Richard Malcolm Johnston. (1822–1898.) The English Classics, 1860; Georgia Sketches, by an Old Man, 1864; Dukesborough Tales, 1871, 1874, 1883, 1892; English Literature (with William Hand Browne), 1872; Life of Alexander H. Stephens (with William Hand Browne), 1878; Old Mark Langston, a Tale of Duke's Creek, 1883; Mr. Absalom Billingslea and Other Georgia Folk, 1888; Ogeechee Cross Firings, 1889; The Primes and Their Neighbors, 1891; Studies Literary and Scientific, 1891; Mr. Billy Downs and His Likes, 1892; Mr. Fortner's Marital Claims and Other Stories, 1892; Two Gray Tourists, 1893; Widow Guthrie, 1893; Little Ike Templin and Other Stories, 1894; Old Times in Middle Georgia, 1897; Pearce Amerson's Will, 1898.
Joel Chandler Harris. (1848–1908.) Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, 1880; Nights with Uncle Remus, Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation, 1883; Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White, 1884; Story of Aaron, 1885; Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches, 1887; Daddy Jake the Runaway, and Short Stories Told After Dark, 1889; Balaam and His Master, and Other Sketches and Stories, 1891; On the Plantation, a Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures During the War, 1892; Uncle Remus and His Friends, 1892; Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country, 1894; Mr. Rabbit at Home, 1895; Sister Jane, Her Friends and Acquaintances, 1896; Georgia from the Invasion of De Soto to Recent Times, 1896; Stories of Georgia, 1896; Aaron in the Wildwoods, 1897; Tales of the Home Folks in Peace and War, 1898; Chronicles of Aunt Minerva Ann, 1899; Plantation Pageants, 1899; On the Wing of Occasions, 1900; Gabriel Tolliver, a Story of Reconstruction, 1902; Making of a Statesman, and Other Stories, 1902; Wally Wanderoon, 1903; Little Union Scout, 1904; Tar Baby and Other Rimes of Uncle Remus, 1904; Told by Uncle Remus; New Stories of the Old Plantation, 1905.
Constance Fenimore Woolson. (1840–1894.) The Old Stone House, 1873; Castle Nowhere, 1875; Lake-Country Sketches, 1875; Rodman the Keeper, 1880; Anne, 1882; East Angels, 1886; Jupiter Lights, 1889; Horace Chase, a Novel, 1894; The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories, 1895; Dorothy, and Other Italian Stories, 1896; Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu, 1896.
Charles Egbert Craddock. (1850——-.) In the Tennessee Mountains, 1884; Where the Battle Was Fought, 1885; Down the Ravine, 1885; The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1885; In the Clouds, 1886; The Story of Keedon Bluffs, 1887; The Despot of Broomsedge Cove, 1888; In the "Stranger People's" Country, 1891; His Vanished Star, 1894; The Phantoms of the Footbridge, 1895; The Mystery of Witchface Mountain, 1895; The Juggler, 1897; The Young Mountaineers, 1897; The Story of Old Fort Louden, 1899; The Bushwhackers and Other Stories, 1899; The Champion, 1902; A Specter of Power, 1903; Storm Center, 1905; The Frontiersman, 1905; The Amulet, 1906; The Windfall, 1907; The Fair Mississippian, 1908; Ordeal—A Mountain Story of Tennessee, 1912; Raid of the Guerrilla, 1912; The Story of Duciehurst, 1914.
Sarah Barnwell Elliott. The Felmeres, 1880; A Simple Heart, 1886; Jerry, 1890; John Paget, 1893; The Durket Sperret, 1897; An Incident and Other Happenings, 1899; Sam Houston, 1900; The Making of Jane, 1901; His Majesty's Service and Other Plays.
Harry Stillwell Edwards. (1855——-.) Two Runaways and Other Stories, 1889; Sons and Fathers, 1896; The Marbeau Cousins, 1898; His Defense, and Other Stories, 1898.
Although prose forms, especially the novel and the short story, dominated the period, yet the amount of poetry published from 1860 to 1899 surpasses, in mere bulk at least, all that had been produced in America before that date. In quality also it is notable. Stedman's An American Anthology has 773 pages of selections, and of this space 462 pages, or almost two-thirds, are given to the poets who made their first appearance during these forty years. Very many whom he mentions were only incidentally poets. A surprising number of those who are known to-day only as novelists or short story writers began their career with a volume and in some cases with several volumes of verse. Few indeed have been the writers who have not contributed poetical material. Among the poets are to be numbered writers as inseparably connected with prose as Thoreau, Burroughs, Howells, Mrs. Stuart Phelps Ward, S. Weir Mitchell, Miss Woolson, Lew Wallace, Mrs. Wilkins Freeman, Harris, Page, Mrs. Cooke, Ambrose Bierce, Alice Brown, Hamlin Garland, and A. S. Hardy.
Those who may be counted as the distinctive poets of the era, the third generation of poets in America, make not a long list if only those be taken who have done new and distinctive work. Not many names need be added to the following twenty-five whose first significant collections were published during the twenty years following 1870:
John James Piatt, Emma Lazarus, Emily Dickinson, and E. R Sill, whose first volumes fall outside of the twenty-years period, complete the number.
For the greater part these later poets were children of the new era who with Whitman voiced their own hearts and looked at the life close about them with their own eyes. The more individual of them, the leading innovators who most impressed themselves upon their times—Whitman, Hay and Harte, Miller, Lanier and Russell—we have already considered. They rose above conventions and rules and looked only at life; they stood for the new Americanism of the period, and they had the courage that dared in a critical and fastidious age to break away into what seemed like crude and unpoetic regions. Not many of them could go to the extremes of Whitman, or even of Harte and Hay. Some would voice the new message of the times in the old key and the old forms; others would adopt the new fashions but change not at all the old themes and the old sentiments.
Of the latter class Will Carleton perhaps is the typical representative. By birth and training he belonged to the Western group of innovators represented by Mark Twain and Eggleston and Miller. He had been born in a log cabin in Michigan and he had spent all of his boyhood on a small, secluded farm. He had broken from his environment at twenty, had gained a college degree, and following the lead of his inclination had become a journalist, first in Detroit, then in Chicago, Boston, and New York. From journalism, especially in the seventies, it was but a step to literature. He would be a poet, and led by the spirit of his period he turned for material to the homely life of his boyhood. He would make no realistic picture—no man was ever less fitted than he to reproduce the external features of a scene or a region—he would touch the sentiments and the emotions. "Betsey and I Are Out," published in the Toledo Blade in 1871, was the beginning. Then in 1873 came Farm Ballads, with such popular favorites as "Over the Hills to the Poor-House" and "Gone with a Handsomer Man," a thin book that sold forty thousand copies in eighteen months. No poet since Longfellow had so appealed to the common people. At his death in 1912 there had been sold of his various collections more than six hundred thousand copies.
His poetry as we read it to-day has in it little of distinction; it is crude, for the most part, and conventional. It made its appeal largely because of its kindly sympathy, its homeliness, and its lavish sentiment. The poet played upon the chords of memory and home and childhood, the message of the earlier Longfellow cast into a heavily stressed and swinging melody that found a prepared audience. With E. P. Roe, his counterpart in prose, Will Carleton is largely responsible for prolonging the age of sentiment.
A singer of a different type was John James Piatt, born in Indiana in 1835 and joint author with W. D. Howells of Poems of Two Friends, 1859. He was a classicist who caught the new vision and sought to compromise. Everywhere in his work a blending of the new and the old: the Western spirit that would voice the new notes of the Wabash rather than echo the old music of the Thames, that syren melody that had been the undoing of Taylor and Stoddard. In an early review of Stedman, Piatt had found, as he characteristically termed it, "a too frequent betrayal of Tennyson's floating musk in his singing-garments," and he had noted as his chief strength that "his representative subjects are American."[140] In making the criticism he touched upon his own weakness and his own strength. In all his volumes conventional work like "Rose and Root," "The Sunshine of Shadows," and "The Unheard" alternates with more original poems, native in theme and to a degree native in spirit, like "The Mower in Ohio," "The Pioneer's Chimney," "Fires in Illinois," and "Riding to Vote." There is no dialect, no straining for realistic effect, no sentimentality. In all that makes for art the poems have little for criticism: they are classical and finished and beautiful. But they lack life. There is nothing about them that grips the reader's heart, nothing that fixes itself in the memory, no single line that has distinction of phrase. Even in the Western poems like "The Mower in Ohio" there is no sharpness, no atmosphere, no feeling of reality. It is art rather than life; it is a conscious effort to make a poem. The case is typical. With the criticism one may sweep away once for all great areas of the poetry of the time.
Far stronger are the vigorous lyrics of Maurice Thompson, whose work is to be found in so many literary fields of the period. His poetry, small in quantity, has a spirit of its own that is distinctive. It is tonic with the out-of-doors and it is masculine. One stanza from the poem "At Lincoln's Grave," delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in 1893, voices the new Western soul:
The successor of Carleton is James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana, the leading producer during the later period of platform and newspaper balladry. The early life of Riley was urban rather than rural. His father was a lawyer at Greenfield, a typical Western county seat, and after sending the boy to the village school he sought to turn him to his own profession. But there was a stratum of the wayward and the unconventional in Riley even from the first. The professions and the ordinary occupations open to youth did not appeal to the imaginative lad. He learned the trade of sign-painting and then for a year traveled with a patent medicine "doctor" as advertising agent. Following this picturesque experience came three or four years as a traveling entertainer with a congenial troupe, then desultory newspaper work, and finally, from 1877 to 1885, a steady position on the Indianapolis Journal. His recognition as a poet came in the mid eighties, and following it came a long period on the lecture circuit, reading his own productions, at one time working in conjunction with Eugene Field and Edgar W. Nye,—"Bill Nye."
His earliest work seems to have been declamatory and journalistic in origin. "I was always trying to write of the kind of people I knew and especially to write verse that I could read just as if it were being spoken for the first time." And again, "I always took naturally to anything theatrical."[141] For years the newspaper was his only medium. He contributed to most of the Indiana journals with pseudonyms ranging all the way from "Edyrn" to "Jay Whitt" and "Benjamin F. Johnson of Boone," and it was while writing under the last of these for the Indianapolis Journal that he first became known beyond the confines of Indiana. The device of printing poems that ostensibly were contributed by a crude farmer from a back country was not particularly original. Lowell had used it and Artemus Ward. Moreover, the fiction of accompanying these poems with editorial comment and specimen letters from the author was as old at least as The Biglow Papers, but there was a Western, Pike County freshness about the Benjamin F. Johnson material. The first poem in the series, for instance, was accompanied by material like this:
Mr. Johnson thoughtfully informs us that he is "no edjucated man," but that he has, "from childhood up tel old enugh to vote, allus wrote more or less poetry, as many of an albun in the neghborhood can testify." Again, he says that he writes "from the hart out"; and there is a touch of genuine pathos in the frank avowal, "Thare is times when I write the tears rolls down my cheeks."
The poems that followed,—"Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer," "When the Frost is on the Punkin," "Wortermelon Time," and the others—were written primarily as humorous exercises just as Browne had written his first Artemus Ward contributions. There is a histrionic element about them that must not be overlooked. The author is playing a part. Riley, we know, had, at least in his youth, very little sympathy with farm life and very little knowledge of it: he was simply impersonating an ignorant old farmer. The dialect does not ring true. There never has been a time, for instance, when "ministratin'" for ministering, "familiously" for familiarly, "resignated" for resigned, and "when the army broke out" for when the war broke out, have been used in Indiana save by those with whom they are individual peculiarities. He is simply reporting the ignorance of one old man in the Artemus Ward fashion. Dialect with him is the record of a town man's mimicry of country crudeness. It is conventional rather than realistic. It is a humorous device like A. Ward's cacography. The first Johnson annotation will illustrate:
Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone County, who considers the Journal a "very valubul" newspaper, writes to inclose us an original poem, desiring that we kindly accept it for publication, as "many neghbors and friends is astin' him to have the same struck off."
He issued the series at his own expense in 1883 with the title The Old Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven More Poems by Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone, and he continued the masquerade until after the publication of Afterwhiles in 1887. After the great vogue of this later volume he began to publish voluminously until his final collected edition numbered fourteen volumes.
Riley not only inherited Will Carleton's public entire, but he added to it very considerably. He too dealt freely in sentiment and he too wrote always with vocal interpretation in mind. Undoubtedly the wide vogue of his poems has come largely from this element. People have always enjoyed hearing the poems read with an appropriate acting out of the part more than they have enjoyed reading them for themselves. The poems, more over, appeared in what may be called the old homestead period in America. Denman Thompson first brought out his Joshua Whitcomb in 1875 and his The Old Homestead in 1886. Riley found a public doubly prepared. He revived old memories—the word "old" is almost a mannerism with him: "The Old Swimmin'-Hole," "Old Fashioned Roses," "The Old Hay-Mow," "The Old Trundle Bed," "Out to Old Aunt Mary's," "The Boys of the Old Glee Club," "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," etc. Especially did he appeal to those whose childhood had been spent in the country.
Finally, he added to Carleton's devices a metrical facility and a jigging melody that is perhaps his most original contribution to the period. More than any one else Riley is responsible for the modern newspaper type of ballad that is to poetry what ragtime is to music. There is a fatal facility to such a melody as,
Or this,
In his preference for native themes and homely, unliterary treatment of seemingly unpoetic material he continued the work of the Pike County balladists. As the Nation, reviewing his Old Fashioned Roses, expressed it, he finds pleasure in "some of the coarser California flavors." His own standards for poetry he has given clearly, and they are in full accord with the spirit of the period:
But one cannot be sure of him. He is an entertainer, an actor, a mimicker. Does his material really come "from the hart out" or is he giving, what one always suspects, only excellent vaudeville? Even in his most pathetic moments we catch for an instant, or we feel that we do, a glimpse of the suave face of the platform entertainer.
Once in a while his childhood lyrics ring true. A little note of true pathos like this from Poems Here at Home is worth a library of The Flying Islands of the Night and of his other voluminous echoes of Alice in Wonderland:
Despite his enormous vogue, Riley must be dismissed as artificial and, on the whole, insincere. He seems always to be striving for effect—he is an entertainer who knows his audience and who is never for a moment dull. He has little of insight, little knowledge of the deeps of life and the human soul, little of message, and he wrote enormously too much. He must be rated finally as a comedian, a sentimentalist, an entertainer.
His influence has been great. A whole school of imitators has sprung up about him, the most of whom have perished with the papers to which they have contributed. The strongest of them all undoubtedly was Sam Walter Foss (1858–1911) whose Back Country Poems were genuine and distinctive. Drummond's Habitant ballads, which rank with the strongest dialect poetry of the century, belong to Canadian rather than American literature. Stedman's praise of them is none too high: "Most of us are content if we sing an old thing in a new way, or a new thing in an old way. Dr. Drummond has achieved the truest of lyrical successes; that of singing new songs, and in a new way. His poems are idyls as true as those of Theocritus or Burns or our own poet of The Biglow Papers."[142]
Greatly different from Riley, yet greatly like him in many ways, was Eugene Field, in whom the lawlessness of the West and the culture of the East met in strange confusion. Though of Western origin—he was born at St. Louis in 1850—he spent the formative years of his life between six and nineteen with his father's relatives at Amherst, Massachusetts. He completed a year at Williams College, then, called West by the death of his father, whose law practice at St. Louis had been distinctive, he was put by his guardian into Knox College. After a year he was transferred to the University of Missouri, but coming of age at the close of his junior year, and his share of his father's estate becoming available, he decided in the spring of 1872 to leave college and travel in Europe. Accordingly, to quote his own words, he spent "six months and [his] patrimony in France, Italy, Ireland, and England."
As a general rule one should quote the autobiographical statements of Eugene Field with extreme caution, but one can trust this bit of his "Auto-analysis":
In May, 1873, I became a reporter on the St. Louis Evening Journal. In October of that year I married Miss Julia Sutherland Comstock of St. Joseph, Mo., at that time a girl of sixteen. We have had eight children—three daughters and five sons.
My newspaper connections have been as follows: 1875-76, city editor of the St. Joseph (Mo.) Gazette; 1876-80, editorial writer on the St. Louis Journal and St. Louis Times-Journal; 1880-81, managing editor of the Kansas City Times; 1881-83, managing editor of the Denver Tribune. Since 1883 I have been a contributor to the Chicago Record (formerly Morning News).[143]
His success with the Denver Tribune, to which he contributed such widely copied work as that published in his first thin volume, The Tribune Primer (1882), attracted attention. He began to receive offers from Eastern papers, one at least from Dana, editor of the New York Sun, but it was not until Melville E. Stone offered him the humorous column of his paper, the Chicago News, that Field decided to turn eastward. He had begun to dream of a literary career and this dream, always a vague one, for he was chained by poverty to a tyrannical profession, seemed more possible in a less tense atmosphere than that of the Western mining center. Arriving at Chicago in 1883, he set out to make his new column a thing with distinction. Flats and Sharps was the name he gave it, and into it he poured a mélange of all things: poetry in every key, paragraphs on all subjects, parodies, hoaxes, mock reviews, pseudo news, personals, jokes—everything. He threw himself completely into the thing: it became his life work; "practically everything he ever wrote appeared at one time or another in that column."
But newspaper humor usually perishes with the flimsy leaves upon which it is recorded. Not until Field had written "Little Boy Blue" in 1887 did he become at all known to the reading public. The publication of the popular editions of A Little Book of Profitable Tales and A Little Book of Western Verse in 1890, only five years before his death, marks, perhaps, the time of his general acceptation as a writer. Hardly had the public learned to know him before they were called upon to mourn his early death. Indeed, the work by which he is now best known was done almost all of it in the last six or seven years of his life. It was only in this brief later period that he was a "bibliomaniac" or a lover of Horace or a student of the old English ballads.
One must classify Eugene Field first of all as a humorist, one of the leading figures in that nondescript school of newspaper comedians that has played such a part in the history of the period. To a personality as high spirited and as whimsical as Artemus Ward's he added the brilliancy of a Locker-Lampson and the improvidence of a Goldsmith as well as the kindly heart. Seriousness seemed foreign to his nature: his life was a perpetual series of hoaxes and practical jokes and hilarious sallies. No one has surpassed him in the making of parodies, of rollicking paraphrases and adaptations, in skilful blendings of modern and antique, in clever minglings of seriousness and humor. He was a maker of brilliant trifles and sparkling non sequiturs. His irreverence is really startling at times. He can make the Odes of Horace seem fit material for the funny column of a Chicago daily newspaper:
He is boon companion of the old Sabine poet. He slaps him on the back and invites him to all kinds of costly revelry, assuring him that Mæcenas will pay the freight. And Horace by no means takes offense. He is a congenial soul.
In the presence of such an incorrigible joker the reader feels always that he must be on his guard. One is never safe. Leafing the pages of the large collected edition of the poems, glancing over the Bret Harte echoes like "Casey's Table D'Hôte," smiling at such outrageous nonsense as "The Little Peach" and "The Onion Tart," one suddenly draws a sharp breath. At last the heart of Eugene Field:
A lyric worthy of any anthology. Yet one quickly finds that it is not Eugene Field at all. He wrote it deliberately as a hoax, a practical joke on Modjeska, who all the rest of her life was obliged to deny the authorship which Field had cunningly fastened upon her. The case is typical. Like Riley, the man is making copy. He uses pathos and sentiment and the most sacred things as literary capital. One wonders where one can draw the line. Was he really sincere in his child lyrics and his bibliomaniac writings or was he cleverly playing a part?
In criticizing Field one must remember the essential immaturity of the man. His frequent artificiality and his lack of sincerity came from his boyishness and his high spirits. He looked at life from the angle of mischievous boyhood. Moreover, he wrote always at the high tension of the newspaper office, for a thing that had no memory, a column that had but one demand—more! It bred in him what may be denominated, perhaps, the ephemeral habit. He was all his life a man preëminently and predominatingly of the present moment, and thus he stands a type of the literary creator that was to follow him.
For Field more than any other writer of the period illustrates the way the old type of literary scholar was to be modified and changed by the newspaper. Every scrap of Field's voluminous product was written for immediate newspaper consumption. He patronized not at all the literary magazines, he wrote his books not at all with book intent—he made them up from newspaper fragments. He wrote always a timely thing to the people, a thing growing out of the present moment for the people to read, making palatable for them even Horace and the severer classics. He was thus one of the leading forces in what may be called that democratizing of literature for which the period so largely stands.
He has been given a place far beyond his real deserts. The sentiment of "Little Boy Blue" and the other child lyrics, the whimsical fun and high spirits of his comic verse, endeared him to the public that enjoyed Riley. Then his whimsical, Goldsmith-like personality helped his fame, as did also his death, since it followed so quickly his late discovery by the reading public that it gave the impression he had been removed like Keats at the very opening of his career. He must be rated, however, not for what he wrote, though a few pieces, like his child lyrics and his bibliomaniac ballads, will continue long in the anthologies, but for the influence he exerted. He was a pioneer in a peculiar province: he stands for the journalization of literature, a process that, if carried to its logical extreme, will make of the man of letters a mere newspaper reporter.
In his own estimation Field was distinctively a Western poet; he gave to his poetry the name "Western verse"; and he refused the offers of Dana and others because he was not at all in sympathy with the Eastern ideals. To quote his biographer, he felt that Chicago "was as far East as he could make his home without coming within the influence of those social and literary conventions that have squeezed so much of genuine literary flavor out of our literature."[144]
What New York might have made of Field we may learn, perhaps, from the career of Henry Cuyler Bunner, for nearly twenty years the most brilliant poetic wit in the East. He, too, had approached literature from the journalistic entrance. At eighteen he had left school to begin an apprenticeship on the brilliant but short-lived Arcadian, and at twenty-two he was editor of the newly established Puck, a position that he held until his death at forty-one.
No man ever turned off verse and prose with more facility or in greater quantity. "The staff of the paper was very small, and little money could be spent for outside contributions; and there were many weeks when nearly half the whole number was written by Bunner."[145] Like Field, he could write a poem while the office boy, who had brought the order, stood waiting for the copy to carry back with him. For more than ten years he furnished nearly all the humorous verse for the periodical, besides numberless paragraphs, short stories, and editorials. But he was more fastidious than Field, inasmuch as he kept this journalistic material strictly unconnected with his name. It was a thing alone of the editorial office, no more to be mingled with his more literary product than Charles Lamb's India office books were to be brought into his Elia essays. The greater number of those who laughed over the verses of the whimsical "V. Hugo Dusenberry, professional poet," never once dreamed that he was H. C. Bunner, author of the exquisite lyrics in Airs from Arcady and Rowen, and the carefully wrought stories—French in their atmosphere and their artistic finish—Short Sixes and Love in Old Cloathes. The skilful parodies and timely renderings, the quips and puns—all the voluminous mélange, indeed, of the poetic Yorick—lie buried now in the files of Puck. Their creator refused to republish them, and we to-day can but yield to his wish and judge him only by that which he himself selected for permanence.
Judged by this, Bunner undoubtedly is our chief writer of vers de société, our laureate of the trivial. He is restrained, refined, faultless. He is of the artificial world, where fans flutter and dancers glide and youth is perennial. Triolets penciled in the program while the orchestra breathed its melody, epigrams over the tea-cups, conceits for a fan, amours de voyage, lines written on the menu, amoretti, valentines—these are his work, and no one has done them more daintily or with more skill of touch. Trifles they are, to be sure, yet Bunner, like every master of the form, makes of them more than trifles. A hint of tears there may be, the faintest breath of irony, the suspicion, vague as an intuition, of satire or facetiousness or philosophy, the high spirits and the carelessness of youth, yet a flash here and there into the deeps of life as, for instance, in "Betrothed" and "A Poem in the Programme," and "She was a Beauty in the Days when Madison was President."
The French forms, imported echoes of Dobson and Lang and Gosse—ballades, rondels, rondeaux, and the like, that so bewitched the younger poets of the mid-eighties—found in Bunner perhaps their most skilful American devotee. Perhaps no one but he has ever succeeded in English with the chant royal, or has found it possible to throw into that most trivial of all verse forms, triolets, a throb of life, as in "A Pitcher of Mignonette":
The period, especially in its later years, has run abundantly to these trivial, though difficult, forms of verse. As poetry ceased more and more to be a thing of vision and compelling power, it became more and more a thing of daintiness and brilliancy. The American Lyra Elegantiarum for the period has been more sparkling and abundant than the English, more even than the French. John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887) belongs almost wholly to the days of Holmes and Lowell, but the greater number of our trivial makers fall into the group that was active during the closing quarter of the century. To mention all of them would be to call the roll of the younger American poets. Perhaps the most noteworthy, however, are Mary Mapes Dodge (1838–1905), whose dainty and tender "The Minuet" gives her a place in the choir; James Jeffrey Roche (1847–1908); Walter Learned (1847——); Richard Kendall Munkittrick (1853–1911); Samuel Minturn Peck (1854——), in many respects the most delightful of the group; Clinton Scollard (1860——); John Kendrick Bangs (1862——), and such modern instances as Oliver Herford, Gelett Burgess, and Carolyn Wells. One might, indeed, collect a notable anthology of vers de société from the files of Life alone.
A large amount of the poetry of the era has been written by women. After the war their thin volumes, bound in creamy vellum and daintily tinted cloth, began more and more to fill the book tables, until reviewers no longer could give separate notice to them, but must consider the poets of a month in groups of ten or twelve. The quality of the feminine product was high enough to find place in the most exclusive monthlies, and the quantity published was surprising. The Atlantic Monthly, for instance, during the decade from 1870 published 108 poems by Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Aldrich, and 450 other poems, and of the latter 201 were by women. The feminine novelists and short story writers, so conspicuous during all the period, were, indeed, almost all poets, some of them voluminous. One may note the names not only of the older group—Mrs. Stuart Phelps Ward, Mrs. Cooke, Mrs. Spofford, Miss Woolson—but of such later writers as Mrs. Freeman, Alice Brown, Mrs. Deland, and Mrs. Riggs.
Very little of this mass of poetry has been strong enough to demand republication from the dainty volumes in which it first appeared. It has been smooth and often melodious, but for the most part it has been conventional. Prevailingly it has been short lyric song in minor key, gentle and sentimental—graceful exercises in verse rather than voices from a soul stirred to utterance and caring not. In a sonneteering age this feminine contingent has swelled enormously the volume of sonnets. Helen Hunt Jackson's thin volume contains one hundred, Louise Chandler Moulton's one hundred and thirty-one, yet in both collections occurs no sonnet one would dream of adding to the select few that undoubtedly are worth while. Here and there in Mrs. Jackson a bit of work like "Poppies on the Wheat," "Glimpses," "Vashti," that rises, perhaps, a little above the level monotony of the times, but in the vital seventies in America why should one have published sonnets? Even as she was shaping them, Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) was demanding in major key,
The life of Emma Lazarus was brief and externally eventless. Born in New York City in a home of refinement and wealth, as a child precocious, inclined to seriousness, intense, she passed her early life among books rather than among companions. At seventeen she had issued a collection of verses, melancholy even above the usual poetry of women, valueless utterly; then at twenty-one she had published again, now a long poem, Greek in its chaste beauty, Admetus, inscribed "To My Friend Ralph Waldo Emerson." Two forces were contending, even as they had contended in Heine. In Paris in later years before the Venus of the Louvre she wrote a sonnet, and, miracle among modern sonnets, it is impassioned, unfettered, alive—a woman's soul: