History of American verse (1610-1897)

Front matter

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Chapter I

Fagb Introductory. — The Elizabethan Era. — First American ballad. — George Sandys and his translation. — Maryland and Virginia writers. — Meagre achievement of the Southern Colonies . . 13

Chapter II

Puritan civilization. — Bay Psalm Book. — Elegiac verse. — Mrs. Anne Bradstreet as "The Tenth Muse." — Puritanism in the later generation. — Apotheosis of the Doleful. — Michael Wigglesworth and his Gloomy Epic. — Death and the tomb the most prolific topics. — First native American poet. — Influence of Waller succeeded by that of Pope. — Byles and Green. — Close of the Gloomy Period 23

Chapter III

Pennsylvania writers. — Slight literary influence of the Quakers. — Benjamin Franklin and the Junto. — James Ralph. — Satirized by Pope. — Thomas Godfrey, first native dramatist. — Nathaniel Evans. — His tribute to science. — Rogers and his drama, " Ponteach." — Colonial New York. — The Dutch poets. — William Livingston and his " Philosophic Solitude " 47

X CONTENTS

CHAPTER IV Hints of Nationalism. — 1 725-1 776

Pagb Early ballads. — The French and Indian wars. — " Pietas et Gratu-

latio." — Political transitions traceable in our literature. — Virginia the pioneer in Revolutionary verse. — Episodes leading up to the war celebrated 60

CHAPTER V Freneau and the Connecticut Choir. — 1765-1815 " Laureate of the Revolution." — Superiority of Freneau's work. — " Cantos from a Prison Ship." — His Indian poems. — Paralleled by Schiller, Campbell, and Scott. — " The House of Night." — First American poem showing imagination. — First national poet. — Perverted literary taste of the time. — The Connecticut Nine. — " The Hartford Wits." — Honorable services to the country 75

Chapter VI

Della Cruscan Echoes. — 1785-1815 Relative importance of female writers. — Della Cruscanism. — Championed by Robert Treat Paine and Mrs. Morton. — Satirized by Clifton and Tyler. — Ossianic and other echoes. — Chaotic condition of American literature at close of War of 1812 . 103

Chapter VII

Growth of American art and its effect. — Washington Allston. — Artist and poet. — R. H. Dana, Sr. — His pioneer services to literature. — Charles Sprague. — John Pierpont and his reform verse. — Influence of Pope succeeded by that of Wordsworth and Coleridge 119

Chapter VIII

Literature on Manhattan Island. — "The Salmagundi Papers." — Paulding and his Epic. — " The Croakers." — Drake and Halleck. — Satiric poetry. — Period of " Annuals." — Sands, Bryant, and Verplanck. — N. P. Willis, Poet of Society. — Outlived his fame. — Characteristics of the Knickerbocker writers. — " The Old Guard of American Literature " , . . 130

CONTENTS xi

CHAPTER IX Poets of Sentiment and Passion. — 1815-1839 Unnatural sentimentalism. — Hillhouse and Brainerd. — Year 1821

important in our literature. — Percival and his Byronic tendencies. — Mrs. Sigourney and Mrs. Brooks. — John Neal. — Minor singers from the South. — Dabney and Maxwell. — Wilde and his famous " Stanzas." — Pinckney as a song-writer.

— Religious poetry. — Robert Dinsmore, pioneer of American dialect verse. — Transition era from the mechanical and artificial to the creative and natural. — American provincialism. — Anti-slavery verse 151

CHAPTER X Poets of Nature and American Life. — 18 17-1870

William Cullen Bryant. — His breadth of mind. — Went direct to nature. — His reserve. — His Hellenic cast of mind. — His nature poetry. — Contrasted with Whitman. — Minor poets of nature. — "Evolution of Nature in Literature." — Early American idyls. — Home themes. — Source of Whittier's influence.

— Folk songs and ballads. — Legendary poems. — Literature among the mill operatives. — Miss Lucy Larcom. — Holland and his didacticism. — The West in literature. — Poetry of pioneer life. — Southern literature. — Foster's plantation songs.

— Verse of the Mexican and Civil Wars. — Characteristics of American home poetry 172

Chapter XI

Henry W. Longfellow. — A new literary era. — Advance shown in his successive volumes. — Early lyrics. — " Evangeline." — English hexameters. — " Miles Standish," " Hiawatha," and other " American " conceptions. — Longfellow on the imagination. — Minor poets of culture. — Story, Parsons, Boker. — Bayard Taylor. — " Lars." — Influence of culture. — Poe as a lyric poet.

— Early struggles. — Pike's "Isidore " and Poe's "Lenore." — Worship of the beautiful. — Literary women friendly to Poe.

— Minor lyric poets. — Read and Stoddard. — The Gary sisters.

— Improvement in magazine literature. — Bulk of American verse naturally lyrical 213 xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER XII Humor and Satire. — 1836-1870 Pagb Early American humor. — Holmes and Lowell highest types of

American wit. — Dr. Holmes as a humorist. — Lowell's greatness as a satiric poet. — " The Biglow Papers." — " Fable for Critics." — Characteristics. — Minor poets of humor. — Saxe, Butler, and Leland. — Characteristics of American humor . . 268

Chapter XIII

Religious Renaissance in New England. — " Transcendentalism ; " " The Dial " and its contributors ; Brook Farm. — Emerson's career. — Carlyle on Transcendentalism. — Minor poets of idealism. — Transcendentalism and abolitionism. — The protest of realism. — Walt Whitman and his characteristics. — Close of the Golden Era of American Song. — Longfellow the poet of the closing and Bret Harte of the opening one . . . 300

Chapter XIV

New era after the war. — Rise of Bret Harte and John Hay. — "Joaquin " Miller and his unrealism. — The Middle West. — Piatt, Venable, Carleton, Riley. — The new South. — Lanier and Thompson. — Mrs. Preston and local Southern singers. — Contemporary verse in New England and the Middle States.

— Edmund C. Stedman, poet and critic. — T. B. Aldrich. — Howells, Trowbridge, Winter, Gilder, Fawcett, DeKay, Lathrop. — Poets born since 1850 too close for fair criticism.

— Feminine mind in recent literature. — " H. H." — Miss Lazarus, Mrs. Thaxter, and Miss Thomas. — Last words. — Concurrent development of American literature and democracy.

— Spirit of each period reflected in its verse. — Conspicuous exception. — Present social and industrial agitation finds no voice in song. — Is it from a lack of true ideals among modern reformers ? 342

INDEXES ,

I. Authors and Subjects 379

II. First Lines of Poems 393

Chapter I Voices From J'he Wilderness

1610-1708

THE age of romance had not entirely ceased in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was, indeed, an era of reaction and unrest, but the afterglow of chivalry still illumined the social horizon. The feelings which animated the crusaders of the Middle Ages yet lingered in a degree, and inspired hardy adventurers to cross the seas, and penetrate the mysteries of that " Saturnian continent " which had lain hidden in the West, and for more than a century after its discovery had offered so little encouragement to colonists. This enthusiasm was, to be sure, a kind of earnestness akin to fanaticism, which, in the name of religion and humanity, tormented, maimed and burnt, beheaded, outraged and tortured; but for all it was a spirit of exploration, of investigation, and of free inquiry, though still embodied in old-world superstitions.

It was not long before false romanticism was to be ridiculed out of Europe. The year in which George Weymouth made his daring voyage to the then unknown coast of Maine witnessed the first appearance of Cervantes' great work; though it was not until five years after the first settlement of Jamestown that

"Don Quixote" became intelligible to English readers through Skelton's translation. Certainly no expedition ever left Salamanca more quixotic in its nature than that composed of men who despised labor, "dissolute gallants, broken tradesmen, gentlemen impoverished in spirit and in fortune, rakes and libertines, men more fitted to corrupt than to found a commonwealth," such as formed the nucleus of English civilization in America in 1607. But with all its faults it was a glorious era in England's history, those early years of the seventeenth century. Never before had there assembled so many brilliant wits, writers, and thinkers, as adorned the London of that day. The Elizabethan poets and dramatists still continue to influence modern thought, and seem certain to retain a commanding position as long as such a thing as literature exists. Their very names are indissolubly connected with the history of civilization. For three centuries their works have furnished inspiration to the wisest minds in all directions of intellectual activity.

The circumstances attending the founding of our nation were a blending of the simple and complex. There is no twilight dawn in which cluster the poetic legends that lend such a charm to the early traditions of other races. The hard, actual strife of the settlers against savage nature early dispelled fantastic notions of an earthly paradise or a new Arcadia. Life in the New World was filled with far sterner realities than in the Old. The colonists were themselves too busy in acting the romance of history to care about reading or writing it. They were, in a certain sense, the romancists of the world. All unconsciously to themselves, they were the actors in the great epic of humanity, laying broad and deep the foundations of a civilization distinct from any that up to that time had ever been realized. Under their own exertions they beheld iorests merging into farm-lands, the wilderness gradually blossoming into towns and villages, the original lords of the soil, at first only objects of terror, slowly receding deeper into the forest, or disappearing altogether. Burning homesteads and midnight massacres told the oft-recurring tragedy of their ordinary life. At the same time, removed from old-world conventionalisms, the cause of common humanity was receiving added dignity, and the spirit of conservative democracy was gaining strength from common hardships at home, and oppression from abroad. In the apparently endless struggle against material obstacles the development of higher literature was impossible. Colonialism is inconsistent with a noble literature. Like the arid lands of the West, our literary soil was rich in essential elements, but needed some irrigating force to quicken it into fertility. Such a force could be found in nationalism alone.

The growth of the colonies presents a singular spectacle of contrary forces developing in parallel lines. In the South a social aristocracy entrenched itself amid the crudest environments. The gradual growth of the spirit of liberty kept pace with the increasing dominance of slavery. Popular education was ignored and a free press unknown. Literature of any sort was tabooed. No native poet worthy even a relatively conspicuous place in our literature appeared in the South prior to the Revolution.

The middle colonies lacked many of the picturesque characteristics of either New England or the South. Politically, they were further advanced than their eastern neighbors. The benign influence of William of Orange had so far stimulated native Dutch stagnation that religious freedom was introduced in New Netherlands at a very early date. In Pennsylvania liberty of conscience was recognized, and some of the earliest utterances in the cause of freedom came from Philadelphia. But the contributions by the middle colonies to higher literature prior to 1775 were light.

The social forces in New England were equally conflicting. Its civilization was designed as a protest against established forms in England. Yet it developed a hierarchy fully as despotic as any in the old world. It denounced the superstitions of Anglicanism and Romanism, while it made heresy a crime, and murdered helpless men and women charged with witchcraft. Freedom of the press as now understood was unknown. Yet it cannot be denied that New England was intellectually far stronger than its southern competitors. The prevalence of education developed a native average intelligence to which neither the southern nor the middle colonies could aspire. The native New England divines were men of strong intellectual force, however misapplied that force may have been. The New England theocracy of the eighteenth century was the lineal predecessor of at least one distinctively American school of literature.

In such barren ground for six generations of American civilization higher literature struggled for a foothold. Such flowers of poetry as succeeded in taking root in the forbidding soil are now generally interesting as historical curiosities rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Yet though in seeking to trace the influence of colonial literature upon the development of genuine poetry we may have to traverse many a barren waste, we may occasionally meet with some modest blossom that will be not the less welcome on account of its- rarity.

It was in the ill-starred colony at Jamestown that American literature had its origin. It was a transplanted product, of course, but it is interesting to note that even amid such discouraging surroundings the spirit of song was not entirely stifled.

The first published metrical effusion on American themes by one who had lived in America seems to have been produced by Mr. R. Rich, one of the earliest arrivals in Jamestown, author of " Newes from Virginia."

But one copy of the original edition is known to exist. This was discovered in a volume of tracts about 1864 by Mr. Halliwell, the well-known Shakespearean scholar. Twenty-five copies were printed in 1865, and fifteen of these destroyed. In 1874 twenty-five additional copies were printed in London for Bernard Quaritch. It is from one of the latter that our extracts are made. Of the author, but little is known beyond what is stated in the ballad itself. He returned to England with Captain Newport, where he published his work and sought to correct existing notions and to induce others to return with him. Whether he ever returned is unknown. The title-page is according to the fashion of the time, and reads as follows: —

" Newes from Virginia. The Lost Flocke Triumphant. With the happy arrival of that famous and worthy knight Sr. Thomas Gates; and the well reputed and valiant Captain Mr. Christopher Newporte, and others, into England. With the maner of their distress in the Island of Devils (otherwise called Bermoothawes) where they remayned 42 weeks, and builded two

Pynaces, in which they returned into Virginia. By R. Rich, Gent., One of the Voyage. London. Printed by Edw. AUde, and are to be sold by John Wright, at Christ Church dore, 1610."

It is not a great poem by any means, and frequently lapses into absurdest doggerel ; yet it breathes a certain spirit of Americanism lacking in some of the more artificial work of the later colonial period. After a breezy introduction the author opens his case in verse. He gives a description of the wreck, the adventures on the "iland" of "Bermoothawes," the building of two gallant "pynases" of "seader tree," the safe arrival of the party in Virginia, and the Arcadian delights of life in the new world. Possibly there is a poetic license in describing the reformatory influences of the Virginia colony.

" Those men that vagrants liv'd with us, have there deserved well ; Their governour writes in their praise, as divers letters tel.

" And to th' adventurers thus he writes, be not dismay'd at all, For scandal cannot do us wrong, God will not let us fall. Let England knowe oure willingnesse, for that our worke is good. We hope to plant a nation, where none before hath stood."

The natural attractions of the country and advantages accorded settlers are set forth, and the " Poem " is brought to a close with a prayer to Heaven for assistance.

This ballad was published twenty-one years before the "Sea Marke" by Captain John Smith, who is usually regarded as the earliest American author. Neither of these two writers can lay any claim to poetic genius.

It was only appropriate that the first purely literary creation of a transplanted people should be in the shape of translation. The claims of such a work to a place in American literature, it is true, are most shadowy. The work of a native of England in interpreting the writings of a native of Italy is hardly one to which Americans, on the score of nationality, can base any strong title. But as the first really poetic effort produced in America, its importance becomes manifest.

George Sandys (i 577-1644) was an Oxford graduate, and had already written some excellent books of travel, when in 162 1 he was appointed treasurer of the Virginia colony.

Nothing could be more discouraging to literary life than the condition of the Jamestown settlement at this time. It was one of the most hopeless periods in the colony's history. Deprived of all the conditions that make life attractive to one of his kind, surrounded by uncongenial adventurers, and constantly threatened by barbaric foes, Sandys in his self-imposed banishment must have appreciated the feelings of his favorite Roman, exiled for years to the barbaric wilderness about the mouth of the Danube. Unlike the Roman poet, however, his translator in going into exile cannot be said to have left his genius behind him, for our poet-traveller never lost heart in the face of great discouragement. The work begun by him in England was completed in the American wilderness. The last ten of the fifteen books of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" were translated in the Jamestown colony, and in this effort of Sandys is embodied the new world's first contribution to genuine literature.

Sandys also translated part of the^neid, the Psalms, and the Song of Solomon. He remained in America several years, but all his attention was not engrossed by official and literary duties. He is said to have built the first water-mill, and to have been interested in ironwork and shipbuilding in the colony. In 1626 the completed volume of the " Metamorphoses " was published in London. The dedication of the book is to "The Most High and Mightie Prince Charles, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland," and concludes with the words —

" It needeth more than a single denization, being a double stranger, sprung from the stock of the ancient Romans, but bred in the new world of ihe rudeness whereof it cannot but participate, especially having Warres and Tumults to bring it to light instead of the Muses. But however unperfect, your favor is able to supply, and to make it worthy of life, if you judge it not unworthy of your royal patronage."

The work did not have to depend on royal patronage for its support. As a piece of scholarly, finished verse-making, this translation is not surpassed by anything produced during our colonial period. It received the approbation of great poets and critics. Dryden and Pope both praised it for its scholarship and poetic spirit. If not so polished as Dryden's Virgil or Pope's Homer, it still deserves high rank in the literature of translations. The last poet of the Augustan era born in the last year of the Roman republic was the first to receive attention in the American colonies. Americans certainly have no reason to feel anything but gratification at the first literary expression from this continent.

Forty years after the appearance of Sandys' translation, the rollicking figure of George Alsop emerged from the Maryland wilderness with his farrago of prose and verse, entitled " A Character of the Province of Maryland." The rhyming doggerel at the close of each chapter is beneath criticism, hardly possessing even the merit of a literary curiosity. Alsop lived in that province |rom 1659 to 1663. In describing the virtues of his Marylanders, he declares: —

" Here if the lawyer had nothing else to maintain him but his brawling, he might button up his chops, and burn his buckram bag, or else hang it upon a pin until its antiquity had eaten it up with dirt and dust ; then with a spade, like his grandsire Adam, turn up the face of creation, purchasing his bread by the sweat of his brows, that before was got by the motionated waterworks of his jaws, . . . The Anabaptists have little to say here, as well as in other places since the ghost of John of Leyden haunts their conventicles. The Adamite, Ranter, and Fifth Monarchy men, Maryland cannot, nay, will not digest such corroding morsels; as that this province is an utter enemy to blasphemous and zealous imprecations, drained from the limbec of Hellish and damnable spirits as well as profuse profaneness that issues from the prodigality of none but crackbrained sots."

" 'T is said the gods lower down that chain above That ties both prince and subject up in love: Few, Maryland, in this can boast but you, Live ever blest, and let those clouds that do Eclipse most states be always lights to you. And dwelling so, you may forever be The only emblem of tranquillity."

Colonial Maryland does not seem to have been especially fortunate in its poets. In 1708 Ebenezer Cook published in London "The Sot-Weed Factor, or a Voyage to Maryland," describing the laws, courts, and constitutions of the country, "and also the buildings, feasts, frolics, entertainments and drunken humors of the inhabitants in that part of America."

It is written with all the exaggeration, crudeness, and coarseness of current English satiric verse, but is lit up with flashes of humor that make parts of it still readable. Every one is the reverse of what he should be. The Maryland men are all rogues and the women no better. Swindled at every turn, the narrator flees the country in rage, flinging upon it a withering curse, in which direful fates are invoked upon unhappy Maryland and her inhabitants. As Cook seems never to have been identified with the country, his right to a place in our national literature may be questioned. At all events, Marylanders may be pardoned for relinquishing any claim to this amusing but abusive satirist.

If under the repressive rule that marked the thirty-six years of Governor Berkeley's administration in Virginia, the voice of freedom ever found expression, nothing of interest has been preserved save the remarkable eulogy on the heroic Nathaniel Bacon in 1676. This eulogy, written shortly after the death of the "general by consent of the people," has become familiar to many readers by its frequent republication. As his "rebellion" was a significant feature in the political development of the country, so his epitaph from a friendly hand offers the most original literary achievement of which the early southern colonists can boast.

With the death of Nathaniel Bacon civil liberty in Virginia was crushed, and with it all attempts at a high grade of literature.

Chapter II 1624-1765

GLOOMY and colorless the New England civilization certainly was, from an aesthetic point of view. And no less certainly was it answerable for many grotesque vagaries. To the Puritans the world was a vale of tears, and the beautiful and the cheerful were but hollow mockeries. In the motherland they early denounced poets as "caterpillars of the commonwealth," though the greatest poet of his generation was an out and out Puritan. But after all the exaggeration that panegyric and vituperation alike have imposed upon their memory, the early Puritans still stand for the great moral force of their age. They betray much of the bigotry, intolerance, and even superstition of their times ; but through it all runs a vein of heroic endurance, of steadfastness to principle, of resignation under sorrow, and a triumphant faith that must tone down many of the rough edges in their character. Yet while this system could produce in England a Milton and a Bunyan, in America the voice of the sublime and the beautiful was strangled in the thralls of theologic disputation.

William Morrell's "Nova Anglia " (1624), and William Wood's "New England's Prospect" (1634), metrical effusions of little merit, are entitled to mention on account of priority, not as representing Puritanism. But even the Puritan divines paid some homage to a lugubrious muse, for a number of them wrote verses of varying degrees of wretchedness. That they could not all write flowing lines for devotional use became a matter of grievous embarrassment. It was easy enough to reject written prayers, but extemporaneous praise proved a stumbling-block. It was necessary, as Richard Mather says, to have some written form, "because every good minister hath not a gift of spirituall poetry to compose extemporaneously psalmes as he hath of prayer."

Accordingly a triumvirate composed of Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John Eliot labored long and earnestly to supply the crying need. The result was the appearance of the first book of any importance printed in America. The " Bay Psalm-Book " was published in 1640, and, with some modifications, for more than a century retained its prestige as the chief devotional book of the colony. By 1750 it had passed through twenty-seven editions.

The preface by Richard Mather, from which we have already quoted, further says : —

" If therefore the verses are not always so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect ; let them consider that God's Altar needs not our pollishings ; Ex. 20. for wee have respected rather a plaine translation then to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather than poetry, in translating the hebrew words into english language, and David's poetry into english meetre ; that soe we may sing in Sion the Lords songs of prayse according to his owne will ; untill hee take us from hence, and wipe away all our teares, & bid us enter into our masters ioye to sing eternall Halleluiahs."

That little attention was given to elegance or beauty will not be disputed. Yet did not their "Conscience,"

which they claim specially to have "attended," suffer a twinge when the grandly sonorous English of the standard tr§inslation of the Nineteenth Psalm, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork," was mutilated as follows? —

" The heavens doe declare the majesty of God ; also the firmament shews forth his handy-work abroad.

2 " Day speaks to day, knowledge

night hath to night declar'd.

3 There neither speach nor language is,

where their voyce is not heard.

4 Through all the earth their line

is gone forth, & unto the utmost end of all the world,

their speaches reach also ; A Tabernacle hee

in them pitcht for the Sun.

5 Who Bridegroom like from 's chamber goes

glad Giant's-race to run.

6 From heaven's utmost end,

his course and compassing ; to ends of it, & from the heat thereof is hid nothing."

"The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein, " becomes Puritanized in this strain : —

" The earth lehovahs is, and the fulnesse of it ; the habitable world, & they that there upon doe sit."

The title-page of the Psalm-Book contains the quotation from the Epistle of St. James, chapter v. : " If any be afflicted, let him pray ; and if any be merry, let him sing psalmes." It is difficult to conceive the degree of merriment that could find expression in this rendition of the Sixty-ninth Psalm : —

" The waters in unto my soule are come, o God me save,

2 " I am in muddy deep sunk downe,

where I no standing have :

into deep waters I am come,

where floods me overflow.

3 I of my crying weary am,

my throat is dryed soe."

A second edition was published in 1647. But in the words of Cotton Mather, " It was thought that a little more of art was to be employed upon them; and for that cause they were committed unto Mr. Dunster," of Harvard, who, with the assistance of Richard Lyon, "revised and refined this translation." This third edition was printed in 1650. It was enriched by the addition of some "Scripture Songs," said to be the work of Mr. Lyon. The most familiar of these is " The Song of Deborah and Barak. "

The first ambitious poetical efforts of the early colonial period, both in Virginia and in Massachusetts, were in the direction of translation. It was too early for a distinctively local literature, and in these efforts may be seen a fairly representative line of thought. The Virginia colonist found congenial work in translating the polished and often impure writings of a heathen poet. The New Englanders found equally congenial work in translating the rugged but exalted strains of the Hebrew poet. The tendencies of each were characteristic. The heathen appears in polished, stately English; the inspired Hebrew in crabbed, knotty, disjointed lines that writhe and twist in their contortions to become metrical. Yet the Bay Psalm-

Book, repellant as it is to modern taste, exerted a mighty influence in shaping the character of thousands for three generations. The more elegant work of the southern colonists never became a household classic, though after the lapse of two and a half centuries it remains much more readable than does the work of the Puritan junto. ^

There is much in the externals of the lives and works of the Puritan divines to cause flippant ridicule to-day. Yet life was a terribly earnest thing for them. It was through their earnestness, convictions, and sincere faith that they accomplished what they did. Literature early gained a foothold in New England. It was not an exhilarating, stimulating product. But it was something. In order to obtain a true conception of American literature, it should be constantly borne in mind that its foundation was on the broad rocks of Protestant theology, a foundation substantial enough to endure through the ages, though in viewing the superstructure we sometimes lose sight of this support. It is true, poetry could bloom only in the crevices of such rocks, and was of too feeble a growth long to retain its beauty. Yet through the storms of centuries those stern crags of Puritan morality transmitted their veins of pure gold, invisible to the eye, but appearing as genuine metal in a later epoch.

The theology of the seventeenth century was the legitimate progenitor of much that is best in American poetry. To the severe arbitrament of an unyielding conscience was submitted every question, however