mem'ry.
      Now I 'm waitin'
To see a white-list;
But I guess folks don't keep 'em.
      Mebbe hatin'
Comes more natchral.

Though born in New York (the granddaughter of the inventor of the Yale lock), Wynne spent the majority of her life in Deerfield, Massachusetts, buying a home there in 1885 (she had separated from her husband and changed her married name from "Winn" to "Wynne"). Shortly after her death, a book was published in her honor: In Memory of Madeline Yale Lynne began with a short tribute by fellow author George Washington Cable. It reads, in part:

No brief phrase can possibly define the beautiful character and presence of Madeline Wynne. She was peculiarly ethereal without a hint of detachment from the tangible world by which she was surrounded, and which she loved for everything in it that was good and fair, or that rightfully called for understanding or sympathy. To her, life, all life, was unfailingly real and earnest, and even poignant. She saw everything with a beautifying and poetic vision, and so reflected it to others. She was one of the most joyous souls I ever came in touch with, and yet saw everything true. She did not merely prefer the bright side of things.

Bierce: A Cargo of Cats

2012-01-03T07:44:00.000-05:00

Ambrose Bierce was editor-in-chief of Wasp when the San Francisco magazine's January 3, 1885 issue published his short story "A Cargo of Cat." Presented as a true story (its original subtitle was "A True Story of the Mediterranean"), the tale follows a ship leaving Malta with a cargo of 127,000 cats — a cargo which resulted in "a good deal of trouble." Rather than tied in bundles, however, the felines are left loose in the hold. The first mate, worried they would be thirsty, hoses a supply of water with them. This decision caused the death by drowning of several thousand of them.

The gruesome tale is supposed to turn comical when the waterlogged cats begin to swell up. This "feline expansion" puts pressure on the body of the ship until planks begin to break free. Captain Doble, informed by the first-person narrator of this development, shows no concern. Then, suddenly, the surviving cats burst up like a volcano and clutch one another with their claws, making a huge column of cats pointing upwards like the ship's mast. No longer able to steer the ship, crew members fear the worst (and, further, have lost access to their food supplies below). The chaplain leads the crew in prayer — until the cats join in with their own hymn:

Each had a pretty fair voice, but no ear. Nearly all their notes in the upper register were more or less cracked and disobedient. The remarkable thing about the voices was their range. In that crowd were cats of seventeen octaves, and the average could not have been less than twelve... It was a great concert. It lasted three days and nights.

The cat calamity is ended when the ship passes the southern part of Italy. Seeing the boot shape, the cats fear they are about to be collectively kicked, and abandon ship.

The story reflects Bierce's own dislike of cats, but it also shows his dark humor. At the time he was editing The Wasp, he was also serializing bitingly witty definitions in a series he called The Devil's Dictionary.

Cranch: My mind did swoon

2012-01-02T07:45:00.004-05:00

Chrisopher Pearse Cranch — Transcendentalist, painter, and poet — did not publish his first book of poems until 1844. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, he frequently attended public speeches by major politicians of the day (and even claimed to witness the inauguration of John Quincy Adams). He went to Harvard Divinity School and started a long series of travels. It was in Cincinnati, Ohio, that he and James Freeman Clarke founded the Western Messenger as an outlet of Transcendentalism. Cranch's earliest poems were published in that journal as well as The Dial, and usually signed "C.P.C." One of those early poems, "Night and the Soul," was written on January 2, 1839:

I went to bed with Shakespeare's flowing numbers
      Within me chiming,
As I sank slowly to my pleasant slumbers,
      My thoughts with his were rhyming.

Out of the window I saw the moonlight shadows
      Go creeping slow;
The sheeted roofs of snow — the broad white meadows
      Lay silently below.

A few keen stars were kindly winking through
      The frost-dimmed panes,
And dreaming Chanticleer woke up and crew
      Far o'er the desolate plains.

But soon into the void abyss of sleep
      My mind did swoon;
I saw no more the broad house-shadows creep
      Beneath the silent moon.

I woke; the morning sun was mounting slowly
      O'er the live earth: —
Say, fancy, why the shade of melancholy
      Which then in me took birth?

Why does the night give to the spirit wings,
      Which day denies?
Ah, why this tyranny of outward things
      When brightest shine the skies?

My soul is like the flower that blooms by night,
      And droops by day;
Yet may its fruit expand, though in the light
      Night-blossoms drop away.

The visions thus in dreamy stillness cherished,
      Like dreams may fly;
But day's great acts, o'er thoughts that nightly perished,
      may ripen, not to die!

To give full time to his literary work

2011-12-31T07:45:00.001-05:00

The records at the Library of Congress are simple in recording the loss of one of its most talented employees: "Paul Laurence Dunbar, appointed from New York to position assistant in Reading Room, Library of Congress... Resigned December 31, 1898, to give full time to his literary work." Dunbar, who earned a $720 salary, left the job, after one year and two months.

His main motivation for the job was basic: he needed money. Though his poetry had been popular, he was financially strapped and, if he ever wanted to marry the beautiful Alice Ruth Moore, he had to secure an income. Dunbar also hoped that access to the great Library of Congress would enrich his mind and, in turn, his literary output. His time there, however, was ultimately not positive.

After putting in a full day's work, Dunbar would attempt to work on his writing from home (by this time, more prose than poetry) but found himself exhausted. Two months into the job, he wrote to a friend, "I am working very hard these days, so if it is only for the idle that the devil runs his employment bureau, I have no need of his services." Adding to his busy schedule, Dunbar was also traveling to give public recitations. His throat was beginning to suffer; he attributed the problem to the dusty books.

Dunbar also missed his home town of Dayton, Ohio and that is where he focused on his "full time" devotion to his "literary work." Unfortunately, however, that period would be short-lived. By 1900, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Six years later, he was dead at the age of 33.

While working at the Library of Congress, Dunbar was also writing The Uncalled, a semi-autobiographical novel. Here's one scene:

"I've been hard at work all my life."

"Eh, that so? You don't look like you'd done much hard work. What do you do?"

"I — I — ah — write," was the confused answer.

Perkins, fortunately, did not notice the confusion. "Oh, ho!" he said: "do you go in for newspaper work?"

"No, not for newspapers."

"Oh, you 're an author, a regular out-and-outer. Well, don't you know, I thought you were somehow different from most fellows I've met. I never could see how you authors could stay away in small towns, where you hardly ever see any one, and write about people as you do; but I suppose you get your people from books."

"No, not entirely," replied Brent, letting the mistake go. "There are plenty of interesting characters in a small town. Its life is just what the life of a larger city is, only the scale is smaller."

Guest post: Revealing Fanny Fern

2011-12-30T07:43:00.005-05:00

Fanny Fern’s famous first novel, Ruth Hall, was released amid much hoopla in December 1854. Fern, the pseudonym for Sara Willis Eldredge Farrington, had recently left Boston and had settled in New York to write, first for the Musical World and Times and then for the New York Ledger. In the few years leading to the release of her first novel, critics and fans unsuccessfully tried to learn her identity and gender. Speculation about just who Fanny Fern really was rose to a fever pitch, especially upon the much-awaited release of Ruth Hall. Mason Brothers, her publisher, struggled to print enough copies to meet the never-before-seen demand for an American novel, yet utilized one of the most-successful early advertising campaigns to fuel that demand. Early critics insisted on reading the novel as autobiographically-based, something Mason Brothers denied, even as they publicized these speculations.

When Fern left Boston, she left behind her first two editors. One of those, William U. Moulton, editor of the True Flag, made it clear that he was bitter and angry at Fern for several reasons. Moulton was not used to dealing with a business-minded woman and resented Fern’s requests for earnings increases (to bring her income closer to a living wage) and especially resented her “abandoning” Boston (and the True Flag) for the greater earning power and prestige to be had in New York City. Although Moulton gladly profited from Fern’s pithy writing when he had her under his commission, nevertheless, he seemed disturbed and annoyed that she failed to conform to conventional feminine expectations of the era.

On December 30, 1854, just a few weeks after Ruth Hall was released, Moulton did the unthinkable – he outted Fanny Fern. Moulton announced that Fern’s identity was that of Sara Willis Eldredge Farrington, the scandalized ex-wife of Boston merchant Samuel Farrington, and, moreover, posited that Ruth Hall was a biographically-based novel laced with unflattering and, perhaps, false, representations of her family and acquaintances, including Moulton himself and Fern’s famous poet/editor brother, N. P. Willis. Fern’s novel, indeed, was biographically-based, and she wrote it with the assurance of anonymity. But, once her identity was known, it wasn’t difficult for readers to identify possible true-life models for the novel’s characters. Fern was hurled to the critical, though fascinated, masses, which devastated her personally, but ultimately led to making her book a phenomenal success.

*Debra Brenegan teaches English and Women’s Studies at Westminster College in Missouri. She is the author of Shame the Devil (SUNY Press), a historical novel based on the life of nineteenth-century journalist, novelist and feminist, Fanny Fern.

Crane's Monster: an outrage on art and humanity

2011-12-29T07:44:00.000-05:00

Julian Hawthorne concluded the story was "an outrage on art and humanity" in his review published in the Philadelphia North American on December 29, 1899. The work in question was The Monster (either a lengthy short story or a short novella) by Stephen Crane, published earlier that year.

Crane's story follows a black coachman named Henry Johnson and his employers, the Trescott family. When the Trescott home catches fire, Johnson puts himself in danger and saves the boy, Jimmie. In doing so, however, Johnson is horrifically disfigured (all we are told is that he has "no face"; Crane is deliciously coy on details). The story then shifts to Dr. Trescott, the family patriarch, in dealing with the "monster" who saved the life of his son but now causes revulsion and horror among the townspeople. The story is told largely through the eyes of the judgmental, rumor-mongering townspeople. Ultimately, the story is one of oppression and of societal shunning — but not the shunning of Johnson. In fact, the monster himself becomes less and less a part of the story, with only one scene of actual dialogue after the fire.

Julian Hawthorne, the son of the famous novelist, immediately drew comparison with another book published some 80 years earlier: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. "What is a man to do with a monster which exists owing to his own efforts?" Hawthorne asks in his review. Like Shelley's book, the book is really asking the ethical questions surrounding not the monster, but the man behind the monster. And Crane, in a style reminiscent of his poetry, leaves massive gaps for the reader to fill in — particularly in its final scene. This style was not appreciated by Hawthorne: "And if you believe it, Crane leaves the matter... without the faintest pretense of doing anything whatever to relieve it!"

The real question in the story is this one, asked not coincidentally by the judge of the town:

...the judge said, suddenly, "Trescott, do you think it is —" As Trescott paused expectantly, the judge fingered his knife. He said, thoughtfully, "No one wants to advance such ideas, but somehow I think that that poor fellow ought to die."

There was in Trescott's face at once a look of recognition, as if in this tangent of the judge he saw an old problem. He merely sighed and answered, "Who knows?" The words were spoken in a deep tone that gave them an elusive kind of significance.

But it is not the death of the monster Henry Johnson that concerned Crane (who, incidentally, died about seven months later). These are the enigmatic last lines of the story that so angered Hawthorne — and the passage should convince you to go back and read the whole thing:

The wind was whining round the house, and the snow beat aslant upon the windows. Sometimes the coal in the stove settled with a crumbling sound, and the four panes of mica flashed a sudden new crimson. As he sat holding her head on his shoulder, Trescott found himself occasionally trying to count the cups. There were fifteen of them.

Timrod: the Southron and his English bride

2011-12-28T07:44:00.000-05:00

A poem came to Henry Timrod as an early Christmas gift; as he told a friend on Christmas day, "The Goddess knocked at my door... and handed me a poem titled 'Katie'." Within about a week of its composition The Charleston Mercury for December 28, 1861 published the love poem, "Katie":

It may be through some foreign grace,
And unfamiliar charm of face;
It may be that across the foam
Which bore her from her childhood's home,
By some strange spell, my Katie brought,
Along with English creeds and thought—
Entangled in her golden hair—
Some English sunshine, warmth, and air!
I cannot tell—but here to-day,
A thousand billowy leagues away
From that green isle whose twilight skies
No darker are than Katie's eyes.
She seems to me, go where she will,
An English girl in England still!

The "Katie" in question was Katie Godwin, a British woman who was also the sister of his own sister's husband. According to the poem, as she walks, nature responds and comes to life. They walk together through this pictorial scene, "through rippling waves of wheat" and "mats of clover sweet," first in an Ancient Saxon town, then in the town where she was born. Together they visit a church and other scenes from her youth ("Some spot that's sacred to her Past"). All the while, the world around is an ideal paradise:

Has not the sky a deeper blue,
Have not the trees a greener hue,
And bend they not with lordlier grace
And nobler shapes above the place
Where on one cloudless winter morn
My Katie to this life was born?
Ah, folly! long hath fled the hour
When love to sight gave keener power,
And lovers looked for special boons
In brighter flowers and larger moons.
But wave the foliage as it may,
And let the sky be ashen gray,
Thus much at least a manly youth
May hold—and yet not blush—as truth:
If near that blessed spot of earth
Which saw the cherished maiden's birth
No softer dews than usual rise,
And life there keeps its wonted guise,
Yet not the less that spot may seem
As lovely as a poet's dream...

Timrod, in the form of his narrator, soon realizes that he is a stranger in these lands across the sea and they are transported to his own native land in the American South. Bewitched by her beauty, he barely recognizes his homeland, however, and mistakes it for another town in England. This, he realizes, is precisely why he hopes she will join him there:

Such is the land in which I live,
And, Katie! such the soul I give.
Come! ere another morning beam,
We'll cleave the sea with wings of steam;
And soon, despite of storm or calm,
Beneath my native groves of palm,
Kind friends shall greet, with joy and pride,
The Southron and his English bride!

Timrod excused himself for the poem's highly romantic notions. As he described in a letter, "Katie and I are by no means on the lover-like terms implied in my verse. Nor indeed are we likely to become so." The real-life Katie was equally modest, noting that the poem "invested me with attributes I never possessed. Many is the time, that I have urged him to see me as I really was." Even so, Timrod and Katie Godwin married in February 1864.

Field: the bliss of one sweet kiss

2011-12-26T07:44:00.002-05:00

St. Louis-born poet and humorist Eugene Field dated his poem "A Song for the Christmas Wind" as December 26, 1885. In it, he personifies a gust of wind as it travels (the only indication it is Christmas is in the title):

As on my roving way I go
   Beneath the starlight's gleaming,
Upon a bank of feathery snow
   I find a moonbeam dreaming;
I crouch beside the pretty miss
   And cautiously I give her
My gentlest, tend'rest little kiss,
   And frown to see her shiver.
            Oho! Oho!
            On bed of snow
Beneath the starlight's gleaming,
            I steal the bliss
            Of one sweet kiss
From that fair friend a-dreaming.

I scamper up the gloomy street
   With wild, hilarious shrieking,
And each rheumatic sign I meet
   I set forthwith to creaking;
The sooty chimneys wheeze and sigh
   In dismal apprehension,
And when the rich man passes by
   I pay him marked attention.
            Oho! Oho!
            With gusts of snow
I love to pelt and blind him;
            But I kiss the curls
            Of the beggar-girls
Who crouch in the dark behind him.

In summer-time a posy fair
   Bloomed on the distant heather,
And every day we prattled there
   And sang our songs together;
And thither, as we sang or told
   Of love's unchanging glory,
A maiden and her lover strolled,
   Repeating our sweet story.
            "Oho! Oho!"
            We murmur low—
The maid and I, together;
            For summer 's sped
            And love is dead
Upon the distant heather.

Christmas: to bind them with the chain

2011-12-25T07:44:00.002-05:00

Elizabeth Margaret Chandler was born on Christmas Eve. Years later, she wrote her poem "Christmas." Typical for Chandler, the poem appeals directly to women. Also typical for Chandler, she infuses the poem with her Quaker-inherited anti-slavery sentiments:

Mother, when Christmas comes once more,
      I do not wish that you
Should buy sweet things for me again,
      As you were used to do:

The taste of cakes and sugar-plums
      Is pleasant to me yet,
And temptingly the gay shops look,
      With their fresh stores outset.

But I have learn'd, dear mother,
      That the poor and wretched slave
Must toil to win their sweetness,
      From the cradle to the grave.

And when he faints with weariness
      Beneath the torrid sun,
The keen lash urges on his toil,
      Until the day is done.

But when the holy angels' hymn,
      On Judea's plains afar,
Peal'd sweetly on the shepherds' ear,
      'Neath Bethlehem's wondrous star,

They sung of glory to our God,—
      "Peace and good will to men,"—
For Christ, the Saviour of the world,
      Was born amidst them then.

And is it for His glory, men
      Are made to toil,
With weary limbs and breaking hearts,
      Upon another's soil?

That they are taught not of his law,
      To know his holy will,
And that He hates the deed of sin,
      And loves the righteous still?

And is it peace and love to men,
      To bind them with the chain,
And sell them like the beasts that feed
      Upon the grassy plain?

To tear their flesh with scourgings rude,
      And from the aching heart,
The ties to which it fondliest clings,
      For evermore to part?

And 'tis because of all this sin, my mother,
      That I shun
To taste the tempting sweets for which
      Such wickedness is done.

If men to men will be unjust, if slavery must be,
Mother, the chain must not be worn; the scourge be plied for me.

As a side note, I found the last stanza, which switched from quatrain to couplet, very attention-grabbing. I couldn't find the original publication date for certain, but it was collected in 1836, two years after her death. Last year, my Christmas post featured Henry Timrod and the struggle to celebrate amidst Civil War.

Birth of Chandler: naught but changeless gloom

2011-12-24T07:44:00.003-05:00

Elizabeth Margaret Chandler was born in Centreville, Delaware on December 24, 1807. Her mother died two days later and her father, unable to care for his daughter, left her in the care of her grandmother in Philadelphia. He died when young Margaret was about 8 years old. At 16, she began publishing poems locally. By age 23, she moved to the Michigan Territory but died only four years later in 1834.

By 18, her writing became more serious as she focused on anti-slavery pieces — likely inspired by her Quaker background. One critic concluded Chandler was "the first American female author that ever made the Abolition of Slavery the principal theme of her active exertions."

Often, Chandler's poems directly appeal to womanly sensibilities. In one of her poems, a child asks, "What is a slave, mother?" The child does not believe that people can be bought and sold and children can be torn away from their parents. "Alas, yes, my child," the mother answers. The child concludes it is "a sinful thing" and only a "savage and wicked" land would allow it. According to contemporary sources, Chandler's most famous poem was "The Slave's Appeal":

Christian mother! when thy prayer
Trembles on the twilight air,
And thou askest God to keep,
In their waking and their sleep,
Those whose love is more to thee
Than the wealth of land or sea,
Think of those who wildly mourn
For the loved ones from them torn!

Christian daughter, sister, wife!
Ye who wear a guarded life—
Ye, whose bliss hangs not, like mine,
On a tyrant's word or sign,
Will ye hear, with careless eye,
Of the wild despairing cry,
Rising up from human hearts,
As their latest bliss departs!

Blest ones! whom no hands on earth
Dares to wrench from home and hearth,
Ye whose hearts are shelter'd well,
By affection's holy spell,
Oh, forget not those for whom
Life is naught but changeless gloom,
O'er whose days of cheerless sorrow,
Hope may paint no brighter tomorrow.

"Ruthless Hall" and the "chronicler of Idlewild"

2011-12-23T07:44:00.003-05:00

Mason Brothers knew they had a good thing in Fanny Fern when they asked her to write a novel to publish. When she started writing it, they knew it would be controversial — and also knew they could capitalize on that controversy. Still, even the Mason Brothers might have been surprised at just how successful Ruth Hall became.

Advertisements released before the book's publication predicted the book was "destined to make a sensation." Sure enough, within days of its release in December 1854, critics realized the book was mean-spirited ("Ruthless Hall," Grace Greenwood called her) and, more importantly, that it was autobiographical. Of course, the real problem was that one of the villains in the book, Hyacinth Ellet, was apparently based on "the chronicler of Idlewild," the very popular writer Nathaniel Parker Willis.

On December 23, 1854, the Mason Brothers began advertising that the author never claimed it was autobiography and that critics were looking for trouble. They never denied that it was Willis (it was, after all) but it wasn't their fault that critics recognized an unflattering portrait of that famous writer. The ads inevitably drew more attention to the controversy, and sales of the book skyrocketed, adding up to some 70,000 copies sold.

But the Mason Brothers could not have anticipated William U. Moulton, the former employer of Fanny Fern (and soon to become husband of author and poet Louise Chandler). His embittered response ended the controversy once and for all. More on that in just a few days.

Adams: December's face grows mild

2011-12-22T07:43:00.000-05:00

By Gilbert Stuart, 1818

The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in December 1620. After more than a century, people in Massachusetts wanted to commemorate the day, choosing December 22 in 1769. Originally called "Old Colony Day," it eventually was renamed as "Forefathers Day" and was typically celebrated in song. In 1803, a young United States Senator was chosen to write the song for that year. His name was John Quincy Adams, future President of the United States. His song was called "Hymn for the 22d of December":

When o'er the billow-heaving deep,
The fathers of our race,
The precepts of their God to keep,
Sought here their resting-place,

That gracious God their path prepared,
Preserved from every harm,
And still for their protection bared
His everlasting arm.

His breath, inspiring every gale,
Impels them o'er the main;
His guardian angels spread the sail,
And tempests howl in vain.

For them old ocean's rocks are smoothed;
December's face grows mild;
To vernal airs her blasts are soothed,
And all their rage beguiled.

When Famine rolls her haggard eyes,
His ever-bounteous hand
Abundance from the sea supplies,
And treasures from the sand.

Nor yet his tender mercies cease;
His over-ruling plan
Inclines to gentleness and peace
The heart of savage man.

And can our stony bosoms be
To all these wonders blind?
Nor swell with thankfulness to thee,
O Parent of mankind?

All-gracious God, inflame our zeal;
Dispense one blessing more;
Grant us thy boundless love to feel,
Thy goodness to adore.

Interestingly enough, Adams was not the only President who was also a recognized poet; James Garfield wrote several poems while in college, for example. Certainly, other writers were also politicians as well. There is even at least one White House servant who was an author.

Glory to our Southern cause

2011-12-21T07:44:00.000-05:00

Illustration of the Battle of Belmont, from Nineteenth Century Battles, 1900

The Battle of Belmont during the Civil War was fought in Missouri in November 1861. Just over a month later, the Memphis Appeal for December 21, 1861 included a poem titled "The Battle of Belmont" by J. Augustine Signaigo. Though historians today find no definitive winner, the Confederacy considered it a victory, as Signaigo shows in his poem:

Now glory to our Southern cause, and praises be to God,
That He hath met the Southron's foe, and scourged him with his rod:
On the tented plains of Belmont, in their might the Vandals came,
And they gave unto destruction all they found, with sword and flame;
But they met a stout resistance from a little band that day,
Who swore nobly they would conquer, or return to mother clay.

Signaigo, born in Italy in 1835, moved to Tennessee and founded a newspaper. He later wrote an operetta about the Civil War, The Vivandiere. In "The Battle of Belmont," one of several war poems he wrote, Signaigo names several soldiers individually, including some who died:

Let us think of those who fell there, fighting foremost with the foe,
And who nobly struck for Freedom, dealing Tyranny a blow:
Like the ocean beating wildly 'gainst a prow of adamant,
Or the storm that keeps on bursting, but cannot destroy the plant...

The battle resulted in the retreat of the Union Army, including then Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant. Signaigo says that their cowardice was so embarrassing, "their great grandchildren's children will be shamed to name that day." More importantly, the bravery shown by Confederates should be considered a warning to the Union and, further, should be considered proof that the Confederacy proceeds with divine blessing:

Let the horrors of this day to the foe a warning be,
That the Lord is with the South, that His arm is with the free;
That her soil is pure and spotless, as her clear and sunny sky.
And that he who dare pollute it on her soil shall basely die;
For His fiat hath gone forth, e'en among the Hessian horde,
That the South has got His blessing, for the South is of the Lord.

Then glory to our Southern cause, and praises give to God,
That He hath met the Southron's foe and scourged him with His rod;
That He hath been upon our side, with all His strength and might,
And battled for the Southern cause in every bloody fight;
Let us, in meek humility, to all the world proclaim,
We bless and glorify the Lord, and battle in His name.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!

2011-12-19T07:43:00.001-05:00

When frontiersman Daniel Boone died in 1820, he was buried in Missouri. Later, his remains were moved to Kentucky but several decades went by before a monument was placed over his new grave. Regardless of the controversy over Boone's burial and re-burial, a Kentucky writer named Theodore O'Hara thought the lack of a marker was inappropriate. So, he wrote "The Old Pioneer"; it was published on December 19, 1850:

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
Knight-errant of the wood!
Calmly beneath the green sod here
He rests from field and flood;
The war-whoop and the panther's screams
No more his soul shall rouse,
For well the aged hunter dreams
Beside his good old spouse.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
Hushed now his rifle's peal;
The dews of many a vanish'd year
Are on his rusted steel;
His horn and pouch lie mouldering
Upon the cabin-door;
The elk rests by the salted spring,
Nor flees the fierce wild boar.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
Old Druid of the West!
His offering was the fleet wild deer,
His shrine the mountain's crest.
Within his wildwood temple's space
An empire's towers nod,
Where erst, alone of all his race
He knelt to Nature's God.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
Columbus of the land!
Who guided freedom's proud career
Beyond the conquer'd strand;
And gave her pilgrim sons a home
No monarch's step profanes,
Free as the chainless winds that roam
Upon its boundless plains.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
The muffled drum resound!
A warrior is slumb'ring here
Beneath his battle-ground.
For not alone with beast of prey
The bloody strife he waged,
Foremost where'er the deadly fray
Of savage combat raged.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
A dirge for his old spouse!
For her who blest his forest cheer,
And kept his birchen house.
Now soundly by her chieftain may
The brave old dame sleep on,
The red man's step is far away,
The wolf's dread howl is gone.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
His pilgrimage is done;
He hunts no more the grizzly bear
About the setting sun.
Weary at last of chase and life,
He laid him here to rest,
Nor recks he now what sport or strife
Would tempt him further west.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
The patriarch of his tribe!
He sleeps—no pompous pile marks where,
No lines his deeds describe.
They raised no stone above him here,
Nor carved his deathless name—
An empire is his sepulchre,
His epitaph is Fame.

Incidentally, Boone's new grave is in Frankfort Cemetery, where O'Hara also is interred today after initial burial in the state of Georgia.

Reese: the battle done

2011-12-17T07:44:00.002-05:00

Lizette Woodworth Reese died on December 17, 1935 after a long career as a teacher and poet. She was one month shy of her 80th birthday. The Maryland native published her first poem in 1874 when she was 18 years old. Including her posthumous editions, she was the author of 14 books (not only poetry, but also memoir).

Reese earned many honors throughout her life, including election to Phi Beta Kappa and an honorary doctorate from Goucher College. Just a few years before her death, she was named poet laureate of Maryland. After her death, a large monument to her was placed on East 33rd Street in Baltimore.

Perhaps Reese's most famous poem was "Tears," a sonnet first published in 1899:

When I consider Life and its few years— ,
A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun;
A call to battle, and the battle done
Ere the last echo dies within our ears;
A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears;
The guests that past a darkening shore do beat;
The burst of music down an unlistening street—
I wonder at the idleness of tears.
Ye old, old dead, and ye of yesternight,
Chieftains, and bards, and keepers of the sheep,
By every cup of sorrow that you had,
Loose me from tears, and make me see aright
How each hath back what once he stayed to weep:
Homer his sight, David his little lad!

And just to add one more, this one is called "A December Rose":

A rose is a rose all times of the year.
I have one out in my garden there,
In the deep grass out by the gray old stair —
A breath of June in December drear.

Ah, but its red is a little sere,
And nipped by the frost in last night's air!
A rose is a rose all times of the year.
I have one out in my garden there.

So, when Love comes, he is counted dear,
With his reed at his lips, in June-tide fair,
A-piping sweet, or with wind-blown hair,
And tears in his eyes in December drear.
A rose is a rose all times of the year.

Howl, battle-cry, cheer, and congratulation

2011-12-16T07:44:00.008-05:00

Sidney Lanier was 25 years old and living in Alabama when he wrote Tiger Lilies, his only novel. He was living in Macon, Georgia, when he reported to a friend on December 16, 1867:

'Tiger Lilies' is just out, and has succeeded finely in Macon. I have seen some highly complimentary criticisms in a few New York papers on the book, and what was written in illustration of a very elaborate and deliberate theory of mine about plots of novels has been mistaken for the 'carelessness of a dreamy' writer; I would I knew some channel through which to put forth this same theory.

Though better known as a poet, Lanier had yet to publish a book of poetry by this time. In his preface, the author likens a new book to a baby. Unlike a newborn child, however, the book must enter the world fully mature, ready to "grasp swordhilt with chubby fingers" to defend its very existence. "A man has seventy years in which to explain his life," he wrote, "but a book must accomplish its birth and its excuse for birth in the same instant."

According to one contemporary reviewer, Tiger Lilies was "a spirited story of Southern life, beginning just before the war, and closing after the war." Its settings are in the mountains of Tennessee and the battlegrounds of Virginia (where the author himself had served as a Confederate soldier). But Lanier intended it to be a simple book: it is not about crime or murder, he wrote in his preface. "That it has dared to waive this interest," he explains, "must be attributed... wholly to a love, strong as it is humble, for what is beautiful in God's Nature and in Man's Art." Luckily, his method seemed appreciated. Only three months later, he told his friend a second edition was already planned.

Though much of the novel is enmeshed in the Civil War, modern critics are frustrated that Lanier makes little attempt to show the reality of war. In fact, Lanier's book was not as humble as his preface implied: the book was heavily loaded with symbolism (in one scene, a Confederate soldier shouts out a hurrah, before being shot in the mouth), making the comment about being a "dreamy writer" somewhat understandable. Perhaps his most visceral description on the battle field is the scene in which the "Rebel Yell" is presented:

From the right of the ragged line now comes up a single long cry, as from the leader of a pack of hounds who has found the game. This cry has in it the uncontrollable eagerness of the sleuth-hound, together with a dry harsh quality that conveys an uncompromising hostility. It is the irresistible outflow of some fierce soul immeasurably enraged, and it is tinged with a jubilant tone, as if in anticipation of a speedy triumph and a satisfying revenge. It is a howl, a hoarse battle-cry, a cheer, and a congratulation, all in one.

They take it up in the centre, they echo it on the left, it swells, it runs along the line as fire leaps along the rigging of a ship. It is as if some one pulled out in succession all the stops of the infernal battle-organ, but only struck one note which they all speak in different voices.

She sprang afraid, like a trembling maid

2011-12-14T07:45:00.000-05:00

While shopping in New York, the Wisconsin-born poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox saw an opal for the first time. A friend suggested she write a poem about the gem, saying he was compiling a poetry anthology with that theme. The next day, December 14, 1886, she wrote "The Birth of the Opal":

The Sunbeam loved the Moonbeam,
   And followed her low and high,
But the Moonbeam fled and hid her head,
   She was so shy—so shy.

The Sunbeam wooed with passion;
   Ah, he was a lover bold!
And his heart was afire with mad desire.
   For the Moonbeam pale and cold.

She fled like a dream before him,
   Her hair was a shining sheen,
And oh, that Fate would annihilate
   The space that lay between!

Just as the day lay panting
   In the arms of the twilight dim,
The Sunbeam caught the one he sought
   And drew her close to him.

But out of his warm arms, startled
   And stirred by Love's first shock,
She sprang afraid, like a trembling maid.
   And hid in the niche of a rock.

And the Sunbeam followed and found her
   And led her to Love's own feast;
And they were wed on that rocky bed.
   And the dying day was their priest.

And lo! the beautiful Opal—
   That rare and wondrous gem—
Where the moon and sun blend into one,
   Is the child that was born to them.

According to her autobiographical The Worlds and I, it took Wilcox "perhaps a half-hour's time" to write; she was paid $25 for it. It was printed without her name, however, and when it later appeared in her collection Poems of Pleasure, some readers demanded evidence that it was truly written by her.

The poem is oddly able to commingle traditional sentimentalist women's themes with an almost violent sexuality: the "bold" lover is the sun, which chases after the uninterested moon "with mad desire." He is described as loving her and having "warm arms"; she, on the other hand, never seems to return that love and is referred to as "cold." Her hope to stay away from the aggressive male figure, however, will soon be "annihilated." When she is finally caught, she first chooses to spring away and hide, afraid and startled by "Love's first shock" (presumably their first sexual encounter and the end of her virginity, here labeled by maidenhood). Only after this encounter (and another referred to as "Love's own feast") do they wed on a rocky bed.

Despite the title, "The Birth of the Opal" is more about the opal's conception rather than its birth. The salacious nature of the theme was furthered when Wilcox recited the poem at private parties and public gatherings while she herself was pregnant.

Through fortune's bitterest hour

2011-12-13T07:44:00.004-05:00

Photo by Randy Garsee, used with permission

The Charleston Academy of Music hosted an evening of "Dramatic Entertainment" on December 13, 1877 in support of the memorial fund for William Gilmore Simms, the Southern novelist/critic/poet who had died about seven years earlier. One year before his death, an aging Simms had written a special poem for the opening of the Academy, despite being essentially retired. Now, so long after his death, he was recognized as an important icon of South Carolina by the people of that state — including fellow writer and personal friend Paul Hamilton Hayne.

Hayne presented a long monody to Simms, simply titled in his collected works as "W. Gilmore Simms: A Poem." Somewhat shocked at how time has gone away so quickly, Hayne writes that "the past becomes the present to our eyes." The "dismal years" in between have been full of "anguished desolation," "veiled tears," and "despondent sighs." Their "curbless mirth" which once exited has since "vanished like wine-foam." But, summoning the "faithful eyes" that once beamed back at the assembled crowd, they remember the hero who can bring them back to happier days:

The man who toiled through fortune's bitterest hour,
As calmly steadfast and supremely brave,
As if above a fair life's tranquil wave.
Brooded the halcyon with unruffled breast;
The man whose sturdy frame upheld aright,
We meet, (O friends), to consecrate tonight!

In honoring Simms, Hayne recreates him in a form resembling a larger-than-life mythological warrior-poet: he was imbued with "imagination, robed in mystical flame" by angels and nymphs, who give him not only intellect but humor as well. Yet, all this manifested for one purpose according to Hayne:

All that he was, all that he owned, we know
Was lavished freely on one sacred shrine,
The shrine of home and country! from the first
Fresh blush of youth, when merged in sanguine glow,
His life-path seemed a shadowless steep to shine,
Leading forever upward to the stars...

Despite being "shadowless," however, Hayne acknowledges that Simms's life was full of "desperate and embittered strife." Still, Simms's soul was "unconquered and majestic" as he mad it his goal:

...not that he might rise
Alone and dominant; but that all men's eyes
Might view, perchance through much brave toil of his,
His country stripped of every filthy weed
Of crime imputed; in thought, word, and deed,
A noble people, none would dare despise.

The poem is, without a doubt, over the top (the italics above are his) and, to a degree, matches the same boisterous style of Simms's own poetry. Hayne refers to Simms as a "vanished genius," a "Titan" with "a Viking mien." When Simms's summoned spirit arises, Hayne refers to him as the "stalwart-statured Simms!" Certainly, the poem must have been inspirational enough to encourage monetary donations. The memorial fund eventually was large enough to commission a bust by John Quincy Adams Ward; it stands today at Battery Park in Charleston, South Carolina.

Riley on McCulloch: heroically voicing

2011-12-12T07:44:00.001-05:00

Oscar C. McCulloch moved to Indianapolis from Wisconsin at a terrible time in the state's history. Hurt by a bank panic, its citizens were poverty-stricken and despondent. Becoming the minister of the Plymouth Congregational Church in 1877, he wanted to do something. He soon became one of the strongest charity organizers the state had ever seen.

McCulloch emphasized the need to focus on individual suffering, and to find the causes of poverty and other obstacles in life in order to address them. One of those causes, he initially believed, was genetic (early on, he was an advocate of eugenics) before realizing that anyone can fall on hard times, regardless of background. Seeking inspiration from his religion, he often called upon Biblical stories and parables of Jesus. "We can do nothing, unless we see, as he saw, the divine humanity in each one,— broken, disfigured, deformed, all but obliterated," McCulloch once wrote. "This, and this only, gives the impulse to personal charity... As each blade of grass differs from each other, so each nature is different from each other." He further saw inspiration in literature and his speeches are full of references to Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and even Bret Harte.

When McCulloch died in 1891, Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley honored him with a poem for his funeral; it was printed in the Indianapolis Journal on December 12, 1891 (two days after McCulloch's death). Titled simply as "Oscar C. McCulloch," the poem asks its readers to avoid "sighs and tears" and, instead, honor him by continuing his work:

What would best please our friend, in token of
    The sense of our great loss?—Our sighs and tears?
Nay, these he fought against through all his years,
    Heroically voicing, high above
Grief's ceaseless minor, moaning like a dove,
    The paean triumphant that the soldier hears,
Scaling the walls of death, midst shouts and cheers,
    The old Flag laughing in his eyes' last love.

Nay, then, to pleasure him were it not meet
    To yield him bravely, as his fate arrives?—
Drape him in radiant roses, head and feet,
    And be partakers, while his work survives,
Of his fair fame,—paying the tribute sweet
    To all humanity—our nobler lives.

Everything you have heard, seen, or done

2011-12-10T07:44:00.001-05:00

I suppose it seems to you as it does to me that everything you have heard, seen, or done, since you opened your eyes on the world, is coming back to you sooner or later, to go into stories.

Thus wrote Mary Wilkins Freeman on December 10, 1889 to her friend and fellow writer Sarah Orne Jewett. In the preceding decade, the Halloween-born Freeman had become a prolific author – the beginning of her long career. Both Freeman and Jewett were soon to publish their most famous works: A New England Nun And Other Stories (1892) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), respectively.

Freeman was 37 years old when she wrote her letter to Jewett and, by then, had published over 50 short stories in about six years. It is unclear if any of them were as autobiographical as her quote suggests. Certainly, her work reflected her life in New England and following the traditions of that region. Inspired by the new realism literary movement, her writing paints pictures of ordinary people: editor Horace Scudder complimented her "truthfulness," and another critic praised her ability to show the "pathos and beauty of simple lives."

Years later in 1921, she wrote a short autobiographical essay about her first published work, "A Shadow Family." After winning a $50 prize with it, she indulged herself by buying new clothes (ashamedly admitting she only gave away one-tenth of it):

However, I give myself the tardy credit of being perfectly conscious, whether or not I have succeeded, in caring more in my heart for the art of my work than for anything else.

Forten: Their works shall live

2011-12-09T07:44:00.004-05:00

The Philadelphia-born Sarah Louisa Forten (a relative of the more famous Grimké sisters) was of many mixed races: Caucasian, African, and Native American. Her father was a supporter of William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator newspaper and her mother was a member of an anti-slavery society. As she grew up, Forten's home was opened to such well-known abolitionists as John Greenleaf Whittier.

Her own poems in support of the anti-slavery movement were published as early as 1831, often under the pseudonym "Ada." About the same time, "Ada" was used as the pen name of at least one other writer, leaving it difficult to authenticate some of Forten's works. One, "The Separation," is dated December 9, 1833 and was written after witnessing an abolitionist convention in Philadelphia, though the poem's content is not explicitly anti-slavery:

"Friend after friend departs."
And they are gone — that little band
Of friends — the firm and true!
We feel the void which absence makes,
With joy, and sorrow too.
We joy that duties call them forth,
Clad in an armor bright;
With shield of faith, their surest guard,
And sword of truth and light.
We bid God speed their parting steps,
And bless the righteous cause: —
Where'er the path of duty points,
May duty never pause.
And yet, we sorrow most of all
And from the heart deplore
That we perchance on earth again
May see these friends no more.
Their works shall live when other deeds,
Which ask a nation's fame,
Have sunk beneath Time's whelming wave,
Unhonored and unnamed.

Literary property will be as sacred as whiskey

2011-12-08T07:44:00.001-05:00

During a trip to Canada, admirers in Montreal threw a banquet for Mark Twain on December 8, 1881. He took the opportunity to lash out against Canadian publishers pirating the works of authors in the United States.

I did not come to Canada to commit crime — this time — but to prevent it. I came here to place myself under the protection of the Canadian law and secure a copyright... This is rather a cumbersome way to fence and fortify one's property against the literary buccaneer, it is true; still, if it is effective, it is a great advantage upon past conditions, and one to be correspondingly welcome.

The real reason for Twain's trip, as he alludes to here, is to secure Canadian copyright for his book The Prince and the Pauper. One Canadian publisher alone, Belford Brothers, published some twenty editions of Twain's works, without paying royalties, and usually listing a cover price cheaper than authorized editions. Worse still, they were distributing not only in Canada but in the United States as well, making them a major competition. When he complained, the publisher told him "the law allows us to pirate them."

At least one biographer of "Samuel Clemens" notes that he took the pseudonym "Mark Twain" as a sort of trademark symbol that had better protection than copyright. But circumventing law was not the real issue. Piracy was a moral concern, and one in which governments should become involved.In his speech in Montreal, Twain tried to make his point using his characteristic humor:

It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. In this age of ours, if you steal another man's label to advertise your own brand of whiskey with, you will be heavily fined and otherwise punished for violating that trademark; if you steal the whiskey without the trademark, you go to jail; but if you could prove that the whiskey was literature, you can steal them both, and the law wouldn't say a word. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.

*Much of the information for this post comes from Writing 'Huck Finn': Mark Twain's Creative Process (1992) by Victor A. Doyno.

One of the nation's most valuable assets

2011-12-07T07:44:00.002-05:00

His intention was to speak before Congress, but Mark Twain was not given the floor on December 7, 1906. Instead, he asked for the use of the office of the Speaker of the House, Joseph Gurney Cannon. There, surrounded by blue tobacco smoke, members of Congress visited Twain to hear him out. As he wrote in a letter that day, his desire was to "talk to the members, man by man, in behalf of the support, encouragement and protection of one of the nation's most valuable assets and industries — its literature." The subject in question was, more specifically, copyright.

Twain was part of a delegation of authors and publishers lobbying on behalf of a bill that would extend copyright on a published work beyond the lifetime of the author for another 50 years. It would have included protection not only of literary works but also of musical works.

Though he was not the head of the delegation, he was certainly among its most prominent members. Others included publisher Richard Rogers Bowker (vice-president of the American Copyright League), Edward Everett Hale (chaplain of the Senate, who noted his own work The Man Without a Country was already out of copyright while he was yet living), Thomas Nelson Page, and composer John Philip Sousa, among others.

Though Twain could not speak on the floor of Congress, he offered a statement supporting the bill to a committee. "I like that bill," he said, "...I think it is just. I think it is righteous, and I hope it will pass without reduction or amendment of any kind." He notes that a certain law dictates, "Thou shalt not steal." But, he wrote, "the laws of England and America do take away property from the owner."

The vote on the bill did not come up that session. Interestingly enough, it was during this trip to Washington, D.C. that Mark Twain debuted his now-iconic white suit. Newspaper reports focused not on Twain's lobbying, but his odd choice of winter apparel.

Stedman: the Guest of the Evening

2011-12-06T07:43:00.000-05:00

When the New York-based Authors Club honored Edmund Clarence Stedman on December 6, 1900, it was done specifically to recognize the completion of his An American Anthology. The book was meant as an exhaustive study of American poetry in the century just ended; it remains impressive today. Even so, by then the Connecticut native had already left an impressive trail of literary criticism, biography, scholarship, copyright advocacy — and a few poems of his own.

That evening, Stedman addressed the rumor that the night marked his retirement from literature. "This would be exceptionally hard to do," he noted, admitting that he finally had enough leisure time to think about future writings. He never dreamed that he would ever "voluntarily cease from trying to perform the labor" — even now in his elder years. He went on:

Which of us toiler of the pen, if born with the art to write, does not know that it is as the last analysis of his love, his wealth, his religion, his solace, and that to it he must return, for better or worse, again and again, so long as breath is in him?

During this reception, a toast in the form of a poem was written by Stedman's friend Charles Henry Webb (who was but a few months younger than Stedman). It was titled "To the Guest of the Evening":

Dear Edmund, when I count the years
    That over us have rolled,
It seems to me I must be young,
    And only thou art old.
For, yet a private in the ranks,
    At best I close the rear,
Whilst thou dost ride in front bestarred, —
    A mounted Brigadier...

Ah, dearest friend and poet, best
    Of all who woo the muse,
I am not envious, but I'd like
    To stand there in thy shoes.
While all this mighty guild press round
    With words of love and praise,
None baying at thy heels, but all
    Enwreathing thee with bays.

And well they may, for hast thou not
    Been generous to them,
To each extending the glad hand
    And not thy garments' hem?
To thee they twang their rusty harps,
    Old men, and wonder why
Thou stretchest too the helping hand
    To youngsters such as I.

If asked, Webb writes, why Stedman performs these duties, offering always "the helping hand" or "words of cheer," he should be compared to zoo animals: Why do lions and tigers bark and bite? It is in their nature. Further, Stedman is presented as someone who is kind to all ("women as well as men"). Webb concludes that "I will drink":

A cup to him who from his heart
Pours Poesy's choicest wine,
And as a critic never wrote —
Or thought — one unkind line.

Birth of Bennett: Hats off!

2011-12-05T07:43:00.006-05:00

The US flag had 35 stars when Bennett was born.

Henry Holcomb Bennett was born in Chillicothe, Ohio on December 5, 1863. After graduating from Kenyon College in 1886, he moved west to work in the railroad business before returning to his home town as a journalist. By 1897, he left journalist to focus on more creative writing, including short stories and poems (he also often illustrated his own works; he was a landscape painter as well). His other nonfiction work included essays about military life, Ohio history, and ornithology.

Bennett's most famous work remains his patriotic poem "The Flag Goes By," which was immediately included in several students' readers around the turn of the century. It is still taught in some Ohio schools:

Hats off!
Along the street there comes
A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums,
A flash of color beneath the sky:
Hats off!
The flag is passing by!

Blue and crimson and white it shines,
Over the steel-tipped, ordered lines.
Hats off!
The colors before us fly;
But more than the flag is passing by.

Sea-fights and land-fights, grim and great,
Fought to make and to save the State:
Weary marches and sinking ships;
Cheers of victory on dying lips;

Days of plenty and years of peace;
March of a strong land's swift increase;
Equal justice, right and law;
Stately honor and reverend awe;

Sign of a nation, great and strong
To ward her people from foreign wrong:
Pride and glory and honor,— all
Live in the colors to stand or fall.

Hats off!
Along the street there comes
A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums;
And loyal hearts are beating high:
Hats off!
The flag is passing by!

Splendid blossoming promise of future fruits

2011-12-03T07:43:00.001-05:00

She was born "Anne Drinker" on December 3, 1827, but her poetry is better known through her pen name "Edith May." She started writing in the 1840s and saw her works published in various newspapers and magazines. Her friends and fans insisted she publish a book and, accordingly, Poems by Edith May was released in 1850 in a high quality, expensive edition. A cheaper version was published four years later. The poet, editor, and frequent supporter of new talent, Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote the introduction to the book, and noted that these early works should be considered "promises" that better work was to come: "They are literally the fore-reachings of genius which anticipate the teachings of experience." Anthologist Rufus W. Griswold agreed, noting she was among the "most brilliant of our younger poets," but that a "critical reader" would see "splendid blossoming promise of future fruits."

Edith May's poem "A Song for Autumn":

Frighten the bird from the tasselled pine,
   Where he sings like a hope in a gloomy breast;
Tread down the blossoms that cling to the vine,
   Winnow the blooms from the mountain's crest;
Let the balm-flower sleep where the small brooks twine,
And the golden-rod treasure the yellow sunshine.

Muffle the bells of the faint-lipped waves;
   Let the red leaves fall; let the brown fawn leap
Through the golden fern; in the weedy caves
   Let the snake coil up for his winter sleep.
Let the ringed snake coil where the earth is drear,
Like a grief that grows cold as the heart grows sere.

Pluck down the rainbow; make steadfast the throne
   Of the star that was faint in the summer night;
Let the white daughters of wave and sun
   Weep as they cloister the pale, pale light;
Let the mist-wreaths brood o'er the valley-bound rills,
And the sky trail its mantle far over the hills.

Plunder the wrecks of the forest, and blind
   The waters that picture its ruinous dome.
Wildly, oh wildly, most sorrowful wind!
   Chant, like a prophet of terror to come—
Like a Niobe stricken with infinite dread,
Leave the spirit of Beauty alone with her dead.

Throne the white Naiad that filleth her urn
   At the fount of the sun; on the curtain of night
Paint wild Auroras like visions that burn,
   Rosy Auroras, like dreams of delight
Mantle the earth, fold the robe on her breast,
While the sky, like a seraph, hangs over her rest.

The "promise" seen by Willis and Griswold was never fulfilled. As one newspaper reported, she soon "lost her reason" and was institutionalized in an asylum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (where the poet Charles Fenno Hoffman was also sent). She was finally released in 1885 in died, forgotten despite her early promise, in 1903.

No more shall they in bondage toil

2011-12-02T07:43:00.000-05:00

On December 2, 1861, the New York Tribune published the words to a song which had been overheard by escaped enslaved people at Fortress Monroe in Virginia (recently named a National Park unit). It soon became well-known among both white and black Americans. The newspaper gave it the title "Let My People Go: A Song of the 'Contrabands,'" though it is also called "Go Down, Moses":

When Israel was in Egypt's land,
               O let my people go!
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
               O let my people go!

Chorus: O go down, Moses,
               Away down in Egypt's land;
               And tell King Pharaoh
               To let my people go!

Thus saith the Lord bold Moses said,
               O let my people go!
If not, I'll smite your first-born dead,
               O let my people go!

No more shall they in bondage toil,
               O let my people go!
Let them come out with Egypt's spoil,
               O let my people go!

Then Israel out of Egypt came
               O let my people go!
And left the proud oppressive land,
               O let my people go!

O 'twas a dark and dismal night,
               O let my people go!
When Moses led the Israelites,
               O let my people go!

'Twas good old Moses, and Aaron, too,
               O let my people go!
'Twas they that led the armies through,
               O let my people go!

The Lord told Moses what to do,
               O let my people go!
To lead the children of Israel through,
               O let my people go!

O come along, Moses, you'll not get lost,
               O let my people go!
Stretch out your rod and come across,
               O let my people go!

As Israel stood by the water side,
               O let my people go!
At the command of God it did divide,
               O let my people go!

When they had reached the other shore,
               O let my people go!
They sang a song of triumph o'er,
               O let my people go!

Pharaoh said he would go across,
               O let my people go!
But Pharaoh and his host were lost,
               O let my people go!

O Moses, the cloud shall cleave the way,
               O let my people go!
A fire by night, a shade by day,
               O let my people go!

You'll not get lost in the wilderness,
               O let my people go!
With a lighted candle in your breast,
               O let my people go!

Jordan shall stand up like a wall,
               O let my people go!
And the walls of Jericho shall fall,
               O let my people go!

Your foe shall not before you stand,
               O let my people go!
And you'll possess fair Canaan's land,
               O let my people go!

'Twas just about in harvest time,
               O let my people go!
When Joshua led his host Divine,
               O let my people go!

O let us all from bondage flee,
               O let my people go!
And let us all in Christ be free,
               O let my people go!

We need not always weep and mourn,
               O let my people go!
And wear these Slavery chains forlorn,
               O let my people go!

This world's a wilderness of woe,
               O let my people go!
O let us on to Canaan go,
               O let my people go!

What a beautiful morning that will be!
               O let my people go!
When time breaks up in eternity,
               O let my people go!

Bryant and Dana: the stamp of your mind

2011-11-30T07:43:00.005-05:00

The poet/novelist/critic Richard Henry Dana had written to William Cullen Bryant, praising his poem "The Tides." From his home in Roslyn, New York, Bryant wrote back on November 30, 1867:

I am glad that you can speak so well of my little poem, 'The Tides.' It was written in the mood in which I produce what seem to me my best verses; and I therefore was once quite disappointed when a friend told me that a person in whose judgment he seemed to have much reliance had told him that there was not much in it.

The poem, written in 1860, is about the relationship between the moon and the tides of a "restless Sea." It is a constant struggle for the tides as they reach to the moon: "Each wave springs upward, climbing toward the fair / Pure light that sits on high." Though the tide never reach their goal, they continue trying again day after day.

Both Dana and Bryant were greatly respected at this point in their careers, but they were also getting old (both were born in the previous century). Bryant reassured his friend that his life had been worthwhile: "I do not think that you ought to look, as you say, upon your life as a melancholy waste. You have impressed the stamp of your mind upon American literature, and have helped to make it what it is, and what it will yet be."

Yet, despite his reassurances, Bryant himself was equally despondent. He admitted that he had "little to say" about his life and only rarely ventured into the city. "I am in the main cheerful, but with some sad hours, and life to me has lost much of its flavor." Bryant also mentioned he was "trifling" with Homer (who he admits is not as perfect as critics say). In fact, in the following decade, Bryant would dedicate much of his time to translating both The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Birth of Grace King: what I can get

2011-11-29T07:43:00.000-05:00

Grace Elizabeth King was born on November 29, 1852 in New Orleans, the third of what became seven children (her birth year has been listed variously as 1851 and 1853, but 1852 seems to be correct).

King, whose own writings include a history of Louisiana and one more specifically about New Orleans, met literary celebrities as varied as Julia Ward Howe, Joaquin Miller, and Mark Twain. Part Creole, she wrote many stories celebrating Creole culture. Among her earliest works was "Monsieur Motte," which was originally rejected by Richard Watson Gilder of Century Magazine before being accepted for the New Princeton Review in January 1886 with the help of Charles Dudley Warner. In that story, she paints a vivid picture of New Orleans life:

They were all dressed in calico dresses made in the same way, with very full, short skirts, and very full, short waists, fastened, matronfashion, in front. They all wore very tight, glossy, fresh, black French kid boots, with tassels or bows hanging from the top. With big sun-bonnets, or heavily veiled hats on their heads, thick gloves on their hands, and handkerchiefs around their necks, they were walking buttresses against the ardent sun. They held their lunch baskets like bouquets, and their heads as if they wore crowns. They carried on conversations in sweet, low voices, with interrupting embraces and apostrophic tendernesses : —

"Chère!"

"Chérie!"

"Ange!"

"M'amie!"

King lived to be 79 years old. In 1901, at the age of 49, however, she wrote: "Birthdays come to me now with increasing forceful admonition to enjoy all the pretty things I have and get the most of our time. There is no use waiting for any more future — preparations are all done and over — the future has come, and if this present is the thing for which my whole past has been a preparation, then I had better take what I can get."

*For the information in this post, I turned to Grace King: A Southern Destiny (1983) by Robert Bush.

Mr and Mrs Taylor: glad words

2011-11-28T07:43:00.000-05:00

"These will be glad words for thee to read, I know, because they are probably the last I shall write to thee from San Francisco," wrote Bayard Taylor on November 28, 1849. The recipient of the letter, Mary Agnew, was engaged to become his wife and hadn't seen Taylor in months. Taylor was in California as a correspondent for the New York Tribune amidst the gold rush. "The stay here has been in the highest degree valuable to myself," he wrote.

He warned Agnew, however, that he would travel through Mexico on his way home, which would deter him for four weeks longer; he predicted he would not see her until February. He assured her he would be safe during the trip. In fact, Taylor made a career off of traveling for the rest of his life, in one form or another. As he broke down his experience as a sojourner in the west in this letter to his betrothed:

I wish thou couldst see me as I am now, — fat, brown, and rough as a mountaineer, heavier by fifteen pounds than I ever was before, and with the rugged feeling of health and strength I have so long coveted. I am fitted for three years' encagement in New York, without grumbling. I can make glorious use of my rough experience in this country, as thou shalt see anon. It will give me such a lift as I could not have attained by years of labor at home.

Sure enough,Taylor wrote of his experience in El Dorado; or, Adventures in the Path of Empire, which is said to have sold 10,000 copies in its first two weeks. "My life is not all roughness here," he assured Agnew. He described the "warm, genial airs, skies soft and blue, sunsets far surpassing Italy, mountains green with springing grass, and glorious moonlights" of life in California. In fact, the experience was invigorating to his health: "Heaven has greatly blessed me, while nearly every one I know has been more or less ill. I have enjoyed from the first the most vigorous and exulting health."

After returning home, Bayard Taylor and Mary Agnew married in October 1850, though she was already sick with the disease that would kill her. "My future has tumbled into ruin," he wrote to his friend George Henry Boker shortly before his wife's death. Their married life lasted about two months.

Eugene Field: A Fool

2011-11-26T07:43:00.002-05:00

Certainly, Eugene Field did write a few serious poems but, for the most part, he was a humorist. Though it's easy to label his work as "children's literature," his type of silly humor can be appreciated by people of all ages (some of his work can even be frustrating). Though a Missouri-born writer, Field later admitted his home town of St. Louis was an "ineffably uninteresting city" and claimed he was "a Yankee by pedigree and education."

True, Field's father was from Vermont and, after the death of his mother when he was about 6 years old, young Eugene was taken to Amherst, Massachusetts. He grew up there and in Newfane, Vermont, raised by family members. Later, he had a short stint at a college in Massachusetts, though he eventually transferred to a school in Missouri (or "Poor Old Mizzoorah," as he called it).

Field was lucky to have his humor, despite his odd, semi-orphaned displacement. Though he claimed he was himself a Yankee, he was a born Southerner, and often remarked on the strange influence of Puritanism in New England. His recollections of religious life in that area brought with it memories of cold and drafty meeting-houses, and uncomfortable, straight-backed chairs ("o, so hard," he recalled).

Eventually, Field moved to Chicago, and it was here that he wrote a short humorous verse titled "The Fool," dated November 26, 1886:

A Fool, when plagued by fleas by night,
Quoth: "Since these neighbors so despite me
I think I will put out the light
And then they cannot see to bite me!"

Thanksgiving Pie: a great moral crusade

2011-11-24T07:44:00.001-05:00

William L. Alden was born in Massachusetts but, when his father was named president of Jefferson College in southwestern Pennsylvania, he became a student there as well. He became a lawyer and journalist and wrote short humor pieces and children's stories. Many of his works were published in the New York Times, including his sketch about "Thanksgiving Pie" (circa 1877).

This illustration is from Alden's book Among the Freaks

Calling Thanksgiving "the one national festival which is peculiarly and thoroughly American," founded by colonists in New England. Because of this important distinction, Alden writes, Americans should be careful that their celebration is beyond reproach. Only one aspect of that holiday, he warns, remains which is "barbarous," "deadly," and "demoralizing" — he refers, of course, to pie.

Even an innocent palate, Alden warns, is easily entrapped by the cunningly lavish nature of this food. The maker of the pie is not deliberately wicked, merely thoughtless, to place such temptation on the table. A grown man easily "abandons all self-restraint," but Alden worries for young people, who are so easily corrupted. "How can we wonder that children who are thus tempted to acquire the taste for pie by their own parents grow up to be shameless and habitual consumers of pie!" If evidence is needed, consider how many children have a stomach ache the next day after Thanksgiving. Alden concludes with an impassioned appeal:

All the efforts of good men and women to stay the torrent of pie which threatens to engulf our beloved country will be in vain, unless the reform is begun at the Thanksgiving dinner-table. Pie must be banished from that otherwise innocent board, or it is in vain that we try to banish it from shops, restaurants, and hotels. May we not hope for a great moral crusade which will sweep pie from every virtuous table, and unite all the friends of morality in a vigorous and persistent attack upon the great evil of the land.

Birth of Saltus: it is new

2011-11-23T07:43:00.000-05:00

Born in New York on November 23, 1849, Francis Saltus Saltus became an accomplished linguist, musician, poet, and humorist. His first foray into literature came in 1873 when he published Honey and Gall. After that, his pen never stopped. One posthumous review of his work claimed he could dash off six sonnets in a single sitting; when he died, he left some 5,000 unpublished pieces.

Saltus wrote several volumes of poetry, a humorous history of the United States (among other comedic works), a few plays, and scored a few operas, including comic operas. He was a main character in Bohemian 19th-century New York, though his work was never particularly famous nationwide. One critic blamed his subject matter and style. Saltus was, after all, influenced by the "strangely weird work" of French poets like Baudelaire and Gautier. He also had a fondness for drink, particularly absinthe; in fact, he wrote an entire series of poems dedicated to alcohol.

For his birthday, however, perhaps it is best to focus on his humor. His poem, "The Modern Critic" (1895):

With pompous mien and all-important air,
   He'll say your views are premature and rash,
And with a grave grandiloquence declare
   That all the verse of later years is trash.

To satisfy his most aesthetic mind,
   In all the modern work he labors through,
He grieves to state he really cannot find
   One worthy line, one thought supremely new.

He calmly adds that it appears to him
   There's lack of power in overrated Keats,
That Shelley's very commonplace and dim,
   That Tennyson the same old song repeats.

You ask: "And Swinburne?" Well, he has some fire,
   He will allow; "but then so very crude."
"Browning?"—" Bah! verbose, of his style you tire."
   "Hugo?"—" A bard of second magnitude."

"Longfellow?"—" Dabbles in all kinds of verse."
   "Lowell?"—" A fraud, and so was Bryant, too.
They do not write," he cries, "in language terse,
   As real and god-born poets always do."

Then he will say, to your surprise,
   That Whittier is a rhymester, very low;
And finally, will harshly criticise
   The morbid ravings of that " crazy Poe."

"Rosetti?"—" Never made a decent rhyme,"
   He shrieks, while Bret Harte has no lofty flight.
"Byron?"—" A loon, he never was sublime."
   "And William Morris?" "Don't know how write."

And as he talks it seems as if the air
   Were tinted red with Tennysonian gore;
While bits of lacerated Baudelaire
   Seem to exist and quiver on the floor.

And as you gasp and dare not add a word,
   This critic gently smiles and says to you:
"I wrote a poem which you never heard;
   I think you will admire it—it is new."

Fortune and Turner: I will be free!

2011-11-22T07:43:00.000-05:00

Timothy Thomas Fortune published his poem "Nat Turner" in the Cleveland Gazette on November 22, 1884. Certainly, Fortune would have felt a kinship with Nat Turner. Fortune was himself born enslaved in Florida, about a half a century after Nat Turner's birth. Turner led a bloody slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831. He was executed only a few months later. The two men were never alive at the same time.

In Fortune's poem, Turner is a larger-than-life heroic figure. A reader can't help but admire and fear Turner, whose eyes flash with fire as he makes only one strong demand (or prediction): "I will be free!" Tension is built in part by the changing pattern of lines in each stanza:

He stood erect, a man as proud
As ever to a tyrant bowed
Unwilling head or bent a knee,
And longed while bending to be free:
And o’er his ebon features came—
A shadow ’twas of manly shame—
Aye, shame that he should wear a chain
And feel his manhood withered with pain.
Doomed to a life of plodding toil,
Shamefully rooted to the soil!

He stood erect; his eyes flashed fire;
His robust form convulsed with ire;
“I will be free! I will be free!
Or, fighting, die a man!” cried he.

Virginia’s hills were lit at night—
The slave had risen in his might;
And far and near Nat’s wail went forth.
To South and East, and West and North,
And strong men trembled in their power.
And weak men felt ’twas now their hour.

“I will be free! I will be free!
Or, fighting, die a man!” cried he,
The tyrant’s arm was all too strong,
Had swayed dominion all too long;
And so the hero met his end,
As all who fail as Freedom’s friend.

The blow he struck shook Slavery’s throne:
His cause was just, e’en skeptics own;
And round his lowly grave soon swarmed
Freedom’s brave hosts for Freedom’s armed.

That host was swollen by Nat’s kin
To fight for Freedom, Freedom win,
Upon the soil that spurned his cry:
“I will be free, or I will die!”

Let tyrants quake, e’en in their power,
For sure will come the awful hour
When they must give an answer, why
Heroes in chains should basely die,
Instead of rushing to the field
And courting battle ere they yield?

Dodge: noble and enterprising

2011-11-20T07:44:00.002-05:00

In the preface to her book Hans Brinker, or, The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland, Mary Mapes Dodge wrote it aimed "to combine the instructive features of a book of travels with the interest of a domestic tale." The preface is dated November 20, 1865. Among the most famous in the novels is the story of a young boy who plugs a leaking dam with his finger.

Dodge intentionally wrote the book for children, but worked hard to stay true to Dutch legends. She studied the work of well-known writers of Dutch history, literature, and art, while also contacting friends in Holland to tell their own stories. One of her hopes was that others would come to appreciate Dutch culture and recognize its people as "noble and enterprising."

In the book, the reader is first introduced to the titular "silver skates" in chapter three. Hans Brinker and his sister Gretel are poor children suffering in the cold December weather in Holland. Like everyone in town, young and old, they skate on the frozen canal as an easy method of transportation. The two Brinker children, however, have cheap wooden skates they made themselves that don't work very well before becoming water-logged. When they hear of a children's skating race and the prize of beautiful silver skates, they want to take part, but know they can't. Then, a local teenager named Hilda offers them money, but only enough to buy one pair of skates.

Hans wants Gretel to take the money; she wants him to have it. But they also know they should not accept the valuable gift. Hilda offers to use the money as payment in exchange for Gretel crafting one of her beautiful wooden necklaces. For this reason, Hans says the new skates should be Gretel's:

"No, Gretel," he answered at last, "I can wait. Some day I may have money enough saved to buy a fine pair. You shall have these."

Gretel's eyes sparkled; but in another instant she insisted, rather faintly: "The young lady gave the money to you, Hans. I'd be real bad to take it."

Hans insists that she keep it and buy new skates. Sure enough, a few paragraphs later, another wooden necklace is commissioned and both Hans and Gretel have nice, metal skates. The story is sappy, featuring two children in the poorest of conditions, yet not even slightly bothered by their situation. They are modest, loving, and kind (to the point of being unrealistic). And the race for the prized silver skates is much later in the book.

Death of Lazarus: can these dead bones live?

2011-11-19T07:43:00.002-05:00

Emma Lazarus was only 38 years old when she died in New York City on November 19, 1887. The cause of death is presumed to be Hodgkin's lymphoma. Though she died at a young age, her career began early: she published her first book at the age of 17.

Lazarus's Jewish family had been in the United States for generations, but she felt a kinship with incoming immigrants, especially those fleeing from Russia. It was that sentiment that inspired her most famous poem, "The New Colossus," which helped raise funds for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. It was not the poem read at the statue's dedication though, decades after her death in 1903, its lines were inscribed on the pedestal.

Shortly after her death, Lazarus's sister Josephine helped compile an anthology of her poems. In the biographical introduction, Josephine notes her sister's desire for privacy and hesitated "to lift the veil and throw the light upon a life so hidden and a personality so withdrawn as that of Emma Lazarus." But, Lazarus was "a born singer," she writes, and "poetry was her natural language, and to write was less effort than to speak." Josephine notes, however, that this "singing" was not "like a bird," singing for "the joy of being alive." Instead, Lazarus felt suffering in the world and in her own life. According to Josephine, her sister was defined by her religion, her culture, and her sex, and those details directed her poems. Referring to work left unfinished, Josephine concludes her biographical sketch with questions: "And now, at the end, we ask, Has the grave really closed over all these gifts? Has that eager, passionate striving ceased, that hunger and thirst which we call life, and 'is the rest silence?'" Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Ezekiel":

What! can these dead bones live, whose sap is dried
   By twenty scorching centuries of wrong?
Is this the House of Israel whose pride
   Is as a tale that's told, an ancient song?
Are these ignoble relics all that live
   Of psalmist, priest, and prophet? Can the breath
Of very heaven bid these bones revive,
   Open the graves, and clothe the ribs of death?
Yea, Prophesy, the Lord hath said again:
   Say to the wind, Come forth and breathe afresh,
Even that they may live, upon these slain,
   And bone to bone shall leap, and flesh to flesh.
The spirit is not dead, proclaim the word.
   Where lay dead bones a host of armed men stand!
I ope your graves, my people, saith the Lord,
   And I shall place you living in your land.

150 years of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"

2011-11-18T07:45:00.000-05:00

Julia Ward Howe and her husband Samuel Gridley Howe were invited to the Washington D.C. area to observe the troops during the early months of the American Civil War. There, she heard troops singing the tune "John Brown's Body" and her friend, the minister James Freeman Clarke, suggested she write new words for the old tune.

In the early morning hours of November 18, 1861, Julia Ward Howe wrote those new words. As she recalled later, she was having difficulty sleeping when "the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain." She let the words come over her until "the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts" before she finally got up and wrote it all down. It soon became one of the most popular tunes at military camps throughout the remainder of the war. The poem was published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862 as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
                                                   His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
                                                   His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
                                                   Since God is marching on."

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
                                                   Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
                                                   While God is marching on.

Birth of Soylman Brown, dentist-poet

2011-11-17T07:43:00.000-05:00

Soylman Brown was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on November 17, 1790. A Yale graduate, he was a minister, teacher and, after moving to New York in 1812, a practicing Swedenborgian. Twenty years later, his career took a turn when he became a dentist. It was this line of work that made him famous. As a founding member of the American Association of Dental Surgeons, he also became an editor of The American Journal and Library of Dental Science.

Brown once wrote that "the proudest freedom to which a nation can aspire, not excepting even political independence, is found in complete emancipation from literary thraldom." In his own way, Brown tried to aspire to this kind of freedom. Combining his interests in dentistry and poetry, he published Dentologia, a Poem on the General Laws of the Teeth in 1838.

When man was fashioned by the Power Supreme,
Strange and mysterious as the fact may seem,
And cause of wonder; to his frame was given
Peculiar structure by the hand of heaven: —
...One common destiny awaits our kind; —
'Tis this, that long before the infant mind,
Attains maturity—and ere the sun
Has through the first septennial circle run,
The teeth, deciduous, totter and decay,
And prompt successors hurry them away.

Naturally, he became known as the poet laureate of the dental profession. Some of his other poems focused on more conventional themes. One of the best I found was "The Emigrant's Farewell":

Farewell to the land that my fathers defended;
   Farewell to the fields which their ashes inurn;
The holiest flame on their altars descended,
   Which, fed by their sons, shall eternally burn.
Ah! soft be the bed where the hero reposes!
And light be the green turf that over him closes!
Gay Flora shall deck with her earliest roses,
      The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth.

Adieu to the scenes which my heart's young emotions
   Have dressed in attire so alluringly gay;
Ah! never, no never can billowy oceans,
   Nor time, drive the fond recollections away!
From days that are past present comfort I borrow;
The scenes of to-day shall be brighter to-morrow;
In age I'll recall, as a balm for my sorrow,
   The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth.

I go to the West, where the forest, receding,
   Invites the adventurous axe-man along;
I go to the groves where the wild deer are feeding,
   And mountain-birds carol their loveliest song.
Adieu to the land that my fathers defended!
Adieu to the soil on which freemen contended!
Adieu to the sons who from heroes descended!
      The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth.

When far from my home, and surrounded by strangers,
   My thoughts shall recall the gay pleasures of youth;
Though life's stormy ocean shall threaten with dangers,
   My soul shall repose in the sunshine of truth.
While streams to their own native Ocean are tending,
And forest-oaks, swept by the tempest, are bending,
My soul shall exult, as she's proudly defending
      The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth.

Birth of Leland: in darksome lore

2011-11-15T07:44:00.001-05:00

I was born on the 15th of August, 1824, in a house which was in Philadelphia, and in Chestnut Street, the second door below Third Street, on the north side. It had been built in the old Colonial time, and in the room in which I first saw life there was an old chimney-piece, which was so remarkable that strangers visiting the city often came to see it.

So begins the Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland, who grew up to become a prominent writer, particularly of humor and folklore. He credits his early interest in reading to his mother, who was "devoted to literature to a degree which was unusual at that time." He also notes he started reading because of chronic illness in his youth.

Leland told the story, almost certainly untrue, that his first nurse performed a ritual on him only a few days after his birth. He had been brought to the garret of the house by the Dutch woman and left sleeping next to an open Bible with a key and a knife on his infant chest. At his head were lighted candles, a plate of salt, and a pile of money. The nurse explained the ritual would ensure his rising in life. He later learned, however, she was a sorceress and the ritual ensured that the child would become interested "in darksome lore" and a scholar of the occult.

Sure enough, after studying at Princeton, traveling to Europe, and fighting in the French Revolution, working as a journalist, and fighting in the American Civil War, he studied more exotic religions and beliefs. He particularly showed an interest in Gypsies, Wicca, and more. From the introduction to his 1882 book The Gypsies:

I have frequently been asked, "Why do you take an interest in gypsies?"

And it is not so easy to answer. Why, indeed? ...But I cannot tell you why. Why do I love to wander on the roads to hear the birds; to see old church towers afar, rising over fringes of forest, a river and a bridge in the foreground, and an ancient castle beyond, with a modern village springing up about it, just as at the foot of the burg there lies the falling trunk of an old tree, around which weeds and flowers are springing up, nourished by its decay? Why love these better than pictures, and with a more than fine-art feeling? Because on the roads, among such scenes, between the hedge-rows and by the river, I find the wanderers who properly inhabit not the houses but the scene, not a part but the whole. These are the gypsies, who live like the birds and hares, not of the house-born or the townbred, but free and at home only with nature.

Moby-Dick: I have written a wicked book

2011-11-14T07:44:00.000-05:00

In his home at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Herman Melville received the first copies of Moby-Dick on November 14, 1851. It was in that home, Arrowhead, that he wrote the book, partly inspired by his own whaling trip a decade earlier. The book's opening lines, "Call me Ishmael," have become among the most famous in American literature.

The book was dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, in "admiration for his genius." The two authors had met only recently and instantly formed a friendship. The night he received his book, Melville visited Hawthorne (who was then living nearby in the town of Lenox). Though he was in the midst of packing in preparation for his move back to Concord, Hawthorne did not hesitate to read Moby-Dick. Only two days later, he wrote a letter of appreciation to Melville (now lost). Melville was pleased that Hawthorne "understood the book." As he wrote, "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb."

The book itself follows now-iconic characters like the exotic Queequeg, the mates Starbuck and Flask, and, of course, the vengeful Captain Ahab and his obsessive quest for the white whale named Moby-Dick. It has also become the bane of students of American literature who find the detailed chapters on whaling tedious. Among its memorable scenes are the first meeting between Ishmael and Queequeg (who share a bed that night) and the fiery and foreboding sermon by Father Mapple. My personal favorite is the scene where Ahab nails a valuable doubloon to the mast to tempt his crewmen:

"I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what's all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true; and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won't smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em out."

Typee: very entertaining and pleasing

2011-11-13T07:43:00.005-05:00

On November 13, 1848, Allan Melville noted the progress of Typee, a novel written by his brother Herman Melville. The cost of publishing 6500 copies, including the process of stereotyping, totaled $1663.01. By then, 5753 copies were sold. Melville's portion of the profits, Allan noted, came to about $686.46.

Though this was certainly a good profit for a first book, the Melvilles were already looking forward. They were in the midst of negotiating terms for a new book, Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, with the publishers Harper & Brothers. Typee had been published by Wiley & Putnam but its sequel, Omoo, was brought to Harper & Brothers (within a few months after the above records, rights to Typee were brought there too).

Typee was, by all accounts, quite a success, and it brought the unknown Melville into the literary scene. Poet/editor Charles Fenno Hoffman called it "one of the most delightful and well written narratives that ever came from an American pen." Critic Margaret Fuller noted it was "a very entertaining and pleasing narrative." Idealist George Ripley approved of the "careless elegance" in the author's writing style. Though the veracity of the story was soon questioned, Typee sold very well.

Wiley had apparently been slow in making payments, often requiring a prompt from Melville himself before a check was cut. Harper, however, paid Melville up front with $500 before Mardi was even printed.

Percival: with loveliest creatures

2011-11-11T07:44:00.008-05:00

According to the notice inside the book, "on the eleventh day of November in the forty-eighth year of the Independence of the United States of America," James Gates Percival copyrighted his book Poems. That date, in more modern terms, is November 11, 1823. In addition to being a poet, the Connecticut-born, Yale-educated Percival was also a practicing medical doctor and, for a short time, a chemistry professor, as well as an assistant in the making of Noah Webster's American dictionary.

Percival's book was massive, collecting nearly 400 pages of poems, including two that were over 40 pages each. Several focused on plant life, reflecting his interest in botany, many were odes, and few are short lyrics. One of the shortest is "My Heart Was a Mirror":

My heart was a mirror, that showed every treasure
Of beauty and loveliness, life can display;
It reflected each beautiful blossom of pleasure,
But turned from the dark looks of bigots away;
It was living and moving with loveliest creatures,
In smiles or in tears, as the soft spirit chose;
Now shining with brightest and ruddiest features,
Now pale as the snow of the dwarf mountain rose.

These visions of sweetness for ever were playing,
Like butterflies fanning the still summer air;
Some sported a moment, some, never decaying,
In deep hues of love are still lingering there:
At times some fair spirit, descending from Heaven,
Would shroud all the rest in the blaze of its light;
Then wood nymphs and fays o'er the mirror were driven,
Like the fire-swarms, that kindle the darkness of night.

But the winds and the storms broke the mirror, and severed
Full many a beautiful angel in twain;
And the tempest raged on, till the fragments were shivered
And scattered, like dust, as it rolls o'er the plain :
One piece, which the storm, in its madness, neglected
Away, on the wings of the whirlwind, to bear,
One fragment was left, and that fragment reflected
All the beauty, that Mary threw carelessly there.

A bad manuscript and worse proof-reading

2011-11-10T07:43:00.002-05:00

The novel Precaution was published on November 10, 1820, priced at $2 for both volumes. Its author, James Fenimore Cooper, wrote the book as a challenge to himself. His publisher (A. T. Goodrich & Co.), however, soon learned he was himself a challenge to work with.

Cooper was highly concerned with its marketing (he denied it should be referred to as "original" American work, and hoped people would infer it was a republication of a British work along the lines of Walter Scott) and asked his name not be included. Another reason for this was that he was already working on a new book, The Spy, which he recognized as a superior work. As he told his publisher, "I can make a much better one — am making a much better one."

Still, Cooper hoped Precaution would be successful, and certainly hoped for a respectable financial return. He was concerned, nonetheless, that British publishers would pirate his book. About three months before its American publication, Cooper asked his publisher, "What do you mean to do about England?" He was not impressed by the slow response and took matters into his own hands — but was fairly limited because of his desire for anonymity. His plan was to take a pseudonym, Edward Jones. Instead, his publisher found a lawyer friend who would negotiate on his behalf.

All this was ironic for a book Cooper never intended to publish at all. Further, Cooper was so disappointed in the poor quality of the first American edition (the fault of his own poorly-written manuscript) that the British edition had scores of corrections. As a later preface noted:

[There] were many defects in plot, style, and arrangement, that were entirely owing to precipitation and inexperience, and quite as many faults, of another nature, that are to be traced solely to a bad manuscript and worse proof-reading. Perhaps no novel of our times was worse printed than the first edition of this work. More than a hundred periods were placed in the middle of sentences, and perhaps five times that number were omitted, in places where they ought to have been inserted. It is scarcely necessary to add, that passages were rendered obscure, and that entire paragraphs were unintelligible.

*For much of this information, I am indebted to the biography James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years by Wayne Franklin.

Frost: those great careless wings

2011-11-08T07:43:00.000-05:00

Robert Frost claimed he first heard his own poetic voice when he published "My Butterfly." The poem was published in The Independent on November 8, 1894, later collected in his book A Boy's Will (1913). It was his first professionally published poem (though he also included it in his self-published book Twilight). Decades later, Frost told a correspondent that he particularly liked the lines beginning "The gray grass is scarce dappled with snow." It was then, he noted, "when I first struck the note that was to be mine."

Even so, the poem is surprisingly un-Frost-like, utilizing a more old-fashioned, highly-technical style inspired by Romantic poetry. As Frost recalled years later, he first came across the Independent in an old library and was impressed that it included a poem on the front page. "This experience gave me my very first revelation that a publication existed, anywhere in my native land, that was a vehicle for the publication of poetry," he noted. It was for this reason he sent his first poem to that magazine. "My Butterfly" sometimes includes the subtitle, "An Elegy":

Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead:
    Save only me
   (Nor is it sad to thee!)
    Save only me
   There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.

    The gray grass is not dappled with the snow;
Its two banks have not shut upon the river;
       But it is long ago—
    It seems forever—
   Since first I saw thee glance,
   With all the dazzling other ones,
       In airy dalliance,
    Precipitate in love,
   Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above,
Like a limp rose-wreath in a fairy dance.

    When that was, the soft mist
Of my regret hung not on all the land,
    And I was glad for thee,
    And glad for me, I wist.

Thou didst not know, who tottered, wandering on high,
That fate had made thee for the pleasure of the wind,
    With those great careless wings,
    Nor yet did I.

    And there were other things:
It seemed God let thee flutter from his gentle clasp:
    Then fearful he had let thee win
    Too far beyond him to be gathered in,
     Snatched thee, o’er eager, with ungentle grasp.

    Ah! I remember me
    How once conspiracy was rife
    Against my life—
The languor of it and the dreaming fond;
Surging, the grasses dizzied me of thought,
   The breeze three odors brought,
And a gem-flower waved in a wand!

    Then when I was distraught
       And could not speak,
    Sidelong, full on my cheek,
What should that reckless zephyr fling
But the wild touch of thy dye-dusty wing!

I found that wing broken to-day!
   For thou are dead, I said,
    And the strange birds say.
I found it with the withered leaves
    Under the eaves.

Cranch: one in the Land of Sleep

2011-11-07T07:44:00.000-05:00

The November 7, 1885 issue of the New York-based weekly The Critic included a poem by Christopher Pearse Cranch. Cranch was a minister-turned-Transcendentalist who alternated his career as a writer and artist. His poem "The Two Dreams" was later referred to by one critic as "one of his more subtle and imaginative bits of verse." When published in The Critic, it coincidentally followed an article on American Art galleries.

The poem is unusual for Cranch in many ways. For one, it is written in the voice of a woman and it also expresses an atypical sentimentalism for Cranch. Many of his other works are humorous or philosophical, often employing nature and scenery for metaphorical purposes. "The Two Dreams":

I met one in the Land of Sleep
   Who seemed a friend long known and true.
I woke. That friend I could not keep —
   For him I never knew.

Yet there was one in life's young morn
   Loved me, I thought, as I loved him.
Slow from that trance I waked forlorn,
   To find his love grown dim.

He by whose side in dreams I ranged,
   Unknown by name, my friend still seems;
While he I knew so well has changed.
   So both were only dreams.

Moore: To my friend

2011-11-05T07:42:00.003-04:00

The New Orleans-born writer Alice Ruth Moore dedicated her first book Violets and Other Tales (1895), "To my friend of November 5, 1892." The ambiguous message is better understood through her diary: "November 5, I began my romance with Nelson Mitchell."

Moore would have been about 17 years old when she began that romance. It did not last. In fact, the young Moore was known for being flirtation (to the dismay of her eventual husband, Paul Laurence Dunbar). Violets and Other Tales, which included both prose and poetry, came out three years later when Moore was 20; she later called it "sheer slop." A contemporary review, however, called it "evidence of great intelligence among persons of African birth." Sure enough, Moore was soon accepted among the elite black community.

Her poem, "Love and the Butterfly":

I heard a merry voice one day
And glancing at my side;
Fair Love, all breathless, flushed with play,
A butterfly did ride.
"Whither away, oh sportive boy?"
I asked, he tossed his head;
Laughing aloud for purest joy,
And past me swiftly sped.

Next day I heard a plaintive cry
And Love crept in my arms;
Weeping he held the butterfly,
Devoid of all its charms.
Sweet words of comfort, whispered I
Into his dainty ears,
But love still hugged the butterfly,
And bathed its wounds with tears.

O Henry: When the cows come home

2011-11-03T07:43:00.002-04:00

William Sidney Porter, known by the pseudonym O. Henry, turned to writing while incarcerated to raise money for his family. The majority of his works were short stories, often humorous tales. On occasion, however, he also wrote poetry.

Not all of his poems include the wit of his short prose. His poem "Looking Forward," dated November 3, 1895, is a harmless and fun poem that experiments a bit with form in its repeated phrases "when (till) the cows come home":

Soft shadows grow deeper in dingle and dell,
Night hawks are beginning to roam;
The breezes are cooler; the owl is awake,
The whippoorwill calls from his nest in the brake;
When
            the
                    cows
                              come
                                        home.

The cup of the lily is heavy with dew;
In heaven's aerial dome
Stars twinkle; and down in the darkening swamp
The fireflies glow, and the elves are a-romp;
When
            the
                    cows
                              come
                                        home.

And the populist smiles when he thinks of the time
That unto his party will come;
When at the pie counter they capture a seat,
And they'll eat and eat and eat and eat
Till
            the
                    cows
                              come
                                        home.

Stowe: we get into regular gales

2011-11-02T07:43:00.002-04:00

On November 2, 1872, Harriet Beecher Stowe continued her public reading tour, this time in Bangor, Maine. Her first reading ever took place less than two months earlier. It was a far cry from her tour of England in 1853, during which Stowe merely stood up for her audiences, accepted their applause, and sat down; the actual reading was done by her brothers. Her motivation for the tour was simple: she needed the money. Each audience member (150 to 1,500, depending on the venue) paid between 50 and 75 cents to hear the "most noted woman in America" according to one billing.

The reading was encouraged in part by her publisher James T. Fields, though Stowe admitted, "I am appalled by finding myself booked to read." Billed as "the world-famous author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,"she naturally chose to read sections from her best-selling novel. But Stowe also presented selections from some of her New England-themed short stories and The Pearl of Orr's Island.

Despite her reticence at the beginning of the tour, she eventually admitted she enjoyed her audience's reaction: "how they do laugh! We get into regular gales." And, of course, her most important motivation: "it is as easy a way of making money as I have ever tried, though no way of making money is perfectly easy." Despite the success of her writing, Stowe was a bit to willingly parted with her earnings, often donating to various causes or to those in need.

Still, the tour proved rewarding for Stowe. In Bangor, a woman who was deaf traveled 50 miles just to hear Stowe and admitted, "I'd rather see you than the Queen." Stowe might also have felt at home: two decades earlier, while writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, she lived in Brunswick, Maine, only slightly southwest of Bangor.

A Hallowe'en Party: awfully degraded

2011-10-31T07:43:00.000-04:00

Caroline Ticknor, the granddaughter of Boston publisher William Davis Ticknor, published several works in her lifetime, including biographies of other writers. One collection of short stories published in 1896 included the tale "The Hallowe'en Party."

The humorous sketch follows a character named J. Turner Dodge, a well-to-do New Yorker transplanted to a less cosmopolitan locale. Trying to fit into the high society scene there, he happily accepts an invitation to a Halloween party, wearing a brand new expensive suit. To his surprise, however, this party is not a formal dinner, but a series of games. By the end of the tale, Dodge has become soaked from bobbing for apples, covered in flour from a game, bumped his knees from falling down stairs, ingested thick black smoke from incorrectly cooked chestnuts, and accidentally swallowed a button intended as a prize hidden in a cake. The next day his friend greets him, excited to hear about the experience:

"How was the party?" he called out; "anything like what you have in New York?"

"No, thank heaven," Dodge responded, " we may be awfully degraded there, but we have n't fallen quite so low yet."

The next year, when Dodge is invited to his second Halloween party, he concocts a prior engagement. "I shall always remember my first Hallowe'en party," Dodge admits. His friend tries to persuade him, noting that most people like these types of parties:

"Well, then, I have n't been educated up to Hallowe'en parties. There are some tastes that can't be acquired, you know; you must be born with them, like the love of Boston baked beans."

"Oh, you 're too New Yorky for anything; don't you know that these jolly informal things are twice as much fun?"

"Yes; but I'm satisfied with half as much fun; you can have my other half."

Death of Ella Wheeler Wilcox

2011-10-30T07:45:00.000-04:00

Ella Wheeler Wilcox died of cancer on October 30, 1919. She was just a few days shy of her 69th birthday. Born in Wisconsin, she is today recognized for one poem (and its quotable first line or two), but wrote much more. Her interest in writing was sparked, in part, by a need to support her family; she was first published in her teen years.

Towards the end of her life, particularly after the death of her husband, Wilcox had become particularly interested in spiritualism and communicating with her dead husband. Throughout her life, however, she wrote poems which frequently delved into questions of death. This one, "Sleep and Death," was published in 1900:

When Sleep drops down beside my Love and me,
Although she wears the countenance of a friend,
A jealous foe we prove her in the end.
In separate barques far out on dreamland's sea,
She lures our wedded souls. Wild winds blow free,
And drift us wide apart by tides that tend
Tow'rd unknown worlds. Not once our strange ways blend
Through the long night, while Sleep looks on in glee.

O Death! be kinder than thy sister seems,
When at thy call we journey forth some day,
Through that mysterious and unatlased strait,
To lands more distant than the land of dreams;
Close, close together let our spirits stay,
Or else, with one swift stroke annihilate!

Birth of Mathews: Man of the Future!

2011-10-28T07:44:00.004-04:00

Perhaps no man who was once so influential is now so forgotten as Cornelius Mathews, born October 28, 1817 in Port Jefferson, New York. He was a journalist, an editor, a poet, a novelist, and a leading member of the Young America movement centered in New York. Perhaps his greatest claim to contemporary fame, however, was his demand for a distinctly American identity, one which could be reflected in literature, as a break-away from Old World ties.

To Mathews, the major problems of the day were the lack of international copyright and the wholesale piracy of foreign books. Stifling the American author financially, he said, would also ruin American creativity. Yet, a focus on books would doom an American to "the tranquility of a sure, though not always a speedy, oblivion." All authors ("any hand that has ever raised a pen"), Mathews hopes, will understand that the problems of literature in America are worth solving, however, and he urges writers to continue writing: "Let whoever can speak and write go on, in the stout heart and hopeful spirit, writing and uttering what Nature teachers. He will not, even in so great a din, be altogether unheard." From his poem, "The Reformer":

Man of the Future! on the eager headland standing,
Gazing far off into the outer sea,
Thine eye, the darkness and the billows rough commanding,
Beholds a shore, bright as the Heaven itself may be;
Where temples, cities, homes and haunts of men,
Orchards and fields spread out in orderly array,
Invite the yearning soul to thither flee,
And there to spend in boundless peace its happier day...

But, the reformer is sudden borne "by passion" and "earnest thought" to a place where earth and heaven meet. There, he learns his new duty: to deliver the truth to his fellow men. But first, he must "seize by its horns the shaggy Past," and cast its carcass into the abyss. Even despite this violent image, Mathews warns, the truth will come slowly. As such, the reformer is told not to beat down "the 'stablished bulwarks" but allow kindness to soften the transition.

Wake not at midnight and proclaim the day,
When lightning only flashes o'er the way:
Pauses and starts and strivings towards an end,
Are not a birth, although a god's birth they portend.
Be patient therefore like the old broad earth
That bears the guilty up, and through the night
Conducts them gently to the dawning light—
Thy silent hours shall have as great a birth!

O life, and light, and gladness

2011-10-27T07:43:00.005-04:00

Maria White was 32 years old when she died of tuberculosis on October 27, 1853. In her short life, she outlived three of her children, who all died in infancy. Her doting husband James Russell Lowell, whom she married in 1844, was devastated by her death. Just before she was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, her coffin was opened so that her daughter Mabel could take one final look.

Shortly after, the still grieving husband oversaw the publication of a posthumous addition of White's poetry. Its 50 copies were privately distributed, though they ensured that her work survived long enough that a new edition was republished in 1907. No doubt Lowell would have further suffered editing this book, especially when preparing her poem "The Sick-Room" (White had suffered for years before her death):

A spirit is treading the earth,
     As wind treads the vibrating string;
I know thy feet so beautiful,
     Thy punctual feet, O Spring!

They slide from far-off mountains,
     As slides the untouched snow;
They move over deepening meadows,
     As vague cloud-shadows blow.

Thou wilt not enter the chamber,
     The door stands open in vain;
Thou art pluming the wands of cherry
     To lattice the window pane.

Thou flushest the sunken orchard
     With the lift of thy rosy wing;
The peach will not part with her sunrise
     Though great noon-bells should ring.

O life, and light, and gladness,
     Tumultuous everywhere!
O pain and benumbing sadness,
     That brood in the heavy air!

Here the fire alone is busy,
     And wastes, like the fever's heat,
The wood that enshrined past summers,
     Past summers as bounteous as fleet.

The beautiful hanging gardens
     That rocked in the morning wind,
And sheltered a dream of Faery,
     And life so timid and kind,

The shady choir of the bobolink,
     The race-course of squirrels gay, —
They are changed into trembling smoke-wreaths,
     And a heap of ashes gray.

Moulton: as from a passing cloud

2011-10-26T07:44:00.001-04:00

Louise Chandler Moulton was uneasy as she sailed back to the United States from Europe in 1891. Just before leaving, she had received a telegram informing her of her mother's illness. As she sailed, she remarked on the lovely weather, but noted, "I am so anxious as to what news of my poor mother awaits me." Sure enough, upon landing, she learned that her mother died on October 26, 1891 (she is pictured here in healthier times). Moulton had missed the funeral as well. As she recorded in her journal: "Oh, what it is to know that I shall never see her again!"

Moulton herself died only 27 years later. Her mother figured more than once in her poetry. One poem is called "My Mother's Picture":

How shall I here her placid picture paint
   With touch that shall be delicate, yet sure?
   Soft hair above a brow so high and pure
Years have not soiled it with an earthly taint,
Needing no aureole to prove her saint;
   Firm mind that no temptation could allure;
   Soul strong to do, heart stronger to endure;
And calm, sweet lips, that utter no complaint.

So have I seen her, in my darkest days
   And when her own most sacred ties were riven,
Walk tranquilly in self-denying ways,
   Asking for strength, and sure it would be given;
Filling her life with lowly prayer, high praise, —
   So shall I see her, if we meet in heaven.

Another poem, "A Dream in the Night," is subtitled "To My Mother," and more expressly addresses her dead mother:

Sometimes it seems thy face —thy long-hid face —
   Looks out on me as from a passing cloud,
   Till I forget they clad thee in thy shroud,
And laid thee sleeping in thy far-off place —
So once again the tender, healing grace
   Of thy dear presence is to me allowed.
   Wilt thou not bless the head before thee bowed?
Wilt not thy voice thrill through the empty space?

How lone and cold the world without thee seemed!
   Regaining thee, how warm it is and bright!
      Yet all in vain to reach thee do I seek: —
And then I wake to know I have but dreamed,
   And thou art silent as the silent night —
      With tears I call thee, yet thou dost not speak.

Boker on Zagonyi: a cheer for thee!

2011-10-25T07:43:00.002-04:00

Though George Henry Boker never personally took up arms during the American Civil War, he used his poetry as an active chronicler of war (and as pro-Union propaganda). One of his books, published in 1864, is entirely made up of war poems. An early poem in that book, "Zagonyi," is dated October 25, 1861. It recounts the event of that date (illustrated above) when a Hungarian-born Union officer named Charles Zagonyi led a charge against Confederate soldiers during the Battle of Springfield, Missouri:

Captain of the Body-Guard,
   I 'll troll a stave to thee !
My voice is somewhat harsh and hard,
   And rough my minstrelsy.
I've cheered until my throat is sore
For how Dupont at Beaufort bore;
   Yet here 's a cheer for thee!

I hear thy jingling spurs and reins,
   Thy sabre at thy knee;
The blood runs lighter through my veins,
   As I before me see
Thy hundred men with thrusts and blows
Ride down a thousand stubborn foes,
   The foremost led by thee.

With pistol snap and rifle crack —
   Mere salvos fired to honor thee —
Ye plunge, and stamp, and shoot, and hack
   The way your swords make free;
Then back again, — the path is wide
This time, — ye gods! it was a ride,
   The ride they took with thee!

No guardsman of the whole command
   Halts, quails, or turns to flee;
With bloody spur and steady hand
   They gallop where they see
Thy daring plume stream out ahead
O'er flying, wounded, dying, dead ;
   They can but follow thee.

So, Captain of the Body-Guard,
   I pledge a health to thee!
I hope to see thy shoulders starred,
   My Paladin; and we
Shall laugh at fortune in the fray,
Whene'er you lead your well-known way
   To death or victory!

Chopin: the voice and the dream

2011-10-24T07:42:00.000-04:00

Though best known as the author of the feminist novel The Awakening, Kate Chopin wrote many other works. The Louisiana writer, perhaps most surprisingly, also wrote several poems. One, "By the Meadow Gate," is dated October 24, 1898, and slyly questions the expected roles of male/female:

Over the hill and across the ford and down by the meadow gate
A girl is asleep in the long, cool grass.
The soft winds blow and the soft winds pass;
The birds call: "awake!" but they do not stay
While the maid is dreaming the time away
           By the meadow gate

Over the hill and across the ford and down by the meadow gate
A youth with the light of the boundless skies
A glow in his soul and a flame in his eyes,
Follows a voice that is never still,
Trading the path to the distant hill
           By the meadow gate

Over the hill and across the ford and down by the meadow gate
The voice and the dream are near — so near,
That if he but listened his heart might hear.
Now he may follow the years and afar,
He may walk from the world to the evening star
           Past the meadow gate.

Over the hill and across the ford and down by the meadow gate
May her days be many, her days be few,
The dream of the maiden will never come true.
For the soft wind carried the moment away,
And the birds they sang, but they would not stay
           By the meadow gate.

Death of Mayne Reid: garden of God

2011-10-22T07:45:00.000-04:00

Though born in Ireland to Scottish parents in 1818, Thomas Mayne Reid moved to New Orleans at the age of 21. In his first two years in the United States, Reid lived and worked in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi before moving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to begin his literary career. Before the end of the 1840s, he had also lived and worked in Philadelphia, New York, Rhode Island, and served as a soldier during the Mexican-American War. When he died on October 22, 1883, he was in London, England. He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery.

Captain Mayne Reid, as he was often known, was the author of scores of poems, novels, and short stories. He also used the pseudonym "The Poor Scholar" for some of his journalistic writings. Many of his works feature exotic locales and dangerous adventures undertaken by fearless males. Critics and readers alike remarked on the inherent manliness in his writing. As one obituary noted: "When his sword was in his sheath, and his fingers held the pen, he wrote with a vigour and impetuosity as if under fire."

According to his widow Elizabeth, Reid's headstone was carved with a sword crossed by a pen as well as an anchor — a design she ordered personally. It was also inscribed with an a simple quote from the first chapter of his book The Scalp-Hunters:

This is the "weed prairie." It is misnamed. It is the garden of God.

Reid's casket was adorned by a wreath ordered by the United States Consul in London. About the same time, a family friend named Caroline Ollivant quickly wrote a tribute poem:

A warrior has gone home,
   A mighty spirit fled!
Hush'd is the magic tone—
   A noble man is dead.

Oh, boys of England, mourn!
   Ye well may grieve and weep,
As to the grave is borne
   This hero, gone to sleep.

No more his wondrous pen
   Can thrill you with delight;
He may not come again
   To wreathe fresh spells as bright.

His kindly heart is stilled;
   Imagination's fire
For us is quenched and chilled,
   And seemeth to expire.

But no! Beyond the veil
   Of this dim, shrouding clay
His brightest powers can never fail,
   And there—he lives to-day!

Then, dear Mayne Reid, farewell!
   Thou'st gained a happier shore,
Where we, too, hope to dwell,
   When earth's tide flows no more.

Thou'st fallen at thy guns,
   Thy keen lance is laid by;
But in the hearts of England's sons
   Thy name shall never die!

Lucy Stone: one of the anointed few

2011-10-21T07:42:00.002-04:00

Lucy Stone was a well-known and respected abolitionist and suffragist. She became the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree and kept her maiden name after she her marriage. As a public speaker and organizer, she was a constant advocate for civil rights throughout her life. She died in 1893 at the age of 75.

Stone's funeral was held on October 21, 1893. She had asked that her funeral be "simple and cheerful" but her wishes were undermined by the throng of admirers that came to pay their respects. Among her dozen pallbearers (six men and six women) was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Her husband and supporter Henry Browne Blackwell had written to another champion of civil rights (especially for women), Julia Ward Howe: "what shall I do without her?" Howe memorialized Stone in a poem, "Lucy Stone":

Full of honors and of years,
   Lies our friend at rest,
Passing from earth's hopes and fears
   To the ever Blest.

One of the anointed few
   Touched with special grace
For a life whose service true
   Should redeem the race.

Where is that persuasive tone
   Welcome in our ears?
Still I hear it, sounding on,
   Through the golden spheres.

When we raise our battle cry
   For the holy Right,
We shall feel her drawing nigh
   With a spirit's might.

As the veil of flesh doth part,
   We behold her rise,
Crowned with majesty of heart:
   There true queendom lies.