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John Greenleaf Whittier (search for this): chapter 8
r, Walter — was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried type-setting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long Island. He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily impressible. The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to the Democratic review, a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall, and tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferry-boats, in love with Italian opera and with long tramps over Long Island. He left his position on The Brooklyn Eagle and wandered south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted back 199 to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the carpenter's t
Thackeray (search for this): chapter 8
ly correcting them for the better. His best poems were likewise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire for artistic perfection. He became the pathbreaker for a long file of men in France, Italy, England, and America. He found the way and they brought back the glory and the cash. I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other men and one woman, seated at a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray would chat with him courteously, but would not greatly care for him. George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him with those inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But Stevenson would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe before he went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has seen that man before, in The Gate of a hundred sorrows. All of them would find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel at,
De Quincey (search for this): chapter 8
rs, and they were caught in the more morbid and extravagant phases of the great European movement while its current was beginning to ebb. Their acquaintance with its literature was mainly at second-hand and through the medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was older than Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. He was untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose models were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without the piety, with the same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the same lovely opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same reputation as a dead-beat. A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he hated Frogpondium his favorite name for the city of his nativity-as much as Whistler hated his native town of Lowell. His
Kipling (search for this): chapter 8
with four other men and one woman, seated at a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray would chat with him courteously, but would not greatly care for him. George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him with those inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But Stevenson would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe before he went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has seen that man before, in The Gate of a hundred sorrows. All of them would find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel at, and perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive, shabby, lonely Poe-what would he think of them? He might not care much for the other guests, but I think he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: I belong at this table. And he does. Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor dubbed the good gray poet, offers a biza
William Wilson (search for this): chapter 8
es to pieces for our amusement a puzzle which he has cunningly put together. The Gold Bug is the best known of these, The Purloined letter the most perfect, The Murders in the Rue Morgue the most sensational. Then there are the tales upon scientific subjects or displaying the pretence of scientific knowledge, where the narrator loves to pose as a man without imagination and with habits of rigid thought. And there are tales of conscience, of which The black Cat is the most fearful and William Wilson the most subtle; and there are landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor stuff. It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human drama with camera-like precision. Other aspects of life, and nobler, he never seemed to perceive. The human comedy sometimes moved him to laughter, but his humor is impish and his wit malign. His imagination fled from the daylight; he dwelt in th
Burton E. Stevenson (search for this): chapter 8
rica. He found the way and they brought back the glory and the cash. I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other men and one woman, seated at a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray would chat with him courteously, but would not greatly care for him. George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him with those inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But Stevenson would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe before he went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has seen that man before, in The Gate of a hundred sorrows. All of them would find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel at, and perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive, shabby, lonely Poe-what would he think of them? He might not care much for the other guests, but I think he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: I belong at this
Disraeli (search for this): chapter 8
y were caught in the more morbid and extravagant phases of the great European movement while its current was beginning to ebb. Their acquaintance with its literature was mainly at second-hand and through the medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was older than Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. He was untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose models were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without the piety, with the same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the same lovely opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same reputation as a dead-beat. A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he hated Frogpondium his favorite name for the city of his nativity-as much as Whistler hated his native town of Lowell. His father die
John Burroughs (search for this): chapter 8
en he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote Drum Taps and other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his threnody on Lincoln's death, When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed. Swinburne called this the most sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world. After the war had ended, Whitman stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John Burroughs and W. D. O'Connor. John Hay was a staunch friend. Some of the best known poets and critics of England and the Continent now began to recognize his genius. But his health had been permanently shattered by his heroic service as a nurse, and in 1873 he suffered a paralytic stroke which forced him to resign his position in Washington and remove to his brother's home in Camden, New Jersey. He was only fifty-four, but his best work was already done, and his remaining years,.until his de
Walter Scott (search for this): chapter 8
Emerson, Whitman is a mystic. He cannot argue the ultimate questions; he asserts them. Instead of marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, he chants I know I am deathless. Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he came at the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it. In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott's poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than sixty years. Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. He represents the assertive, Jacksonian period of our national existence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the separate person, the single man of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out. Sometimes this is mere
Edgar Allan Poe (search for this): chapter 8
he medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was older than Whitman by ten years, was s a dead-beat. A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he hated Froith an office-boy's firm and experienced eye: Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober. He wnd prosperous Pharisees should be reminded that Poe did not make himself; or rather, that he could ot make himself over. Very few men can. Given Poe's temperament, and the problem is insoluble. He horror of the final moment. In Ligeia, which Poe sometimes thought the best of all his tales, th that bruised themselves against his prison. Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and bothlory and the cash. I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other men and one woman, seated at There was nothing distinctively American about Poe except his ingenuity; he had no interest in Ameal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors.[21 more...]
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