Chapter Three: The Rise of a National Literature
Historical Background
The Romantic Movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to
England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some 20 years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads . In America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet there was an important difference:
Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of
"the American Renaissance."
Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science,
Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay "The
Poet" (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the
Romantic era, asserts:
For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself; the other half is his expression.
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Chapter Three: The Rise of a National Literature
The development of the self became a major theme; self- awareness a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one's self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of "self"----which suggested selfishness to earlier generations----was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: "self-realization," "self-expression," "selfreliance."
As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology.
Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The "sublime" -- an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop) -- produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.
Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America's vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime.
The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England
Transcendentalists -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates -- were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic
Movement. In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil.
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1. Social and political changes: Andrew Jackson’s unsuccessful bid for presidency in
1824, when he won the plurality of votes but lost to John Quincy Adams when the election was decided in the House of Representatives. Jackson, a man of common beginnings, was the first candidate of the new states. In 1828 election, Jackson convincingly defeated Adams bringing to an end the domination of the eastern establishment.
2. The beginning of industrial and technological developments: key markers were the introduction of steamboats, spinning mills, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, the clipper ships, railroad and telegraph.
3. “The success of northern industry made slavery appear anomalous, and to the free labor of the North slavery became…repugnant.”
4. The industrial revolution also raised the issue of the overworked laborers.
Influenced by the French philosopher Charles Fourier, Albert Brisbane published The
Social Destiny of Men (1840) . In it Brisbane states: “…monotony, uniformity, intellectual inaction, and torpor reign: distrust, isolation, separation, conflict and antagonisms are almost universal…Society is spiritually a dessert.”
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5. Utopian experiments to counter the industrial revolution: Robert
Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana; George and Sophia Ripley’s Brook
Farm; Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands; and many Fourierist colonies.
6. Other experiments: Amelia Bloomer’s bloomers worn by women in some Fourierist colonies, mesmerism, phrenology, hydropath, giving up of tobacco or alcohol, the eating of Dr. Graham’s bread.
7. The major reform movements: abolition of slavery, the rights of women, and the civil war. Reformism was, according to Whittier, “moral steam-enginery” and it was fed by two impulses----the idea of evolution even before Darwin and the idea of the “perfection of the social order.”
8. Transcendentalism: the philosophical, literary, social and theological movement. (discuss it in details in next chapter)
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General Introduction of Romanticism
Elements of Romanticism
1.
Frontier: vast expanse, freedom, no geographic limitations.
2.
Optimism: greater than in Europe because of the presence of frontier.
3.
Experimentation: in science, in institutions.
4.
Mingling of races: immigrants in large numbers arrive to the US.
5.
Growth of industrialization: polarization of north and south; north becomes industrialized, south remains agricultural
Romantic Subject Matter
1.
The quest for beauty: non-didactic, “pure beauty”
2.
The use of the far-away and non-normal----antique and fanciful: a. In historical perspective: antiquarianism; antiquing or artificially aging; interest in the past.
b. Characterization and mood: grotesque, Gothicism, sense of terror, fear; use of the odd and queer.
3.
Escapism----from American problems
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6.
7.
8.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
4.
Interest in external nature: for itself, for beauty a. Nature as source for the knowledge of primitive.
b. Nature as refuge.
c. Nature as revelation of God to the individual.
Romantic Attitudes
1.
Appeals to imagination; use of the “willing suspension of disbelief.”
2.
3.
Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, geniality.
Subjectivity: in form and meaning.
Romantic Techniques
Remoteness of settings in time and space.
Improbable plots.
Inadequate or unlikely characterization.
Authorial subjectivity.
Socially “harmful morality”, a world of “lies”
Organic principle in writing: form rises out of content, non-formal.
Experimentation in new forms: picking up and using obsolete patterns.
Cultivation of the individualized, subjective form of writing.
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Washington Irving
Like Cooper, Irving used English and European literary forms--wit and satire, the occasional essay, the novel, the biography—to convey what he sensed to be the uniqueness of the American scene. And like Cooper, Irving was a Federalist and social conservative, using literature as a means of creating a tradition to offset the centrifugal results of geographical expansion, political democracy, and economic innovation.
Irving was born in New York City in 1783 and, like so many boys of that generation, named after the nation’s godlike hero.
(1783—1859)
As a young man, Irving studied law but practiced rarely, preferring to socialize with
New York’s amusing set of young bachelors and men-about-town. From his group
Irving drew the inspiration for his first publication, Salmagundi , became the focal point for a group of New York writers in the early nineteenth century, called the
Knickerbocker school . Borrowing this name (which was drawn from an old Dutch family name from the time when New York was a Dutch colony), Irving wrote another satirical work A History of New York…by Diedrich Knickerbocker , in which, as a good Federalist, he ridiculed the Democratic Party of Thomas Jefferson.
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From 1815 to 1832 Irving lived and traveled widely in England and on the
European continent. Now much of his work shaped itself as a consciously
American response to Old World culture.
Seeking a large international audience, he became primarily a writer of short fiction and personalized sketches and essays. Burlesque satire gave way to a gentler, more subtle humor, and he developed the more ingratiating prose style for which he became famous. His persona Geoffrey Crayon, a shy, ironic, at times melancholy American bachelor writer traveling in Europe—a fictionalized version of Irving himself— gave a degree of thematic and tonal unity to his miscellanies, The Sketch
Book, Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a
Traveler and The Albambra.
His going to Spain in 1826 and being given access to a mass of largely unused materials relating to Christopher
Columbus led to his biography of the explorer. The book was well received, and thereafter Irving wrote more history and biography than fiction. A national celebrity upon his return to America in
1832, he traveled west, gathering material for “A Tour on the Prairies”, which he followed shortly with Astoria and Bonneville , histories of far-western fur trading and exploring ventures.
From 1842 to 1846 he served as
American minister to Spain. In his final years he continued to produce books and revised and published his complete works. He finished the five-volume
Life of Washington shortly before his death.
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A History of New York…by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809)
Washington Irving's A Knickerbocker's History of New York is the single funniest book in American literature. Despite a weak and too-lengthy opening segment on the origin of life and other awkward philosophical questions (the merits of this section are addressed by Irving/Knickerbocker in volume two), once the Dutch colonize the ancient island of Manhattoes (present-day Manhattan),
Irving hits a rollicking gallop, going full stride at full speed and doesn't't stop until the dubious William the Testy is vanquished at the first volume's end.
"Diedrich Knickerbocker" was arguably the greatest of the several personae Irving adopted during the course of his long writing career. 'Diedrich' penned 'The Legend
Of Sleepy Hollow' and 'Rip Van Winkle,' as well as short stories 'Wolfert Weber,'
'The Devil And Tom Walker,' 'Kidd The Pirate,' and 'Dolph Heyliger.' Irving achieved magic whenever he wrote, but when he steps into Knickerbocker's antique
Dutch shoes, the combination of humor, history and folklore that results is unique, sweeping, and highly entertaining.
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A History of New York…by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809)
Few writers could or would dare to write the kind of poetic sentences
Irving/Knickerbocker could, such as "the inhabitants were of primitive stock, and had intermarried and bred in and in, never swarming far from the parent hive."
In the preface, Irving writes that his purpose is “to clothe home scenes and places and familiar names with imaginative and whimsical associations”. Irving actually invented many of the vents and legends he writes about in the book. The idea was to give the region of New York City a special “local color”. But more importantly, the book is a masterpiece of comedy which laughs at the Puritans and at New
York’s early Dutch governors.
All lovers of American literature and history, and of Americana generally, should know this delightful, warm and amusing book. Too often today, when addressing the origins of American literature and our early writers, we turn to names like
Hawthorne and Poe, forgetting that Irving came first and was in fact the first
American writer ever to be taken seriously by Europeans.
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The Sketch Book (1819)
Washington Irving’s next important work, The Sketch Book (1819), contains two most enduring stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. In both these stories, Irving aims at creating a past in which history and myth blend into each other, providing for a rapidly changing American society kind of historical tradition so apparent in England and so apparently absent in the new nation.
The plots of both stories are based on old German folk tales. However, Irving fills them with the “local color” of New York’s Hudson River Valley. In “The Legend”,
Irving tells of a Connecticut schoolmaster plying his trade near Tarrytown, New
York, among the Dutch families there. A fervent believer in witchcraft and the spirit world, Ichabod Crane is also one of the few educated men in the community, and as such is a notable figure in the area. In love with Katrina Van Tassel, daughter of a prosperous farmer, Crane must compete for her affections with Abraham Van Brunt, or Brom Bones as he is locally known. A huge, muscular brute, Brom is determined to win Katrina’s affection. Going home late one night after a party at the Van
Tassel’s, Crane is assailed by a monstrous black horse and rider, whom he hysterically identifies as the ghost of a headless
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The Sketch Book (1819)
Hessian cavalryman killed in that area during the Revolution. Crane’s horse and hat are discovered the next day, but he has vanished; some say he was spirited away by the headless horseman; others, like successful suitor Brom Bones, will only laugh and say nothing. In this story, Irving tells a comic tale, using some stock figures like the awkward schoolmaster and the unsophisticated country giant. Further, he takes what was once serious matters in New England—witchcraft, demon, possession, the unseen world—and makes them quite unserious, a matter of frightening little children and gullible adults. Most of all, Irving writes a story taken from American materials, saying in effect that the U.S., like England and
Europe, has folk tales, legends, tales of the supernatural to provoke and amuse.
“Rip Van Winkle”, by far the better story, also relies on American materials and setting, although the plot derives a German folk tale, “Peter Klaus”. Rip Van
Winkle lives in a village near the Tappan Zee, a wide part of the Hudson River north of New York City. Set in the years just before the Revolution, “Rip” details the amusing but unhappy home life of the hero, a man dominated by a nagging and shrewish wife. Driven out of doors, Rip loves to go exploring and hunting with his faithful dog Wolf. At the close of one such day, Rip discovers a group of strangely dressed men bowling in a hidden glen. Drinking from their keg, Rip falls deeply asleep.
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The Sketch Book (1819)
When he awakes and returns home, he slowly realizes that twenty years have passed.
His wife is dead as were his old cronies; his village had grown into a town; a new generation of American citizens had sprung up to replace Rip’s group of loyal
British subjects.
Like “Legend”, “Rip Van Winkle” is a funny, graceful and charming story. But here
Irving is taking up more serious issues. Rip is astounded at the immensity of the changes over twenty years; the river and the mountains were the same, but the entire social order had drastically changed. We are meant to feel sympathy for Rip as he tries to come to terms with change; “he found the house gone to decay—the roof fallen in the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges…He entered the house, which, to tell the truth, Dame Van Winkle had always kept in neat order. It was empty, forlorn, and apparently abandoned.” Looking for the old village inn, Rip finds “a large rickety wooden building…with great gaping windows, some of them broken, and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over the door was painted,
‘The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle.’” At first accused of disloyalty, Rip convinces the townsfolk of his identity, and takes up residence with his now grown daughter and her prosperous farmer husband. But the crucial moment comes when
Rip is standing in the midst of the suspicious people, his whole world gone, crying,
“Does nobody know poor Rip Van Winkle?”
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The Sketch Book (1819)
In a world in which the cheap and tawdry has replaced the old and snug, in which politicians buying votes have replaced long-term traditional loyalties, in which change is the order of the day—in this world, nothing is familiar, everything is in motion.
Irving, in quest of a deeper ground of tradition and influence on which to base his sense of American culture, looks suspiciously on the new American society; to him, it appears to be not much more than a rickety hotel, a sham with old hats and petticoats for windows. To mock those who believe that America’s newly-won independence was an earth-shaking event, Irving had this to say: “Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him. But there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was—petticoat government. Happily, that was at an end; he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle.” The bitter denunciations of Britain as a false parent had become, in Irving’s ironic reading, a humorous denunciation of marriage as wifely tyranny.
In all, The Sketch Book contains thirty-two stories. The majority are on European subjects, mostly English. Like many important American writers after him, Irving found that the rich, older culture of the Old World gave him a lot of material for his stories. Few of his stories are really original. “We are a young people,” he explains in the preface, “and must take our examples and models from the existing nations of
Europe”.
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James Fenimore Cooper (1789--1851)
James Fenimore Cooper was born in
Burlington, New Jersey, the son of
Quakers, Judge William Cooper and
Elisabeth Fenimore Cooper. His father was a representative of the 4th and 6th
Congress, and had attained wealth by developing virgin land. The family moved to Cooperstown, New York, which Judge Cooper had founded.
James Fenimore spent his youth partly on the family estate on the shores of
Otsego Lake.
He roamed in the primeval forest and developed a love of nature which marked his books.
Cooper was educated in the village school, and in 1800—1802 in the household of the rector of St. Peter's.
In his junior year Cooper was expelled from Yale because of a series of pranks, which included training a donkey to sit in a professor's chair. Encouraged by his father, Cooper joined the Navy and served on the Sterling, 1806-07. On his return to the United States, he received a warrant as a midshipman. In 1808 he served on the Vesuvius and on the Wasp in the Atlantic in 1809.
These experiences later inspired his sea stories.
Upon his father's death in 1809, Cooper became financially independent.
He resigned his commission in 1811 and married Susan Augusta De Lancey, who was a descendent of the early governors of New York colony.
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James Fenimore Cooper (1789--1851)
From the early 1810s Cooper took up the comfortable life of a gentleman farmer. He lived in Mamaroneck, New
York from 1811 to 1814, then in
Cooperstown, and from 1817 to 1821 in Scarsdale, New York. A change of fortune connected with his father's estate ended the Coopers' rural idyll.
He settled in Westchester, living on his wife's land. He was very fond of reading and one day when he had finished an English novel he said: "I could write a better story than that myself!" –classical words marking the beginning of a prolific literary career.
When his wife challenged him to write the book Cooper set to work.
Cooper's first novel Precaution (1820) was an imitation of Jane Austin’s novels and did not meet with great success. His second, The Spy (1821) , was based on
Sir Walter Scott’s W averly series, and told an adventure tale about the
American Revolution, set in Westchester
Country. The protagonist was Harvey
Birch, a supposed loyalist who actually was a spy for George Washington, disguised as “Mr. Harper”. The book brought Cooper fame and wealth and he gave up farming. Scott inspired Cooper to draw stereotypes of light and dark, good and evil, and dichotomize the female into the fair and pure and the dark and tainted. In 1823 appeared The
Pioneers .
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James Fenimore Cooper (1789--1851)
It started his preoccupation with a series of frontier adventures and pioneer life, in which he spent about twenty years. The novels depicted the adventures of Natty
Bumppo, also called Leatherstocking or Hawkeye, and his Indian companion
Chingachgook. They were not written in chronological order. They included such classics as The Deerslayer , The Last of the Mohicans , The Pathfinder , and The
Prairie (1827) .
Cooper had the idea of transporting Leatherstocking to the Far West while he was writing The Last of the Mohicans . He had read with care Major Stephen H. Long's account of his expedition up the Platte River. During the spring of 1826 or earlier he met a young Pawnee chief who became the model for Hard-Head in The Prairie.
From the narrative of the Lewis and Clark expedition he took such names as
Mahtoree and Weucha for Sioux chiefs. The character of Natty drew upon folk traditions of historical pioneers such as Daniel Boone. Natty's friendship with the
Delaware chief Chingachgook established him as a mediating figure between the white, advancing settlers, and the threatened culture of the Native Americans.
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James Fenimore Cooper (1789----1851)
"I will go upon the rock, boys, and look abroad for the savages," said Ishmael shortly after, advancing towards them wit a mien which he intended should be conciliating, at the same time that it was authoritative. "If there is nothing to fear, we will go out on the plain; the day is too good to be lost in words, like women in the towns wrangling over their tea and sugared cakes." (From The Prairie)
Carey and Lea of Philadelphia originally published The Last of the Mohicans in two volumes. The book has inspired several films, and many television programs have utilized its plot elements. The feature-length silent version of 1920 focused on the love triangle between Uncas (Albert Rosco), Cora (Barbara Redford), and
Magua (Wallace Berry). In Michael Mann's version (1992) Cora is no longer of mixed race, and the interracial relationship between Uncas and Alice is left undeveloped. Native American actors, Eric Schweig and Russell Means, play
Uncas and Chingachgook for the first time. "Overall, the confrontation of racial adversaries is still resolved through violence instead of romantic coupling (i.e.,
Uncas and Cora; or Uncas and Alice; or Hawkeye and a mixed-race Cora), which keeps the centuries-old doctrine of racial purity intact. The next version of The Last of the Mohican will undoubtedly rewrite the racial politics of the story in a way consistent with future needs and sensibilities." (From Novels into Films by John C.
Tibbets and James M. Welsh, 1999)
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James Fenimore Cooper (1789----1851)
In the beginning of the 1820s Cooper lived in New York City and participated in its intellectual life and politics. He wrote a series of sea adventures, starting from The
Pilot (1824) , a genuine American sea tale about the exploits of John Paul Jones. It was followed by The Red Rover (1827) , The Wing-and-Wing (1842), The Two
Admirals (1842), Afloat and Ashore (1844), Miles Wallingford (1844), and The
Sealions (1849) .
From 1826 to 1833 Cooper lived in Europe, where he wrote romances and unsuccessful books about democracy, politics, and society. He served as the US consul at Lyons and traveled a great deal. In Europe he became friends with Sir
Walter Scott and Marquis de Lafayette, who partly inspired his essay NOTIONS
OF AMERICA (1828). He was especially inspired by Italy and lived in Tasso's villa at Sorrento, but literary meetings in London annoyed him.
During the last decades of his life Cooper was earning less from his books but was forced to go on writing for income. In 1833 Cooper returned to the Unites States, living first in New York City and then in Cooperstown. Feeling ill-treated by journalists, he fought the press with libel suits, winning most of his cases.
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James Fenimore Cooper (1789----1851)
However, with his biting opinions he also lost friends, and his lack of circumspection was especially vulnerable to such criticism as presented by Mark
Twain in his essay Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences (1895). His later works include Satanstoe (1845) , a historical novel of manners, The Chainbearer (1845) , and The Red-Skins (1846) , which form the trilogy called “The Little page
Manuscripts”. The novels deal with the anti-rent controversy and its historical background. Cooper defended in the work the landlords' rights–the tenants of the
New York had refused to pay rent and the author saw in the controversy a crisis in
American democracy. In The American Democrat , Cooper also expressed his political and social views. Cooper died at Otsego Hall, on September 14, 1851. He was buried in the cemetery of Cooperstown. His wife followed him four months later.
The Spy (1821)
The Leatherstocking Tales (1823—1841)
The Pilot (1824) The Red Rover (1827)
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James Fenimore Cooper (1789----1851)
第一部：
This is his first successful novel, which is about a man who moves back and forth between American and British camps during the Revolution, selling things to both sides. He is a tragic character, since almost everyone knows he is really a spy.
But which side is he spying for? The Americans are sure he is working for the
British and they almost kill him several times. In fact, he is George Washington’s most loyal agent. But this secret is kept almost to the end. Up to his death, he is still misunderstood and distrusted by his fellow countrymen.
第二部： Cooper’s enduring fame rests on his frontier stories, especially the five novels that comprise the Leatherstocking Tales.
The five novels are The Pioneers
(1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841).
A modern American historian, Allan Nevins, who has edited a one-volume version of the series, calls these five novels “the nearest approach yet to an American epic.”
The Pioneers was the first novel of Cooper’s famous “Leatherstocking” series, set in the exciting period of America’s movement westward. Natty Bumppo (who is often called Leatherstocking) appears in all of the novels in the series and is one of the best-known characters in American literature.
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He is a typical American pioneer figure. He is a master of all the skills needed to live and hunt in the forest. He has an unusually deep love for nature and is afraid of destroying it. His sympathy for all people, including the Indians, is also unusual.
Race conflict—especially between whites and Indians—was common in America until the end of the nineteenth century. Cooper makes this conflict a constant theme throughout the series. He fills his novels with battle scenes between whites and
Indians. But both the author and his character, Natty, clearly disapprove of those who are simply Indian haters. Such people are always seen as the worst sort of
American, because they kill both animals and humans “for the sport of it”.
Cooper’s Indians, even the “bad” ones, are almost always brave. In general, he divides Indians into two types. His “good” ones—like Uncas and Chingachgook
(Natty’s best friend)—are loyal and affectionate. Some critics complain that they are too good and that Cooper saw them, wrongly, as “noble savages”. The “bad” ones are filled with evil and cannot be trusted. Still, there is always a sadness in Cooper’s depiction of the Indians. They are a dying race, sacrificed to the advance of white culture. At the same time, Cooper seems to be warning all of humanity that this could be the fate of other races.
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In The Pioneers , we see Natty in his old age. He and Chingachgook, now a drunkard, have lost the grace and nobility of their youth. But Chingachgook gets back some of his nobility by returning to the religion of his people before dying.
The novel has beautiful scenes describing the seasons and life in a frontier village.
The author combines history, adventure and local customs into what he calls “a descriptive tale”.
The Lat of the Mohicans , one of America’s most famous novels, shows Natty at a much younger age. It is an exciting story, full of action. Characters fight and are taken prisoner, then escape or are rescued. Uncas, the Mohican, is the last of his trive. He replaces Natty as the hero in the last half of the novel. Uncas is killed by the evil Indian, Magwa. In The Prairie , Natty is now in his eighties. He is too old for heroism. But Cooper makes him seem like Moses in the Bible as he guides a group of settlers to their new homeland. His beloved forests have all been cleared and are now farmland. To escape “civilization”, he must now live on the treeless plains.
In The Pathfinder , we again see Natty as a young man. He almost marries a girl called Mabel Dunham, but decides to return to his life in the wilderness.
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Cooper also changes his hero’s manner of speaking, making him a kind of backwoods philosopher. The idea may have been to make him a more attractive figure for Mabel. But it was not very successful, and the dialogue of this novel is often severely criticized.
The Deerslayer shows Natty in his early twenties.
Although we see him kill his first Indian, his essential goodness is contrasted with the Indian haters, Hurry Harry and Thomas Hutter. At the end of the novel he visits the scene of its main events, fifteen years after they happened. He finds only a tiny piece of faded ribbon which had belonged to a girl who once loved him. The reader shares Natty’s feeling of sadness about the past.
第三部：
Cooper was also one of the first writers of sea stories in America. These novels have elements of both romanticism and realism. The author is a romantic when he describes the sudden changes of weather, the beauty of the ocean, and the mysterious ships and seamen. The realism comes from Cooper’s personal knowledge of the sea; he had been a sailor in his youth.
The Pilot is set in
Revolutionary times. It is a kind of Leatherstocking tale set on the sea, with fierce battles, narrow escapes and a wise old sailor similar to Natty Bumppo in his old age.
The Red Rover is a tale of pirate adventures, also set in Revolutionary times.
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William Cullen Bryant (1794--1878)
Born in Cummington, Massachusetts, William Cullen Bryant was the son of a country doctor who served several terms in the
Masachusetts State Legislature and was both a stern Calvinist and a strict disciplinarian. Dr. Bryant’s library, which contained at least seven hundred books, provided Bryant with a formidable basis for his copious early reading, reading which apparently began when he was sixteen months old.
At thirteen, Bryant was sent to live with an uncle so that he might begin to study
Latin and Greek and he learned so rapidly that at sixteen he entered Williams College as a sophomore. Despite his wish to continue working towards a classical education,
Bryant was compelled by family financial circumstances to leave college during his first year and he reluctantly turned to the law, reading for the bar in Worthington and entering practice in Plainfield, Massachusetts, at the age of twenty-one. Bryant’s precocity was evident also in his early poetry. At thirteen, he wrote an anti-
Jeffersonian poem called “The Embargo” after the manner of the seventeenth and eighteenth century satires of Dryden and Pope. Even though the political sentiments of the poem probably owed more to his father’s opinions than to any political views young Cullen might claim, the poem so impressed Dr. Bryant that he had it printed in
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the Hampshire Gazette. Other early compositions which in their subject matter and manner prefigure the later poetry included a pair of odes in praise of the
Connecticut River and patriotic stanzas called “The Genius of Columbia”. In these,
Bryant’s style was influenced by his reading of English poets of the preceding generation, such as Thomas Gray etc. Their subjects, which tended to be pastoral and philosophical, helped to form Bryant’s conception of what a poem should be: grave, somber, dignified, meditative, and above all, regular.
His most famous poem, “Thanatopsis”, was composed when he was eighteen. In
1821, the year of his marriage to Frances Fairchild, Bryant published a small book entitled simply Poems . The connection established with Richard Henry Dana and
Willard Philips at the North America Review had led to an invitation from the Ph
Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College to present a “poetical address” at the 1821 commencement, and his poem for that occasion, “The Ages,” together with seven others, was published in a forty-four page pamphlet which was warmly reviewed by the North American Review and promptly reprinted in a British Anthology of
American poetry. Bryant’s literary career was now launched.
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Moving to New York in 1825, Bryant happily abandoned his job as justice of the peace in Berkshire Country to become an editor of The New York Review and
Athenaeum , but when the publication folded in 1827 he renewed his license to practice law in New York. Yet his return to the legal profession was brief, for he was offered a job as assistant editor of the New York Evening Post and in 1829 became its editor-in-chief, a position he held until his death in 1878 at the age of eighty-four.
During his years at the Post , he published a dozen volumes of his poetry to great acclaim. Although his poetic production fell off in his middle years, new collections of his poetry continued to be published and republished and he achieved the sort of fame ordinarily reserved for traditional public figures, such as actors and politicians.
Seemingly indefatigable, later in his life he undertook translations of both The Iliad and The Odyssey .
Poems: Thanatopsis (1817)
A Forest Hymn (1825)
The Prairies (1832)
To a Waterfowl (1815)
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His first great poem, Thanatopsis (1817), shows the deep Romantic spirit of Bryant in his youth. In this famous blank verse masterpiece, nature and death are described with a gentle sadness. The title is Greek for “view of death”. Bryant’s view is that death is the absolute end of the individual. Nature has a kind of healing effect.
Nature can share your happiness. The image of death is definitely not horrifying, because you will be melted into nature.
At first, this “view of death” might seem a cold and terrifying thought. But, as he explains in later poems, the life of man is part of the wonderful life of nature as a whole. The individual soul is not alone but, as he says in A Forest Hymn, part of
“the soul of this wide universe”. Almost all of his poetry expresses his excitement at the idea of being part of something so vast.
The Prairies is an emotional description of the huge flatlands of the American Mid
West.
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this poem, called by Matthew Arnold “The most perfect brief poem in the language,” was composed by Bryant after a walk from Cummington to Plainfield, Massachusetts, in December
1815. Arranged in alternating rhymed quatrains, it expressed both the poet’s grateful view, at the close of a day of self-doubt and despair, of a solitary bird on the horizon, and his sense of a divine power guiding and protecting everything in nature. The clarity of the central image and the aptness and simplicity of the moral analogy have always been admired, even by those who dislike “preaching” in poetry. The effect of the stanza form has been described as “gliding,” appropriate to the visual image of the second stanza. The poem was first published in the
and collected in the
.
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