PREFACE THE CIVIL WAR-AND AFTER The end of the Civil War marked the end of a literary epoch. The New England group, containing (if Poe could be added) all the great names of the antebellum period, began to disintegrate. The poets had outsung themselves; it was a time of surrender and swansongs. Unable to respond to the new forces of political nationalism and industrial reconstruction, the Brahmins (that famous group of intellectuals who dominated literary America) withdrew into their libraries. Poets like Longfellow, Bryant, Taylor, turned their eyes away from the native scene, rhapsodized endlessly about Europe, or left creative writing altogether and occupied themselves with translations. "They had been borne into an era in which they had no part," writes Fred Lewis Pattee (A History of American Literature Since 1870), “and they contented themselves with reëchoings of the old music." Suddenly the break came. America developed a national consciousness; the West discovered itselí, and the East discovered the West. Grudgingly at first, the aristocratic leaders made way for a new expression; crude, jangling, vigorously democratic. The old order was changing with a vengeance. All the preceding writers. -poets like Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes were not only products of the New England colleges, but typically "Boston gentlemen of the early Renaissance." To them, the new men must have seemed like a regiment recruited from the ranks of vulgarity. 3 Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, John Hay, Joaquin Miller, Joel Chandler Harris, James Whitcomb Riley-these were men who had graduated from the farm, the frontier, the mine, the pilot-house, the printer's shop! For a while, the movement seemed of little consequence; the impact of Whitman and the Westerners was averted. The poets of the transition, with a deliberate art, ignored the surge of a spontaneous national expression. They were even successful in holding it back. But it was gathering force. THE "POST-MORTEM" PERIOD The nineteenth century, up to its last quarter, had been a period of new vistas and revolts: a period of protest and iconoclasm-the era of Shelley and Byron, the prophets of "liberty, equality and fraternity." It left no immediate heirs. In England, its successors by default were the lesser Victorians. In America, the intensity and power of men like Emerson and Whittier gave way to the pale romanticism and polite banter of the transition or, what might even more fittingly be called, the "post-mortem" poets. For these interim lyrists were frankly the singers of reaction, reminiscently digging among the bones of a long-dead past. They burrowed. and borrowed, half archaeologists, half artisans; impelled not so much by the need of creating poetry as the desire to write it. From 1866 to 1880 the United States was in a chaotic and frankly materialistic condition; it was full of political scandals, panics, frauds. The moral fiber was flabby; the country was apathetic, corrupt and contented. As in all such periods of national unconcern, the artists turned from life altogether, preoccupying themselves with the by-products of art: with method and technique, with elaborate and artificial conceits, with facile ideas rather than fundamental ideals. Bayard Taylor, Richard Henry Stoddard, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Thomas Bailey Aldrich -all of these authors, in an effort to escape a reality they could not express and did not even wish to understand, fled to a more congenial realm of fantasy. They took the easiest routes to a prim and academic Arcadia, to a cloying and devitalized Orient or a mildly sensuous and treacle-dripping Greece. In their desperate preöccupation with lures and legends overseas, they were not, except for the accident of birth, American at all; all of them owed much more to old England than to New England. WALT WHITMAN Whitman, who was to influence future generations so profoundly in Europe as well as in America, had already appeared. The third edition of that stupendous volume, Leaves of Grass, had been printed in 1860. Almost immediately after, the publisher failed and the book passed out of public notice. But Whitman, broken in health and cheated by his exploiters, lived to see not only a seventh edition of his great work published in 1881, but a complete collection printed in his seventy-third year (1892) in which the twelve poems of the experimental first edition had grown to nearly four hundred. The influence of Whitman can scarcely be overestimated. It has touched every shore of letters, quickened every current of art. Whitman has been acclaimed by a great and growing public, not only here but in England, Germany, Italy and France. He has been hailed as prophet, as pioneer, as rebel, as the fiery humanist and, most frequently, as liberator. In spite of the rhetorical flourish, he may well be called the Lincoln of our literature. The whole scheme of Leaves of Grass is inclusive rather than exclusive; its form is elemental, dynamic, free. Nor was it only in the relatively minor matter of form that Whitman became our great poetic emancipator. He led the way toward a wider aspect of democracy; he took his readers out of fusty, lamp-lit libraries into the sharp sunlight and the buoyant air. He was, as Burroughs wrote, preeminently the poet of vista; his work had the power "to open doors and windows, to let down bars rather than to put them up, to dissolve forms, to escape narrow boundaries, to plant the reader on a hill rather than in a corner." He could do this because, first of all, be believed implicitly in life—in its physical as well as its spiritual manifestations; he sought to grasp existence as a whole, not rejecting the things that, to other minds, had seemed trivial or tawdry. The cosmic and the commonplace were synonymous to him; he declared he was part of the most elemental, primitive things and constantly identified himself with them. It was this breadth, this jubilant acceptance that made Whitman so keen a lover of casual and ordinary things; he was the first of our poets to reveal "the glory of the commonplace." He transmuted, by the intensity of his emotion, material which had been hitherto regarded as too unpoetic for poetry. His long poem "Song of Myself" is an excellent example. Here his "barbaric " sounded "over the roofs of the world," is yawp, softened, time and again, to express a lyric ecstasy and naïf wonder. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a chef-d'œuvre of the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow, crunching with depressed head, surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels! It is this large naturalism, this affection for all that is homely and of the soil, that sets Whitman apart from his fellow craftsmen as our first American poet. This blend of familiarity and grandeur animates all his work. It swings with the tremendous vigor through "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; it sharpens the sturdy rhythms (and occasional rhymes) of the "Song of the Broad-Axe"; it beats sonorously through "Drum-Taps"; it whispers immortally through the "Memories of President Lincoln" (particularly that magnificent threnody "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed") and lifts with a biblical solemnity in his most famous "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." Whitman did not scorn the past; no one was quicker than he to see its wealth and glories. But most of the older formulas belonged to their own era; they were foreign to our country. What was original with many transatlantic poets was being merely aped by facile and unoriginal bards in these states; concerned only with the myths of other and older countries, they were blind to the living legends of their own. In his "Song of the Exposition" Whitman not only wrote his own credo, he uttered the manifesto of the new generation-especially in such lines: Come Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia. Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts; |