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Nathaniel Parker Willis

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Willispoemssacredpassi00williala 0006

Nathan Parker Willis (1806-1867), from Poems: Sacred, passionate, and humorous, 1866. Courtesy Internet Archive.

Nathaniel Parker Willis
Born January 20, 1806(1806-Template:MONTHNUMBER-20)
Portland, Maine
Died January 20, 1867(1867-Template:MONTHNUMBER-20) (aged 61)
Occupation editor, literary critic, poet
Nationality United States American
Signature File:NPWillis-signature.jpg

Nathaniel Parker Willis (January 20, 1806 - January 20, 1867) (also known as N.P. Willis)[1] was an American poet, literary critic, and editor.

Life[]

Overview[]

Willis was born at Portland, and educated at Yale. He was mainly a journalist, and conducted various magazines, including the American Monthly; but he also wrote short poems, many of which were popular, of which perhaps the best is "Unseen Spirits;" stories; and works of a more or less fugitive character, with such titles as Pencillings by the Way (1835), Inklings of Adventure, Letters from under a Bridge (1839), People I have Met, The Rag-Tag, The Slingsby Papers, etc., some of which were originally contributed to his magazines. He traveled a good deal in Europe, and was attached for a time to the American embassy in Paris. He was a favorite in society, and enjoyed a wide popularity in uncritical circles, but is now distinctly a spent force.[2]

Family[]

Willis was descended from George Willis, described as a "Puritan of considerable distinction," who arrived in New England about 1630 and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was the eldest son and 2nd child of Nathaniel Willis, a newspaper proprietor in Boston;[3] his grandfather owned newspapers in Boston and western Virginia.[4] His mother was Hannah (Parker) from Holliston, Massachusetts.

Youth and education[]

Willis was born in Portland, Maine, on the 20th of January 1806.[3] In 1816, the family moved to Boston, where Willis's father established the Boston Recorder and, 9 years later, The Youth's Companion,[5] the 1st newspaper for children.

After attending Boston grammar school and the academy at Andover, Nathaniel entered Yale College in October 1823. Although he did not specially distinguish himself as a student, university life had considerable influence in the development of his character, and furnished him with much of his literary material.[3]

1829-1839[]

File:NPWillis-Young.jpg

A young Nathaniel Parker Willis

Willis graduated in 1827,[6] and then spent time touring parts of the United States and Canada. In Montreal, he met Chester Harding, with whom he would become a lifelong friend. Years later, Harding referred to Willis during this period as "the 'lion' of the town".[7] Willis began publishing poetry in his father's Boston Periodical, often using the pen names "Roy" (for religious subjects) and "Cassius" (for more secular topics).[8] The same year, Willis published a volume of poetical Sketches, which attracted some attention, although the critics found in his verses more to blame than to praise. It was followed by Fugitive Poetry (1829) and another volume of verse (1831). He also contributed frequently to magazines and periodicals.[3]

In 1829, he served as editor for the gift book The Token, making him the only person to be editor in the book's 15-year history besides its founder, Samuel Griswold Goodrich.[9] In the same year he started the American Monthly Magazine, which was continued from April of that year to August 1831, but failed to achieve success.[3]

He blamed its failure on the "tight purses of Boston culture"[6] and moved to Europe to serve as foreign editor and correspondent of the New York Mirror.[10] To this journal he contributed a series of letters, which, under the title Pencillings by the Way, were published at London in 1835 (3 volumes; Philadelphia, 1836, 2 volumes; 1st complete edition, New York, 1841). Their vivid and rapid sketches of scenes and modes of life in the old world at once gained them a wide popularity.[3]

Willis was censured by some critics for indiscretion in reporting conversations in private gatherings.[3] At one point he fought a bloodless duel with Captain Frederick Marryat, then editor of the Metropolitan Magazine, after Willis sent a private letter of Marryat's to George Pope Morris, who had it printed.[11] In 1835 Willis introduced Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to important literary figures in England, including Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron.[12]

While abroad, Willis wrote to a friend, "I should like to marry in England".[13] He soon married Mary Stace, daughter of General William Stace of Woolwich]], on October 1, 1835, after a month-long engagement.[14] The couple moved to London where, in 1836, Willis met Charles Dickens, who was working for the Morning Chronicle at the time.[15]

His "Slingsby Papers," a series of magazine articles descriptive of American life and adventure, republished in 1836 under the title Inklings of Adventure, were as successful in England as were his Pencillings by the Way in America. He also published while in England Melanie and other poems (London, 1835; New York, 1837), which was introduced by a preface by Barry Cornwall.[3]

In 1837, Willis and his wife returned to the United States,[16] and settled at a small estate on Oswego Creek, just above its junction with the Susquehanna. Here he lived off and on from 1837 to 1842, and wrote Letters from Under a Bridge (London, 1840; 1st complete edition. New York, 1844), the most charming of all his works.[3]

On October 20, 1838, Willis began a series of articles called "A New Series of Letters from London", one of which suggested an illicit relationship between writer Letitia Elizabeth Landon and editor William Jordan. The article caused some scandal, for which Willis's publisher had to apologize.[17]

On June 20, 1839, Willis's play Tortesa, the Usurer premiered in Philadelphia at the Walnut Street Theatre.[18] Edgar Allan Poe called it "by far the best play from the pen of an American author".[19] That year, he was also editor of the short-lived periodical The Corsair, for which he enlisted William Makepeace Thackeray to write short sketches of France.[20]

1840-1850[]

During a short visit to England in 1839-1840 he published Two Ways of Dying for'a Husband.[3] By 1842, Willis was earning the unusually high salary of $4,800 a year. As a later journalist remarked, this made Willis "the first magazine writer who was tolerably well paid".[21]

Returning to New York City, Willis reorganized, along with George Pope Morris, the weekly New York Mirror as the daily Evening Mirror[16] in 1844 with a weekly supplement called the Weekly Mirror.[22] In the fall of that year, he also became the first editor of the annual gift book The Opal founded by Rufus Wilmot Griswold.[23] During this time, he became the highest-paid magazine writer in America, earning about $100 per article and $5,000 per year,[24] a number which would soon double. Even Longfellow admitted his jealousy of Willis's salary.[25]

While Willis was editor of the Evening Mirror, its issue for January 29, 1845, included the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" with his name attached. In his introduction, Willis called it "unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent, sustaining of imaginative lift ... It will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it".[26] Willis and Poe were close friends, and Willis helped Poe financially during his wife Virginia's illness and while Poe was suing Thomas Dunn English for libel.[27] Willis often tried to persuade Poe to be less destructive in his criticism and concentrate on his poetry.[28] Even so, Willis published many pieces of what would later be referred to as "The Longfellow War", a literary battle between Poe and the supporters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom Poe called overrated and guilty of plagiarism.[29] Willis also introduced Poe to Fanny Osgood; the 2 would later carry out a very public literary flirtation.[30]

Willis's wife Mary Stace died in childbirth on March 25, 1845. Their daughter, Blanche, died as well and Willis wrote in his notebook that she was "an angel without fault or foible".[31] He brought his surviving daughter Imogen to England to be with her mother's family.[32]

Moris left his daughter behind when he returned to the United States,[33] in the spring of 1846, and married Cornelia Grinnell.[3] In 1846, Willis and Morris left the Evening Mirror and attempted to edit a new weekly, the National Press, which was renamed the Home Journal after 8 months.[34] Willis edited the Home Journal until his death in 1867. During his time at the journal, he especially promoted the works of women poets, including Frances Sargent Osgood, Anne Lynch Botta, Grace Greenwood, and Julia Ward Howe.[35]

In 1845 he published Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil, in 1846 a collected edition of his Prose and Poetical Works, in 1849 Rural Leilas, and in 1850 Life Here and There.

Last years[]

File:Out-doors at Idlewild.jpg

Willi purchased a home in 1846 which he named Idlewild. The home would later inspire the title of an 1855 book.

In 1850 Willis settled at Idlewild on the Hudson River, and on account of failing health spent the remainder of his life chiefly in retirement.[3] During those last years at Idlewild, Willis continued contributing a weekly letter to the Home Journal.[36]

In 1850 he assisted Rufus Wilmot Griswold in preparing an anthology of the works of Poe, who had died mysteriously the year before. Griswold also wrote the 1st biography of Poe in which he purposely set out to ruin the dead author's reputation. Willis was one of the most vocal of Poe's defenders, writing at one point: "The indictment (for it deserves no other name) is not true. It is full of cruel misrepresentations. It deepens the shadows unto unnatural darkness, and shuts out the rays of sunshines that ought to relieve them".[37]

Among his later works were Hurry-Graphs (1S51), Outdoors at Idlewild (1854), Ragbag (1855), Paul Fane, (1856), and the Convalescent (1859), but he had outlived his great reputation.[3]

In 1861, Willis allowed the Home Journal to break its pledge to avoid taking sides in political discussions when the Confederate States of America was established, calling the move a purposeful act to bring on war.[38] The Home Journal lost many subscribers during the American Civil War. Morris died in 1864, and the Willis family had to take in boarders and for a time turned Idlewild into a girls' school for income.[39]

Willis was very sick in these final years: he suffered from violent epileptic seizures and, early in November 1866, fainted in the street.[40] He died on his 61st birthday, January 20, 1867, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[41]

Writing[]

File:AmericanScenery Willis.jpg

American Scenery by N.P. Willis with illustration by William Henry Bartlett, 1840

Publisher Charles Frederick Briggs once wrote that "Willis was too Willisy".[42] He described his writings as the "novelty and gossip of the hour" and was not necessarily concerned about facts but with the "material of conversation and speculation, which may be mere rumor, may be the truth".[43] "He is too artificial", Longfellow wrote to his friend George Washington Greene. "And his poetry has now lost one of its greatest charms for me—its sincerity".[44]

Notwithstanding, however, the small affectations and fopperies which were his besetting weaknesses as a man as well as an author, the grace, ease and artistic finish of his style won general recognition.[3] Willis built up his reputation in the public at a time when readers were interested in the personal lives of writers.[45] In his writings, he described the "high life" of the "Upper Ten Thousand", a phrase he coined.[46] His travel writings in particular were popular for this reason[47] as Willis was actually living the life he was describing and recommending to readers.[48]

Even so, he manufactured a humble and modest persona, questioned his own literary merit, and purposely used titles, such as Pencillings by the Way and Dashes at Life With Free Pencil, which downplayed their own quality.[49] His informally toned editorials, which covered a variety of topics, were also very successful.[47] Using whimsicality and humor, he was purposely informal to allow his personality to show in his writing.[50] He addressed his readers personally, as if having a private conversation with them. As he once wrote: "We would have you ... indulge us in our innocent egotism as if it were all whispered in your private ear and over our iced Margaux".[51] When women poets were becoming popular in the 1850s, he emulated their style and focused on sentimental and moral subjects.[52]

In the publishing world, Willis was known as a shrewd magazinist and an innovator who focused on appealing to readers' special interests while still recognizing new talent.[53] For a time, it was said that Willis was the "most-talked-about author" in the United States.[54] Poe questioned Willis's fame, however. "Willis is no genius–a graceful trifler – no more", he wrote in a letter to James Russell Lowell. "In me, at least, he never excites an emotion."[55] Minor Southern writer Joseph Beckham Cobb wrote: "No sane person, we are persuaded, can read his poetry".[56] Future senator Charles Sumner reported: "I find Willis is much laughed at for his sketches".[57]

Even so, contemporaries recognized how prolific he was as a writer and how much time he put into all of his writings. James Parton said of him:

Of all the literary men whom I have ever known, N.P. Willis was the one who took the most pains with his work. It was no very uncommon thing for him to toil over a sentence for an hour; and I knew him one evening to write and rewrite a sentence for two hours before he had got it to his mind.[58]

In August 1853, future President James A. Garfield discussed Willis's declining popularity in his diary: "Willis is said to be a licentious man, although an unrivaled poet. How strange that such men should go to ruin, when they might soar perpetually in the heaven of heavens".[59] After Willis's death, obituaries reported that he had outlived his fame.[60] One remarked, "the man who withdraws from the whirling currents of active life is speedily forgotten".[39] This obituary also stated that Americans "will ever remember and cherish Nathaniel P. Willis as one worthy to stand with Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving".[61]

The best edition of his verse writings is The Poems, Sacred, Passionate and Humorous, of N.P . Willis (New York, 1868).[3]

13 volumes of his prose, Complete Prose Works, were published at New York (1849-1859), and a Selection from his Prose Writings was edited by Henry A. Beers (New York, 1885).[3]

Recognition[]

File:NPWillis-1857.gif

Daguerreotype of Willis, circa 1857

In 1832, while in Florence, Italy, Willis met Horatio Greenough, who sculpted a bust of the writer.[62]

On the day of Willis's funeral, all bookstores in the city were closed as a token of respect.[41] His pallbearers included Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Gridley Howe, and James Thomas Fields.[63]

His Life, by Henry A. Beers, appeared in the series of "American Men of Letters" series in 1895.[3]

Publications[]

Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867), Poetical Worlks. London: Routledge, 1853. Courtesy [https://archive.org/details/poeticalworksofn00willrich Internet Archive.
Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867), Poetical Worlks. London: Routledge, 1853. Courtesy [https://archive.org/details/poeticalworksofn00willrich Internet Archive.

Poetry[]

Plays[]

Novels[]

Non-fiction[]

Collected editions[]

  • Complete Works. New York: J.S. Redford, 1846.
  • Miscellaneous Works. New York: J.S. Redford, 1847.


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[64]

Poems by Nathaniel Parker Willis[]

The_Declaration_Nathaniel_Parker_WILLIS_audiobook

The Declaration Nathaniel Parker WILLIS audiobook

  1. "To Helen in a Huff"

See also[]

On_Witnessing_a_Baptism_by_N._P._Willis

On Witnessing a Baptism by N. P. Willis

Belfry_Pigeon_Audiobook_by_Nathaniel_Parker_Willis

Belfry Pigeon Audiobook by Nathaniel Parker Willis

References[]

  •  Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "Willis, Nathaniel Parker". Encyclopædia Britannica. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 686. . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 19, 2018.
  • Auser, Cortland P. Nathaniel P. Willis. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1969.
  • Baker, Thomas N. Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame. New York, Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-19-512073-6
  • Bayless, Joy. Rufus Wilmot Griswold: Poe's Literary Executor. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1943.
  • Beers, Henry A. Nathaniel Parker Willis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913.
  • Callow, James T. Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807–1855. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1967.
  • Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8154-1038-7
  • Pattee, Fred Lewis. The First Century of American Literature: 1770–1870. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966.
  • Phillips, Mary E. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man. Volume II. Chicago: The John C. Winston Co., 1926.
  • Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1941. ISBN 0801857309
  • Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. ISBN 0-06-092331-8
  • Tomc, Sandra. "An Idle Industry: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure", American Quarterly. Vol. 49, Issue 4, December 1997: 780–805.
  • Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basic Civitas Books, 2004. ISBN 0465092888

Notes[]

  1. ↑ Baker, 3
  2. ↑ John William Cousin, "Willis, Nathaniel Parker," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1910, 409. Wikisource, Web, Mar. 19, 2018.
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 Britannica 1911, 28, 686.
  4. ↑ Auser, 19.
  5. ↑ Auser, 20.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Phillips, 910.
  7. ↑ Callow, 83
  8. ↑ Auser, 21
  9. ↑ Vanderbilt, Kermit. American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986: 55. ISBN 0812212916
  10. ↑ Lapidos, Julet. "Old New Haven", The Advocate, March 17, 2005.
  11. ↑ Auser, 46
  12. ↑ Calhoun, Charles C. Longfellow: A rediscovered Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. ISBN 0807070262. 98.
  13. ↑ Baker, 76.
  14. ↑ Beers, 170–171
  15. ↑ Beers, 264
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Phillips, 911
  17. ↑ Auser, 47–48
  18. ↑ Quinn, 284
  19. ↑ Meyers, 152
  20. ↑ Callow, 111
  21. ↑ Beers, 260–261
  22. ↑ Quinn, 434
  23. ↑ Bayless, 83
  24. ↑ Silverman, 223.
  25. ↑ Baker, 88.
  26. ↑ Silverman, 237
  27. ↑ Meyers, 202
  28. ↑ Meyers, 184
  29. ↑ Silverman, 234–235
  30. ↑ Meyers, 174
  31. ↑ Beers, 276
  32. ↑ Yellin, 83
  33. ↑ Yellin, 86
  34. ↑ Auser, 125
  35. ↑ Auser, 130
  36. ↑ Beers, 329
  37. ↑ Quinn, 666–667
  38. ↑ Auser, 128
  39. ↑ 39.0 39.1 Baker, 188
  40. ↑ Yellin, 201
  41. ↑ 41.0 41.1 Beers, 350
  42. ↑ Thomas, Dwight and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1987: 514. ISBN 0783814011
  43. ↑ Baker, 87
  44. ↑ Thompson, Lawrance. Young Longfellow (1807–1843). New York: The Macmillan Company,1938: 215.
  45. ↑ Baker, 6
  46. ↑ Tomc, 783.
  47. ↑ 47.0 47.1 Auser, 54
  48. ↑ Tomc, 786.
  49. ↑ Tomc, 794.
  50. ↑ Callow, 113
  51. ↑ Tomc, 784
  52. ↑ Watts, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1978: 73–74. ISBN 0-292-76540-2
  53. ↑ Auser, 146
  54. ↑ Baker, 4.
  55. ↑ Quinn, 389
  56. ↑ Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature: 1607-1900. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1954: 638.
  57. ↑ Baker, 100.
  58. ↑ Tomc, 795–796
  59. ↑ Baker, 158
  60. ↑ Beers, 351
  61. ↑ "Obituary. Nathaniel Parker Willis", The New York Times. January 22, 1867. Accessed May 11, 2008
  62. ↑ Callow, 86
  63. ↑ Baker, 187
  64. ↑ Search results = au:Nathaniel Parker Willis, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Dec. 14, 2013.

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