Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[46] World. For this newspaper he went to the front, in 1861, as war correspondent. A man of thirty years when the war was over, he turned to the life of Wall Street, becoming, six years later, an active member of the Stock Exchange. He held his seat till 1900. ‘There was no such market for literary wares at that day as has since arisen, and I needed to be independent in order to write and study.’ Perhaps so; it was a bitter problem to solve; yet there is little question that Stedman's choice limited his literary achievement in quality as well as quantity. To be sure, he could not have foreseen the financial misfortunes that beset his way to independence. At the same time, he had a talent for business that might better not have been developed, since it flourished at the expense of a rarer talent that he possessed for literary criticism and for poetry. With more knowledge and the discipline of hard thinking, his literary criticism, at its best in Poets of America (1885), might have contributed much to a department of our literature that is all too weak. He had high, if not the highest, seriousness, without the admixture of sentimentalism that often accompanies ideality and range.

His distinction as a literary critic and as an editor of anthologies and other works seems to have given rise to an unwarranted presumption in his favour as a poet. If he had a voice of his own, he spoke in uncertain tones; in the main his poetry is an echo of the romantic poets and Tennyson. He seems to have written frequently in cold blood; at least he told Winter that ‘it was his custom to select with care the particular form of verse that he designed to use, and sometimes to invent the rhymes and write them at the ends of the lines which they were to terminate,—thus making a skeleton of a poem, as a ground-work on which to build.’ Aside from his war verse¹ he wrote poems on New York themes, the best of which is Pan in Wall Street; on New England life and ideals, including the charming lines entitled The doorstep; on The Carib Sea; on special occasions, including poems on Greeley and several of the New England poets; and on various other themes, notably in The hand of Lincoln and Stanzas for music. In most of this work—limited in quantity to a single volume—Stedman's muse is decorously uplifted rather than elevated of its own