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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature, Chapter 6: the Cambridge group (search)
arnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon its pallid regent. The criticism on Lowell comes with force from FitzGerald, who always cultivated condensation, and it also recalls the remark of Walter Pater, that the true artist may be best recognized by his skill in omission. Apart from his bent for personalities, however, and from the question of his ability to practice what he preached, there is in the substance of his best prose work a sound body of criticism such as no other American has yet produced. For scholarship, incisiveness, and suggestiveness, such papers as the essays on Dryden, Pope, and Dante have been surpassed by very little criticism written in English. The special service of the New England literature of the middle of the nineteenth century was to achieve an enlargement of the national horizon. In Cambridge, as we have seen, the expansion was primarily mental and aesthetic; in Concord, as we are about to see, it was mainly speculative and spiritual.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature, A Glossary of Important Contributors to American Literature (search)
er (from 1836 until 1854) at Harvard. The most important of his published works are Hyperion (1839); Voices of the night (1839); Ballads and other poems (1841); Poems on slavery (1842); The Spanish student (1843); The Belfry of Bruges, and Other Poems (1846); Evangeline, a tale of Acadie (1847); Kavanagh (1849); The Seaside and the Fireside (1850); The golden legend (1851); The song of Hiawatha (1855); The Courtship of Aliles Standish (1858); Tales of a Wayside inn (1863); a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (1867); Flower de Luce (1867); The divine tragedy (1871); Three books of song (1872); Aftermath (1874); The Masque of Pandora (1875); Keramos (1878); Ultima Thule (1880); and In the Harbor (1882). He died in Cambridge, Mass., March 24, 1882. Lowell, James Russell Born in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 22, 1819. Graduating from Harvard in 1838, he was admitted to the bar, but devoted himself to literature. He contributed to The liberty Bell, anti-slavery standard, and the Bost
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 12: Longfellow (search)
sion of the masterpiece to which Longfellow gave so many years of love and study seems worthy of his pains and of the praise it has received from other admirers of Dante. After the appearance of the translation of Dante and of the Christus, two works de longue haleine which show that the retired professor of nearly twenty years Dante and of the Christus, two works de longue haleine which show that the retired professor of nearly twenty years standing was not open to the charge of idleness, Longfellow had still about a decade to live and to continue his writing. Some of the titles of his collections of verse have been already given; others are The Masque of Pandora, and other poems (1875), Keramos; and Other Poems (1878), Ultima Thule (1880), and In the Harbor (1882—poSonnets, fourteen in all, considerably extended in number in later editions of the poetical works. Some notable sonnets had been published with the translation of Dante, and to these Longfellow's later achievements in the same form are worthy pendants. High praise has been given to them by many critically minded readers of a late
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 24: Lowell (search)
re. He had been directing his attention less to contemporary letters and more to the masters of English and to a few of the masters of foreign literature, notably Dante. The result of these studies was a long succession of essays which make up the volumes Among My books (1870), My study Windows (1871), and Among My books, second omanticism which had reached its full flower in English letters, by its leaders, Wordsworth, Keats, Lamb, or by the gods of its idolatry, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Dante. His feeling was like that which Keats had experienced twenty years before, when English poetry had opened out a new world inviting to fresh beauty and new enterp neither castles nor cathedrals. But for our past well-nigh desolate of esthetic stimulus his essays were supplying the past of Milton and Spenser, of Chaucer and Dante. The essays on the two medieval poets are among his best and have done their part in stimulating among thoughtful Americans a study and appreciation of the great
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 1: Whitman (search)
any rate Whitman was probably accurate in his statement that he was still in frocks. but Walt, until he went to live in Washington during the Civil War, continued to be more or less under the wholesome influence of the country. Throughout childhood, youth, and earlier manhood he returned to spend summers, falls, or even whole years at various parts of the Island, either as a healthy roamer enjoying all he saw, or as a school-teacher, or as the editor of a country paper, or as a poet reading Dante in an old wood and Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Homer within sound of the lonely sea, and mewing his strength for the bold flights of his fancy. Perhaps it was a certain disadvantage that while he was thus absorbing and learning to champion the common people, the powerful uneducated persons, among whom he moved on equal terms though not as an equal, he was little thrown, in any influential way, among people of refinement or taste. In his old age nobility and common humanity jostled each ot
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Index (search)
hing, Caleb, 164 Dabney, Richard. See Bibliography to Book III, Chap. in Dabney, Thomas, 314 Daily Advertiser, the (Boston), 180, 181, 185 Daily Confederate, the, 302 Daily Crescent, the, 263, 263 n. Daily times (Brooklyn), 267 Daisy Chain, the, 137 Damrosch, Dr., Leopold, 337 Dana, Charles A., 166, 192 Dana, Richard Henry, Sr., 164, 168 Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 225, 399, 401 Danger of Sporting with innocent Credulity, the, 368 Daniel, John M., 61, 184 Dante, 40, 247, 248, 254, 259 Dartmouth College, 93 n., 227 Dartmouth College vs. Woodward, 75 Darwin, 13, 224 Daudet, 385 David Swan, 22 Davidson, James Wood, 302, 303 Davis, Charles Augustus, 151 Davis, Jefferson, 142 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 372 Davis, Richard H., 388, 392, 393 Davy and the Goblin, 408 Day is done, the, 41 Deacon's Week, the, 373 Death in the School Room, 262 n. Death of Lyon, the, 281 Death of Stonewall Jackson, 307 Death of Wind-Foo
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 3: the third and fourth generation (search)
nents as it was superseded by the arbitrament of war. But the idealism of this lonely thinker has entered deeply and permanently into the spiritual life of his countrymen, and he will continue to be read by a few of those who still read Plato and Dante. My mother grieves, wrote Benjamin Franklin to his father in 1738, that one of her sons is an Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know. The truth is I make such distinctions very little Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father came out in 1685, more than fifty years after the most notable Puritan emigration. Young Benjamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the ardors of that elder generation as he would have been by the visions of Dante — an author, by the way, whom he never mentions, even as he never mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for Puritan New England. To its moral beauty, its fine severity, he was wholly blind. As a boy he thriftily sold his Pilgrim's progres
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 7: romance, poetry, and history (search)
hod precisely suited to his temperament. No American has approached Lowell's success in this difficult genre: the swift transitions from rural Yankee humor to splendid scorn of evil and to noblest idealism reveal the full powers of one of our most gifted men. The preacher lurked in this Puritan from first to last, and the war against Mexico and the Civil War stirred him to the depths. His prose, likewise, is a school of loyalty. There was much of Europe in his learning, as his memorable Dante essay shows, and the traditions of great English literature were the daily companions of his mind. He was bookish, as a bookman should be, and sometimes the very richness and whimsicality of his bookish fancies marred the simplicity and good taste of his pages. But the fundamental texture of his thought and feeling was American, and his most characteristic style has the raciness of our soil. Nature lovers like to point out the freshness and delicacy of his reaction to the New England sce
James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (search)
e awful spectacle. The very theme of the poem is enough to show that it must be a failure. The task of depicting the feelings which that stupendous sacrifice awakened in seraphic souls, is one which no one of our race should attempt. What do we know of the workings of angelic natures? If, as Mrs. Browning so often tells us, truth is an essential quality of poetry, how can we look for poetry where there is no basis on which truth can rest? A poet of imperial imagination, like Milton or Dante, may successfully introduce angels as actors in an epic poem, where the interest centres in what is done, and in which there is a groundwork of human action, and the most prominent actors are men; but is not this far different from attempting to depict dramatically the working of angelic natures? As might naturally be expected, therefore, the Seraphim is a failure. It is extravagant, mystical, and, in some places, very unpleasant, by reason of its efforts to depict what should be foreve
James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen, Victoria, Queen of England. (search)
re victors, pursued the same policy. Consequently there were always a great number of persons, both within and without the conquered place, whose only hope of regaining their rights and property was in overturning the government. Hence three centuries of fruitless, desolating war. But although in this cardinal error of the contest there was not a pin to choose between the hostile factions, it is nevertheless evident that the Guelphs were, upon the whole, fighting the battle of mankind. Dante was upon their side, --a great fact in itself. Closely allied with the pope, then the chief civilizing power of Europe, the sole protector of the people against the tyranny of their lords, the Guelphs were greatly instrumental in limiting the power of the emperors, and preventing all the fairest countries of Europe from lapsing under the dominion of a single dynasty. It was from these warlike Guelphs of the middle ages that the present royal house of England descended. Gibbon, indeed,
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