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Fireside Poets

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History and progress of the world (1913) (14595373847)

Fireside Poets Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and Whittier, from The History and Pregress of the World, 1913. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The Fireside Poets (also known as the Schoolroom or Household Poets) were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England.[1]

Overview[]

The group is typically thought to comprise Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr..[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson is sometimes also included as a member. They were the earliest American poets to achieve canonical status,[2] their popularity rivaling that of contemporary British poets in both the United States and abroad.[1]

The name "Fireside Poets" is derived from that popularity: The Fireside Poets' general adherence to poetic convention – standard forms, regular meter, and rhyme – made their work particularly suitable for memorization and recitation in school and also at home, where it was a source of entertainment for families gathered around the fire.

Most of the Fireside Poets lived long lives. A culminating event was the 70th birthday party of Whittier in 1877. Organized by publisher Henry Oscar Houghton, then editor of the Atlantic Monthly, the event meant to serve as a symbol for the magazine's association with the poets, most of whom were present for the celebration.[3] Lowell had recently moved to Spain.[4] Mark Twain gave a now infamous after-dinner speech in which he satirized the poets as uncouth drunkards.[5]

Writing[]

An_Introduction_to_the_Fireside_Poets

An Introduction to the Fireside Poets

The_Fireside_Poets_and_the_Search_for_American_Identity_(1_3)

The Fireside Poets and the Search for American Identity (1 3)

The poets' primary subjects were domestic life, mythology, and the politics of America, in which several of the poets were directly involved. The Fireside Poets did not write for the sake of other poets; they wrote for the common people. They meant to have their stories told for families.

Generally, these poets promoted nationalist values and, as such, were deemed especially appropriate for study among children. Horace Scudder in his 1888 book Literature in School emphasized this point:

They were born on American soil; they have breathed American air; they were nurtured on American ideas. They are Americans of Americans. They are as truly the issue of our national life as are the common schools in which we glory. During the fifty years in which our common-school system has been growing to maturity, these six have lived and sung; and I dare to say that the lives and songs of Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell have an imperishable value regarded as exponents of national life.[6]

Teachers through modern times have frequently emphasized the fireside poets in the classroom. According to scholar Kevin Stein, this emphasis reflects an expectation that poetry should have didactic messages and that poems can be used for moral betterment. Young readers, however, often turn away from this type of poetry because they dislike such sermonizing tones.[7]

Critical reputation[]

Wallace Stevens was a student at Harvard College when the Fireside Poets were at their height; he recalled that "it was commonplace to say that all the poetry had been written".[8]

Even before the end of the century, however, Lowell acknowledged a change in the poetic climate and feared the erasure of gentlemanly gentility in emerging poetry. He wrote to William Dean Howells: "The danger of our literature... seems to me to be lawlessness & want of scholarly refinement. This is the rock I see ahead just now, & I fear we may go to pieces on it if we don't look sharp."[9] Holmes died in 1894, the last of the fireside poets, and one literary magazine called it "the closing of an era in American literature".[10]

Critics, meanwhile, began re-examining the role of these poets in the canon and distinguishing between popularity and aesthetics.[11] As the 20th century began, academics began to turn to poets such as Walt Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost.[12] Anthologist Edmund Clarence Stedman released his exhaustive An American Anthology, 1787–1900, and the frontispiece artwork featured the fireside poets sharing space with Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sidney Lanier, which visually emphasized the canonical shift.[13]

Fireside poets were soon regarded as old-fashioned. In 1904, for example, The Dial noted, "The message of our older poets, it is true, has lost something of its timeliness with the lapse of years, and they have not found the successors that we could have wished; but we doubt greatly if a new Longfellow or a new Lowell could now become a real force in our national life".[14] Professor Lawrence Buell wrote that modern scholars "value [them] less than the nineteenth century did but still regard [them] as the mainstream of nineteenth-century New England verse."[15]

Their work was increasingly emphasized in the classroom, so many of these poets were dismissed merely as children's poets, as noted by a 20th-century scholar who asked, "Who, except wretched schoolchildren, now reads Longfellow?"[16] Longfellow was particularly criticized. Literary scholar Kermit Vanderbilt noted, "Increasingly rare is the scholar who braves ridicule to justify the art of Longfellow's popular rhymings."[17] 20th-century poet Lewis Turco called Longfellow a minor and derivative poet who was "nothing more than a hack imitator of the English Romantics."[18] Holmes, according to a modern scholar, is now the least likely of the Fireside Poets to be anthologized.[19]

Many of the new and emerging poets displayed resentment towards America's poetic past, including T.S. Eliot. An exception was Robert Frost, who named his debut collection A Boy's Will after a line by Longfellow. Whitman was a contemporary of the fireside poets who complained that they were too focused on reflecting English styles and themes in American poetry: "Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake".[20]

Recognition[]

In 1901, Emerson and Longfellow were inducted as inaugural members of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, which added Lowell and Whittier in 1905 and Holmes and Bryant in 1910.[13]

Longfellow was commemorated with a bust in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey in London; he was the earliest non-British writer honored this way and remains the only American poet represented with a bust.[21]

In popular culture[]

Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes are featured in the bestselling novel The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl, published in 2003.

See also[]

References[]

Notes[]

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "A Brief Guide to the Fireside Poets," Poets.org, Academy of American Poets. Web, Apr. 14, 2017.
  2. ↑ Newcomb, 4.
  3. ↑ Rubin, Joan Shelley. Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007: 25. ISBN 978-0674024366
  4. ↑ Duberman, Martin. James Russell Lowell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966: 282–283.
  5. ↑ Rubin, Joan Shelley. Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007: 26. ISBN 978-0674024366
  6. ↑ Gailey, Amanda. Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age. University of Michigan Press, 2015: 73. Template:ISBN
  7. ↑ Stein, Kevin. Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010: 198. Template:ISBN
  8. ↑ Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994: 3–4. Template:ISBN
  9. ↑ Stokes, Claudia. Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875–1910. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006: 97. Template:ISBN
  10. ↑ Newcomb, 107.
  11. ↑ Newcomb, 107-108.
  12. ↑ Williams, Cecil B. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1964: 23.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Newcomb, 106.
  14. ↑ Newcomb, 110.
  15. ↑ Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986: 43. Template:ISBN
  16. ↑ Arvin, Newton. Longfellow: His Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963: 321.
  17. ↑ Gioia, Dana. "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism" in The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini. Columbia University Press, 1993: 68. Template:ISBN.
  18. ↑ Turco, Lewis Putnam. Visions and Revisions of American Poetry. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1986: 33. Template:ISBN
  19. ↑ Knight, Denise D. "Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)", Writers of the American Renaissance: An A-to-Z Guide. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003. Template:ISBN.
  20. ↑ Sollors, Werner. Ethnic Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008: 13. Template:ISBN
  21. ↑ Williams, Cecil B. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1964: 21.

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