Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

. . .I think that you place Matthew Arnold far too high, he seeming to me to rank among the fourth rates as a poet, whatever the merit of his prose. Then I think you dismiss Charles (Turner) Tennyson with much contempt; I have always felt there was a great deal of delicate feeling and felicity in his sonnets.

Per contra, the only serious fault I find with the book [ “Victorian poets” ] is what seems to me the treason to America in two passages (pp. XVII and 125). To those I utterly disagree, and indeed read them with great grief. It is such men as you who ought to see that there is not “a lack of inspiring theme or historic halo of dramatic contrast and material,” and that, as I have urged at length in my “Americanism in literature,” it is the democratic society of the future which, by subordinating the conventional and the individual, is really to afford more material and a far higher style of contrast. I am almost indignant when you speak of the “barren sentiment of a plain New England life” --plain if you please, but not necessarily barren. Emerson and Hawthorne certainly did not find it practically barren, though the latter in one moment of degeneracy made a similar remark. The strength of Whittier has been in finding all needed elements of poetry at home.