THE YOUNGER AMERICAN POETS

THE YOUNGER AMERICAN POETS

BY

JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE

ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1904

Copyright, 1904, By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved

Published October, 1904

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

To

LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON

WHO HAS ENRICHED AMERICAN LITERATURE WITH HER SONG, AND MY LIFE WITH HER FRIENDSHIP, THESE STUDIES OF THE YOUNGER POETS ARE INSCRIBED WITH THE WARM AFFECTION OF JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE

FOREWORD

TO attempt, in one volume, to cover the entire field of present-day poetry in America, will be recognized the more readily as impossible when one reflects that in Mr. Stedman’s American Anthology over five hundred poets are represented, of whom the greater number are still living and singing.

One may scarcely hope, then, in the space of one volume, to include more than a representative group, even when confining his study to the work of the younger poets, for within this class would fall the larger contingent named above. It has therefore been necessary to follow a general, though not arbitrary, standard of chronology, of which the most feasible seemed that adopted by Mr. Archer in his admirable study of the English “Poets of the Younger Generation,”—the including only of such as have been born within the last half-century, and whose place is still in the making. The few remaining poets whose art has long since defined itself, such as Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Stedman, and Mrs. Moulton, need no further interpretation; nor does the long-acknowledged work of Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, nor that of James Whitcomb Riley, whose final criticism has been pronounced in every heart and at every hearth.

The work of Mr. Edwin Markham, the poet of democracy, whose fraternal songs embody many of the latter-day ideals, and that of John B. Tabb, the lapidary of modern verse, who cuts with infinite care his delicate cameos of thought, were also beyond the chronological scheme of the volume. Nor of those who fell within its scope could a selection be made that would not seem to some invidious, since it must chance among so great a number that many would be omitted who should, with equal right, have been included; it returns, therefore, to the earlier statement, that one must confine himself to a representative group, with whose work he chance to be most familiar, and upon which he has, therefore, the truer claim to speak.

It seemed, also, that the volume would have more value if it gave to a smaller number such a study as would differentiate and define their work, rather than to a larger group the passing comment of a few paragraphs. It was a great regret, however, that circumstances incident to the copyrights prevented me from including the admirable work of William Vaughn Moody, which reveals by its breadth, penetration, and purpose, the thinker and not the dreamer. Indeed, Mr. Moody’s work, in its vitality of touch, fine imagination, and spiritual idealism, proves not only the creative poet but one to whom the nobler offices of Art have been entrusted, and the critic given to inquiring why the former times were better than these may well keep his eye upon the work of Mr. Moody.

It was also a regret that those inexorable arbiters, space and time, deprived me of the privilege of including the strongly individual work of Helen Gray Cone; the artistic, thoughtful verse of Anna Hempstead Branch; the sincere and sympathetic song of Virginia Woodward Cloud; the spiritual verse of Lilian Whiting, with its interpretation of the higher imports; the heartening, characteristic notes of Theodosia Garrison; and the recently issued poems of Josephine Dodge Daskam, which prove beyond peradventure that the Muses, too, were at her christening,—indeed, the “Songs of Iseult Deserted,” which form a group in her volume, are lyrics worthy of any hand.

Had it been possible in the space at command, I should also have had pleasure in considering the work of Frank Dempster Sherman, who is not only an accomplished lyrist, but who has divined the heart of the child and set it to music; the cheer-giving songs of Frank L. Stanton, fledged with the Southland sunshine and melody; and the verse-stories of Holman F. Day, bringing from the pines of Maine their pungent aroma of humor and pathos. Mr. Day covers an individual field, representing such phases of New England life as have been little celebrated hitherto, even by writers of fiction. He is familiar with every corner of Maine from the mountains to the sea, and writes of humanity in the concrete, sketching his types equally from the lumber camp or from the sailors and fishermen of the shore. In his latest volume they are drawn from the “Kin o’ Ktaadn,” and hold their way throughout its pages with a reality provoking both laughter and tears; indeed, one must seek far to find a keener humor, or one more infectious, than that of Mr. Day, or a

more sympathetic penetration into the pathos of life. The heart is the book of his reading, and, in turn, the heart is the book of his writing.

There is no attempt in these studies of the younger poets to group them into schools, to define them in relation to one another, or to hazard prophecies concerning them. Each is considered in his present accomplishment, whether the work be fresh from the pen, or come bringing with it the endorsement of time, since the song of yesterday may carry farther than that already borne on the wings of the years, and has equal claim to consideration in a volume devoted to the work of the younger singers; for only by such consideration shall we learn what is being done in our own day.

J. B. R.

The

Younger American Poets

I

RICHARD HOVEY

RICHARD HOVEY was a poet of convictions rather than of fancies, in which regard he overtopped many of his contemporaries who were content to be “enamored architects of airy rhyme.” Hovey was himself a skilful architect of rhyme, an imaginative weaver of fancy; but these were not ends, he does not stand primarily for them. He stands for comradeship; for taking vows of one’s own soul; for alliance with the shaping spirit of things; for a sane, wholesome, lusty manhood; a hearty, confident surrender to life.

He is the poet of positivism, virile, objective, and personal to a Whitmanesque degree, and answers to many of the qualifications laid down by Whitman for the testing of an American poet. His performance is eminently of the sort to “face the open fields and the seaside;” it does “absorb into one;” it “animates to life,” and it is of the people. It answers also to the query, “Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States?” for Hovey was an American of the Americans, and his patriotic poems are instinct with national pride, though one may dissent from certain of his opinions upon war.

Hovey, to the degree of his development when his hand was stayed, was a finely balanced man and artist. The purely romantic motives which form the entire basis, for example, of Stephen Phillips’ work, and thus render him a poet of the cultured classes and not of the people, were foreign to the spirit of Hovey. He, too, was recasting in dramatic form some of beauty’s imperishable traditions; but this was only one phase of his art, it did not cause him to approach his own time with less of sympathy; and while he had not yet come deeply into the prophet gifts of song, their potency was upon him, and in the Odes, which contain some of his strongest writing, his passion for brotherhood, for development through comradeship, finds splendid expression. In the best known of his odes, “Spring,” occurs this stirring symbol:

It is in this ode, with the exception of his visioning of “Night” in Last Songs from Vagabondia, that the influence of Whitman upon Hovey comes out most prominently; that is, the influence of manner. The really vital influence is one much less easily demonstrated, but no less apparent to a student of both poets. It is not of the sort, however, to detract from the originality of Hovey, but rather an intensifying of his characteristics, a focalizing of his powers, and is in accordance with Whitman’s declaration that

Hovey’s own nature was so individual that he rarely failed to destroy the teacher, or he was perhaps unconscious of having one; but in the opening lines of the ode in question the Whitman note is unmistakable:

Could volumes of conventional nature poetry set one a-tingle like this? The crowning excellence of Hovey’s nature poems is that they are never reports, they do not describe with far-sought imagery, but are as personal as a poem of love or other emotion. Such passionate surrender, such intimate delight as finds expression, for example, in “The Faun,” could scarcely be more communicative and direct. It becomes at once our own mood, an interchange which is the test of art:

In such words as these one loses thought of the merely picturesque, their infection takes hold upon him, particularly in that line befitting the forest spirit as a garment, in which

a line wherein the idea, feeling, movement, and diction are wholly at one. It is impossible for Richard Hovey to be aloof and analytical in any phase of his work, and when he writes of nature it is as the comrade to whom she is a mystic personality. A stanza of “The Faun” illustrates this; still in the wood, he asks:

The first two collections of the Vagabondia books contain Hovey’s most spontaneous nature verse; they have also some of the lyrics by which he will be known when such a rollicking stave as “Barney McGee,” at which one laughs as a boyish exuberance, is forgotten. The quips of rhyme and fancy that enliven the pages of the earlier volumes give place, in the Last Songs, to a note of seriousness and artistic purpose which sets the collection to an entirely different key; not that the work is uniformly superior to that of the former songs, but it is more earnest in tone; dawn is giving place to noon.

From the second collection may be cited one of the lyric inspirations that sometimes came to Hovey, all warmth and color, as if fashioned complete in a thought. It is called “A Sea Gypsy,” and the first of its quatrains, though perhaps not more than the others, has a haunting charm:

Aside from the dramas, and the noble elegy, “Seaward,” Hovey’s most representative work is found in his collection, Along the Trail, which opens with a group of battle-hymns inspired by the Spanish-American war. With the exception of “Unmanifest Destiny,” and occasional trumpet notes from the poem called “Bugles,” these battle-songs are more or less perfunctory, nor are they ethically the utterance of a prophet. There is the old assumption that because war has ever been, it ever will be; that because the sword has been the instrument of progress in past world-crises, it is the divinely chosen arbiter. There is nothing of that development of man that shall find a higher way, no visioning of a world-standard to which nations shall conform; it is rather the celebration of brawn, as in the sonnet “America.” The jubilant note of his call of the “Bugles,” however, thrills with passionate pride in his country as the deliverer of the weak, for the ultimate idea in Hovey’s mind was his country’s altruism; but, as a whole, the

battle-songs lack the larger vision and are unequal in workmanship, falling constantly into the commonplace from some flight of lyric beauty. The best of them, and a worthy best, both in conception and in its dignified simplicity, is “Unmanifest Destiny,” which follows:

Hovey’s themes are widely diverse, but they are always of the essential purports. He seems not only integral with nature, but integral with man in his ardor of sympathy for his fellows, and the swift understanding of all that makes for achievement or defeat. He had the splendid nonchalance that met everything with confident ease, and made his relation to life like that of an athlete trained to prevail. Not to be servile, not to be negative, not to be vague,—these are some of the notes of his stirring song. Even in love there is a characteristic dash and verve, a celebration of comradeship as the keynote of the relation, that makes it possible for him to write this sonnet, so refreshing and wholesome, and so far removed from the mawkish or effeminate:

And that other sonnet, “Faith and Fate,” with its Valkyr spirit, and its words like ringing hoofbeats:

And closing with one of his finest lines—

What valor in that line—“Loose rein upon the neck of Fate—and forth!” This is the typical mood, but I cannot refrain, before considering the last phase of his work, the dramas, from quoting another sonnet in another mood, because of its beauty and its revelation of the spiritual side of his nature:

“The Quest of Merlin,” Hovey’s first incursion into drama, and indeed one of his earliest works, having been issued in 1891, is most illustrative of his defects and least of his distinctions. It is unnecessary to the subsequent dramas, though serving as an introduction to them, and has in itself very little constructive congruity. In the songs of the fairies, the dryads, the maenads, there is often a delicate airy beauty; but the metrical lapses throughout the drama are so frequent as to detract from one’s pleasure in the verse. This criticism is much less apposite to the subsequent works of the cycle.

Hovey’s Arthurian dramas must be judged by the manner rather than motif, by the situations through which he develops the well-known story, and the dramatic beauty and passion of the dialogue, since the theme is his only as he makes it his by the art of his adaptation. He has given us the Arthur of Malory, and not of Tennyson, the Arthur of a certain early intrigue with Morgance, the Queen of Orkney, outlived in all save its effect, that of bitterness and envy cherished by her against the young Queen Guinevere, and made use of as one of the motives of the drama.

While Tennyson’s Arthur, until the final great scene with Guinevere in the convent, and Bedivere by the lake, has a lay-figure personality, placidly correct, but unconvincing,—in these scenes, and in the general ideal of the Round Table, as developed by Tennyson, there is such profound spiritual beauty that Arthur has come to dwell in a nebulous upper air, as of the gods. It is a shock, then, to see him brought down to earth, as he is in Hovey’s dramas. However, the lapses are but referred to as incidental to the plot, not occurring during its action, and Arthur becomes to us a human, magnanimous personality, commanding sympathy, if he does not dominate the imagination as does Tennyson’s hero. The handicap under which any poet labors who makes use of these legends, even though vitalizing them with a new touch, and approaching them from a new standpoint, is that the Tennyson touch, the Tennyson standpoint, has so impressed itself upon the memory that comparison is inevitable.

The fateful passion of Lancelot and Guinevere is enveloped by Tennyson in a spiritual atmosphere; but in the dramas of Hovey, while delicately approached, it lacks that elevation by which alone it lives as a soul-tragedy, and not as an intrigue. There is, indeed, a strife for loyalty on the part of Lancelot, when he returns from a chivalrous quest and learns that the King’s bride is his unknown Lady of the Hills; but it is soon overborne by Galahault’s assurance that Arthur is to Guinevere—

and that she

Ere this declaration, Lancelot, in conflict with himself, had exclaimed:

But to Galahault’s subtle arguments he opposes an ever-weakening will, and seeing the Queen walking in the garden, exquisite in beauty,

he is persuaded to seek her, and, ere the close of the interview, half confessions have orbed to full acknowledgment by each. The scene is artistically handled, especially in the ingenuous simplicity of Guinevere.

Hovey occasionally makes the mistake of robbing some vital utterance of its dramatic value by interlarding it with ornament. True emotion is not literary, and Guinevere, meeting Lancelot alone at the lodge of Galahault, for the first time after their mutual confession, having come hither disguised and by a perilous course, would scarcely have chosen these decorative words:

and Lancelot, of the overmastering passion, would scarcely have babbled this reply:

But when the crisis of the play is reached, when the court is rife with rumors of the Queen’s disloyalty, and Lancelot and Guinevere, under imminent shadow of exposure, meet by chance in the throne room,—there is drawn a vital, moving picture, one whose art lies in revealing the swift transition from impulse to impulse through which one passes when making great decisions. First, the high light is thrown upon the stronger side of Guinevere, in such meditative passages as these, tinged with a melancholy beauty:

And fortressed with resolve, she speaks of war, of rending the kingdom, of violating friendships, of desecrating the family bond, to all of which Lancelot opposes his own desires:

This but adds strength to Guinevere’s argument,

and with a final resolve she adds:

(Lancelot looks at her dumbly, then slowly turns to go. As he draws aside the curtain of the doorway—)

This swift change of front, this weakening, this inconsistency, is yet so human, so subtly true to life, under such a phase of it, that the entire scene vibrates with emotion which gathers force in the declaration of Guinevere:

and reaches its climax in the sudden strength with which Lancelot meets the Queen’s weakness. During her pleading that he should leave her, his selfish wish had been uppermost; but her weakness recalls him to himself and evokes his latent loyalty to the King:

And Guinevere, casting about for her own justification, replies:

To which Lancelot:

No surplusage, no interposition of the merely literary, cumbers this scene, which immediately precedes the final one, in which Lancelot and the Queen are publicly accused before the King, sitting with Guinevere beside him on the throne.

The opportunity for a great dramatic effect is obvious; but through the magnanimity of Arthur, in waiving the impeachment, and exonerating from suspicion the Queen and Lancelot, the effect is not of the clash and din order, in fact, it is anti-climax in action, the real climax being a spiritual one whose subtlety would be lost on the average audience.

Lancelot (half aside, partly to Guinevere and partly to himself):

Guinevere (half apart):

Whatever one may think of the ethical side of the play as wrought out by Hovey, there is no question of its human element. As a whole, “The Marriage of Guenevere” leaves upon one a more concrete and vital impression than do the other dramas of the cycle, though it has less of action and intricacy of plot than the succeeding one, “The Birth of Galahad,” and would probably, for stage purposes, be less effective.

The action of the latter play takes place chiefly with Arthur’s army occupied in the siege of Rome, and unfolds an ingenious plot, turning upon the capture of Dagonet, the Queen’s jester, who has been sent with a letter to Lancelot, informing him of the birth of his son, and announcing that Guinevere, having left the child with her friend, the Princess Ylen, had set out to join the army. The Romans at once conceive the plan of holding Dagonet; capturing the Queen for the palace of Caesar; and giving to Lancelot the alternative of forsaking Arthur, placing himself at the head of the army and becoming tributary king of Britain, with Guinevere as his queen; or of being publicly dishonored by the conveyance to Arthur of the incriminating letter. All of which was artfully planned, and might have been executed as artfully, had not Dagonet, the jester, in an act of jugglery, stolen the Emperor’s cloak and escaped, and, in the guise of a scrivener, attached himself to the service of a young poet of Caesar’s household.