Chapter 5: the Boston Brahmins
Social background
The “Brahmins” refers to the famous group of aristocratic writers who lived in Boston
in the 19th century. Most Brahmins came from rich, old Boston families. They
considered Boston “ the thinking center of the (American) continent, and therefore the
planet”. Their “ Saturday Club” met on Saturday a month for dinner. Their membership
included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
John Greenleaf Whittier, James Lowell and the famous historians Prescott and Motley.
In 1857, the club started its own magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. Through the magazine,
Boston’s literary establishment tried to influence the intellectual life and tastes of the
new American republic. For the next twenty or thirty years, it was leading intellectual
magazine of the United States.In their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician,
Harvard-educated class came to be called) supplied the most respected and genuinely
cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of
wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for
learning. Most of the Brahmin poets traveled or educated in Europe: They were familiar
with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain.
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Upper class in background but democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their
genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States, through public
lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the pages of two
influential Boston magazines, the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly.The
writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to
create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to
educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to
American literature. Ironically, their overall effect was conservative. By insisting on
European things and forms, they retarded the growth of a distinctive American
consciousness. Well-meaning men, their conservative backgrounds blinded them to the
daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to meet socially), and
Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson regarded as the “jingle man”). They were pillars
of what was called the “genteel tradition” that three generations of American realists
had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland influence, it was almost 100 years
before the distinctive American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was
generally recognized in the United States.
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, and educated at
Bowdoin College, where one of his classmates was Nathaniel
Hawthorne. A gifted linguist, he was appointed to a chair at Harvard as
a professor of modern languages before he was thirty. By 1857, when
The Atlantic Monthly was founded under the editorship of James
Russell Lowell, Longfellow was in the prime of his writing life and
incontestably the most celebrated poet in the land.
His verse narrative The Song of Hiawatha (1855) had sold 50,000 copies; its
successor, The Courtship of Miles Standish, racked up 10,000 purchases on its first
day in London when it appeared in 1858. This popular success, combined with a
nearly unstinting critical acclaim (one notable dissenting voice belonged to Edgar
Allan Poe, who years earlier had savaged Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems in a
review, fuming that its author”s “conception of the aim of poetry is all wrong”) won
for Longfellow an audience and eminence in the nineteenth century that even such
beloved American poets as Frost and Sandburg were not to rival in later generations.
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Primary works
Voice of the Night (1839),
Hyperion (1839),
Ballads and Other Poems (1842),
Evangeline (1847),
The Song of Hiawatha (1855),
The Court ship of Miles Standish (1858),
Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), Christus (1872).
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A Psalm of Life (1838)
TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream ! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
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Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife !
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant !
Let the dead Past bury its dead !
Act,— act in the living Present !
Heart within, and God o'erhead !
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Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time ;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate ;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
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He published two considerable medical works, Homeopathy and Its Kindred
Delusions (1842), and The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever (1843). In 1847 he
became Parkman professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard, a chair he held
until his retirement in 1882. Holmes was extremely popular as a teacher, and was
famous also for his humorous essays and poems and his entertaining after-dinner
speeches. During the late 1850s The Atlantic Monthly, which he co-founded with
James Russell Lowell in 1857, published many of his essays---which were then
collected in the successful The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), as well as
poems such as “ the Chambered Nautilus” and “ The Deacon’s Masterpiece”.
Among later collections of his essays are The Professor at the Breakfast Table
(1860), The poet at the Breakfast Table (18972), and Over the Teacups (1891).
Drawing upon hid scientific training, he wrote three novels about characters that
are psychologically disturbed. All three explore the biological and psychological
factors determining human behavior and reject any theological version of
determinism. The first, Elsie Venner (1861), was the most successful; it was
followed by The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Mortal Antipathy (1885). A
scientific rationalist, Holmes sought in particular to discredit Calvinism and what
he saw as its superstitious and stifling doctrine of determinism.
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James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
James Russell, who became professor of modern languages at Harvard
after Longfellow retired, is the Matthew Arnold of American literature.
He began as a poet but gradually lost his poetic ability, ending as a
respected critic and educator. As editor of the Atlantic and co-editor of
the North American Review, Lowell exercised enormous influence.
He was influential in revitalizing the intellectual life of New England in the mid-19th
cent. Educated at Harvard, he abandoned law for literature. In 1843 he started a
literary magazine, the Pioneer, which failed after two issues. The next year Lowell
married Maria White, an ardent abolitionist and liberal, who encouraged him in his
work. Lowell’s Poems (1844, 1846), A Fable for Critics (1848), The Vision of Sir
Launfal (1848), and The Bigelow Papers (1848; 2d series, 1867) brought him
considerable notice as a poet and critic. The best remembered of these are The
Bigelow Papers, political and social lampoons written in Yankee dialect, which
established his reputation as a satirist and a wit. The first of these two series of verses
expressed opposition to the Mexican War, and the second supported the cause of the
North in the Civil War.
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In 1855, Lowell became professor of modern languages at Harvard, a position he
held until 1876. In addition to teaching, he served as first editor (1857–61) of the
Atlantic Monthly and later (1864–72) of the North American Review. In his later
writings he turned to scholarship and criticism. Collections of his essays and
literary studies appeared as Fireside Travels (1864), Among My Books (1870; 2d
series, 1876), and My Study Windows (1871). In 1877 he was appointed minister to
London, where he remained until 1885. While abroad Lowell did much to increase
the respect of foreigners for American letters and American institutions; his
speeches in England, published as Democracy and Other Addresses (1887), are
among his best work. Lowell’s letters (ed. by C. E. Norton, 2 vol., 1893) and New
Letters (ed. by M. A. De Wolfe Howe, 1932) remain valuable for their shrewd and
lively comments on public affairs and the literary activities of his generation.
Major works
A Year’s Life (1841), Poems (1842), A Fable for Critics (1848), The Vision of Sir
Launfal(1848), The Biglow Papers (1848,first series, 1867,second series)
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The Biglow papers
In his early career, Lowell’s poetry often had a political message. In The Biglow
Papers, written during the Mexican War (1846-1848), he attacked American policy.
To him, the war was “ a national crime”. The book’s main character, Hosea Biglow,
speaks in a New England dialect and often expresses humorous opinions. At other
times, however, he is completely serious: “ Ez fer (as for) war, I call it murder.”
Another humorous character, Birdofredom Sawin, is silly enough to join the army
full of hopes. He returns home as a physically and morally destroyed man. The
second series of The Biglow Papers was written to support the North during the
Civil War (1861-1865), but it is far less interesting to read. For these, Hosea’s
dialect was scarcely an adequate vehicle of expression, and the second series of
Biglow Papers, if not inferior in skill, somehow lacks the entire sufficiency of the
first; even when, as in the tenth paper, both the pathos and valor of the great
conflict sound through the verse. The passions that the war aroused were too
overpowering for poetry except the brief expression of dominant feeling, as in the
fine stanza written in October, 1861.
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God, give us peace! Not such as lulls to sleep,
But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit
And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep,
Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit,
And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap!
Fable for Critics (1848)
In A Fable for Critics Lowell makes fun of many of his fellow writers. He describes
Poe as “ three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” W.G. Bryant is “ as
quiet, as cool, and as dignified, / as smooth silent iceberg.” Emerson, who was
influenced by the philosophy of Plato, has “ a Greek head on right Yankee
shoulders”. Thoreau “ watched Nature like a detective “. Later in life, Lowell
became an important literary critic. He had wider interests than the other Brahmins
and several of his essays ate still read and studied today.
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John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
John Greenleaf Whittier, the most outspoken abolitionist among the
poets of his generation, was born into a Quaker farming family in
Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1807. Although his early life was one
of relative hardship and isolation, his constant exposure to the
wonders of nature gave him a poet's appreciation for the beauties of
the world around him.
His first poem, The Exile's Departure, was published by William Lloyd Garrison in
the Newburyport Free Press in June of 1826. Thus began a lifelong friendship with
the fiery abolitionist leader. After acquiring the equivalent of a high school
education (Garrison had persuaded the elder Whittier to allow it), Whittier
supported himself for a time as a teacher and a shoemaker. Eventually, his
involvement with Garrison pulled him into the world of politics. He became the
editor of the American Manufacturer in Boston and then of the Haverhill Gazette
and the New England Review and a co-founder (in 1839) of the Liberty party, a
“political-action group of the Abolitionist party”.
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From his ready-made platform, Whittier joined Garrison and others in assailing the
evils of slavery. His first collection of poems dealing with abolition was published
in 1837. The rigors of his boyhood had left him in poor health and eventually
forced his retirement from the high-pressure world of newspaper editing, but he
continued to write tirelessly against the South’s “peculiar institution” and in favor
of emancipation.
Whittier died in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, in 1892, having lived to see the
successful conclusion of the abolitionist movement he had championed throughout
his life.
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Major works
Whittier’s greatest poem, Snow-Bound (1866), describes a time when Whittier, his
parents and family were “shut in from all the world” by a snowstorm. Whittier’s sharp
images, simple constructions, and ballad-like tetrameter couplets have the simple earthy
texture of Robert Burns. “Snow Bound”, vividly recreates the poet’s deceased family
members and friends as he remembers them from childhood, huddled cozily around the
blazing hearth during one of New England’s blustering snowstorms. This simple,
religious, intensely personal poem, coming after the long nightmare of the Civil War, is
an elegy for the dead and a healing hymn. It affirms the eternity of the spirit, the
timeless power of love in the memory and the undiminished beauty of nature, despite
violent outer political storms.
The first part of the poem describes the coming of the storm:
The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray
The next mornings, they wake to find a changed world:
And when the second morning shone,
We looked upon a world unknown.
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…
A universe of sky and snow!
The old familiar sights of ours
Took marvelous shapes…
In the middle of this cold, wintry world, the poet invites us to:
Sit with me by the homestead hearth,
And stretch the hands of memory forth
To warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze!
Farmhouse fireplace
But the fire isn’t the only kind of warmth in the house. More important is the
warmth of family affection, which the poet values so highly.
Works:
Poems Written During the Progress of the Abolition Question (1938), Lays of My
Home and Other poems (1843), Voices of Freedom(1896), Songs of Labor(1850),
The Chapel of the Hermits (1853), The Panorama and Other Poems (1856), Home
Ballads and Poems (1860), In War Time and Other Poems (1864), Snowbound
(1866), The Tent on the Beach (18670, Among the Hills (1869), Miriam and Other
Poems (1871), Hazel- Blossoms (1875), The Vision of Echard (1878), Saint
Gregory’s Guest (1886), At Sundown (1890).
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