American Literature From Before Colonial Times To 1870 - Part 6

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) had rare talents, as poet, short-story writer, and critic. Although he was born in Boston, his background was Southern. His father, the son of a Revolutionary "general," was from Maryland. both Edgar's parents were actors. They died while he was still an infant in Richmond, Virginia.

The orphaned boy was taken into the home of a wealthy merchant, John Allan, and his wife, how had no children. Though Edgar was never formally adopted by the Allans, their name was added to his own.

His childhood was happy. He was given a sound education, partly in England. He was bright in his studies and a splendid athlete. Mrs. Allan loved him dearly and spoiled him.

In 1826, he entered the University of Virginia. Unfortunately he made the wrong friends, gambled and began to drink. At the end of his first year he was deeply in debt. Mr. Allan was furious. He would neither pay Edgar's debts nor allow him to return to the university.

When Mr. Allan insisted that Edgar go into a business office, they quarreled. Edgar ran away and joined the Army. He had been writing poetry for some time and three months after his enlistment he published his first book of verse, Tamerlane.

Mrs Allan was dying in 1829 and begged her husband to help Edgar again. The outcome was an appointment for Edgar to West Point. However, he detested the life and deliberately failed in his studies and disobeyed rules so that he would be expelled. When this happened, Mr. Allan disowned him for good.

Poe was now completely on his own resources and with hardly a penny. He had had three volumes of poems published but no one read them. Several stories appeared in magazine and with one, A Ms. Found in a Bottle, he won a contest. In Baltimore he found an aunt, Mary Clemm, and her little daughter, Virginia.

Toward the end of 1835, he became an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, in Richmond. Shortly thereafter he married Virginia Clemm (his cousin). His aunt stayed with them.

Poe contributed some brilliant reviews to the Messenger and also some of his fantastic tales, which helped to make the magazine famous.

In spite of this, he was discharged, after little more than a year, for drunkenness. It must be said that Poe did not write when he was drinking and he produced a considerable body of work. Few writers have labored so hard.

The sad little trio lived now in New York and and then in Philadelphia. From time to time, Poe found work on various magazines, whose circulations usually increased under him.

In one, his Murders in the Rue Morgue appeared, the first detective story in literary history.

The Gold Bug, which followed, gained wide popularity. He had just managed to achieve his ambition of being a newspaper owner when the paper failed for lack of funds. Articles, stories, poems (including The Raven, his most celebrated poem) spilled from his pen and earned only pitiful sums.

There were periods of times when the family was close to starvation, with most of their belongings in pawn. To add to his despair, his wife's health was failing. With her death, in 1847, his life went into even further pieces. Yet, he continued to write, as if driven.

Out of this terrible time came the haunting melody of The Bells. He collapsed at last, in Baltimore, and died there under mysterious circumstances.

For all his brilliance, it is believed by some that Poe's mind was not healthy. The horrible and the grotesque lured him. Many thought that his stories did not come from the real world, but from a power of an almost nightmarish imagination. The characters are not important.

Poe seems to have had little love of humanity. On the other hand, he was a master of the technique of short-story writing. His best tales, such as the Fall of the House of Usher, are spellbinders that keep the reader breathless with eerie atmosphere and suspense.

As for his verse, no other poet has ever been more sensitive to the music of words. Since his death, Poe's work has had wide influence on writers at home and abroad. He is especially honored in France.

Though Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815-1882), wrote several other books, they pale beside his great narrative of a sailor's life, Two Years Before The Mast.

Dana was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of the editor of the North American Review (who had accepted Bryant's Thanatopsis).

While young Dana was at Harvard, an attack of measles weakened his eyesight. So, with the idea of improving his health, he signed on, as an ordinary seaman, on a voyage to California and back (1834-1836).

The trip was a combination of high adventure and grueling ordeal. Dana was appalled by the brutal treatment meted out to sailors and vowed that he would call their hard lot to public attention. This he did with his justly famous book, issued in 1840. It is really a diary, crammed with realistic detail, for Dana missed nothing.

The life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was at the very opposite extreme from works like those of Poe. Longfellow was never in want, nor in conflict with himself. His father was a lawyer and a prominent citizen of Portland, Maine, where Henry was born.

At fifteen, the boy entered the sophomore class of Bowdoin College. By the time he was a senior his heart was fixed on a literary career.

Voices of the Night, his first book of poems, appeared that year. Just at this point, however, it was decided to set up a chair of modern languages at Bowdoin. The professorship was offered to Longfellow when he graduated in 1825 (Hawthorne was in the same class).

To prepare himself for the post, he spent the next three years studying in Europe. Back at Bowdoin, he proved to be an inspiring teacher. He was so successful that in 1835, he was called to Harvard. As a professor there for almost twenty years, he was to become practically an American institution. He had married in 1831. Four years later his young wife died.

There were a few other trips abroad and in 1843 he married again. The couple went ot live in lovely Craigie House, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, once Washington's headquarters.

It was an ideally happy marriage, graced by five children. Then, in 1861, this serene life was shattered by tragedy. Mrs. Longfellow was accidentally burned to death. Outside of this agonizing blow, his life flowed calmly on.

He was surrounded by friends and admired by a host of readers almost to the point of adoration. Even in England, he held second place only to Tennyson.

In his own day and for a long time thereafter, Longfellow was perhaps overpraised (only Margaret Fuller and Poe cared to be acid about him).

To many critics today his work is too sweet, too gentle. It lacks bite and shrinks from harsh realities. He was not a great poet, true, but he had an ear for melody and could express himself with lovely clearness.

Longfellow will always be read because his poetry is evergreen warm-hearted.

Such short poems as:

• The Children's Hour
• The Village Blacksmith
• The Psalm of Life
• The Day is Done

have lasting charm, and such long poems asEvangeline and Hiawatha, remain a part of the American heritage. As a Cajun/Acadian, I am personally grateful for his Evangeline story even if it was a composite poem and veered greatly from the real life of the real Evangeline.

A farm at Haverhill, Massachusetts, was the birthplace of John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892). His parents were Quakers. As John described it later in The Barefoot Boy, his childhood held many simple joys.

At the same time, he had to work very hard on the farm, a poor one, and had little schooling. He read as much as he could, however. The Scottish poet Robert Turns, enthralled him. Whittier had always liked rhyming.

When he was nineteen, his sister Mary, unknown to him, sent one of his poems to the Newburyport Free Press. The editor, William Lloyd Garrison, published it and became Whittier's friend. Through Garrison, Whittier became an editor. He worked on several New England newspapers.

Partly because of the influence of Garrison, who was an extreme abolitionist (against slavery), and also out of his Quaker beliefs, Whittier threw himself whole-heartedly into the abolitionist camp in 1833.

That year he issued the fiery pamphlet Justice and Expediency. From then on, until Lincoln freed the slaves, he fought tirelessly to arouse the North against slavery, though he never went to such lengths as the hot-headed Garrison.

Side-by-side with this activity, Whittier continued his work as an editor and writer. He bought a house at Amesbury where the greater part of his life was spent. Many of his poems written before the Civil War, such as the mournful Ichabod, hinge on the slavery question. Once that was settled, these verses lost most of their interest.

Some of his religious poems, which breathe the quiet faith of the Quakers, have been turned into hymns. His most lasting works are also the most familiar -- the ballads, such as Barbara Frietchie (though it twists history), and the touching poems on nature and rural life, such as Snow Bound and In School Days.This group speaks for the country folk of the nineteenth century New England and mirrors their life faithfully.

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), son of a clergyman, was born at Elmwood, a historic house on the outskirts of Cambridge. This house was his lifelong home.

After graduation from Harvard, he tried law, but no clients came and discouraged, he quit.

His future brightened in 1844, when he married Maria White. She was a poet and a follower of Margaret Fuller. Partly inspired by his wife, Lowell began to write for antislavery papers and had two collections of poems published.

The year 1848 saw him firmly established as a writer. Within that twelve-month period he issued, in book form, The Vision of Sir Launfal, the first series of The Biglow Papers and the Fable for Critics.

The refreshing Vision of Sir Launfal remains his best know poem. In sharp contrast are The Biglow Papers, which ridicule the Mexican War and slavery.

In the North, the Papers met with wide favor because it was felt that the South was supporting the war solely to win more slave territory.

Fable for Critics reveals still another of Lowell's many sides. It was first published without the author's name. A satire in verse, it sums up a number of his literary fellows, such as Emerson, Poe, Longfellow, and so on.

Lowell spared neither them nor himself from the edge of his wit. His own portrait of himself is amusing; its last lines are:

"The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching; Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching."

In 1854, Longfellow retired from his post at Harvard and Lowell took his place. He held the position until 1886. When the Atlantic Monthly was founded in 1857, he became its first editor. Besides teaching, writing and editing (he was also associated with the North American Review for a time), he became active in politics.

He was appointed minister to Spain in 1877, and then to England in 1880. He was well liked and successful at both courts. Honorary degrees were showered on him both at home and abroad.

As a writer, Lowell had far more polish than Whittier and probed deeper than Longfellow. Longfellow and Whittier were loved by nonliterary people; Lowell was more of a literary force.

He and Poe were the first real American literary critics. Lowell's poetic gifts probably reached their peak in his fine Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration (1865). By then, however, most of his writing was in prose.
Some of his essays -- on Shakespeare, Dante, Wordsworth and others -- are acute criticism and literature in their own right.