A History of American Literature

Aldrich wrote in a letter to Taylor about Boston, "I miss my few dear friends in New York-but that is all. There is a finer intellectual atmosphere here than in our city....The people of Boston are full-blooded readers, appreciative, trained."

"The leading figure in the Knickerbocker school was Fitz-Green Halleck, who was born in Connecticut in 1790 but spent his active life in New York. When he came up to the city, at the age of twenty-one, he fell in with the literary people of the town and shared their eager interest in the current English output" (133).

"Halleck [...] was uncomfortably conscious of the prosaic commercial drive of American life and disposed to lament the wane of romance" (134).

"He probably knew little of Emerson, and he certainly disapproved of Whitman" (137).

Howells and Twain were friends for over forty years.

"Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of the two American poets regarded with greatest respect by authors and critics in England and on the Continent [...] because his subject matter is so universal-located out of space and out of time-and because he was such a master craftsman in his art" (173).

"[...] and some on the outskirts of 'Bohemia,' were not too aggressively like Stedman, who admitted much later, 'I was very anxious to bring out my first book in New York in Boston style, having a reverence for Boston, which I continued to have'" (328).

Boynton comments on Stedman's analysis of Whitman's work (334).

Stedman's works "'Bohemia' and 'Pan in Wall Street,' though composed in this same general period, are far more sober, deliberate, and genuinely poetical. In both Stedman dealt with the romantic rather than with the ridiculous or contemptible in city life" (335).

"Taylor clung to the idea of establishing a manorial estate at Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, but lived more or less in New York and buzzed restlessly about the literary market until he died a victim of overwork in 1878" (324).

In discussing Sidney Lanier's relationship to Taylor, Boynton states: "But depression and drudgery tended to silence him, and might have done so if the music in [Lanier] had succumbed with the poetry and if the poetry had not been revived by the stimulating friendships of two older men, Paul Hamilton Hayne and Bayard Taylor" (350).

Boynton says that Halleck certainly disapproved of Whitman.

Boynton reprints "[...] the famous testimony of Nathaniel Parker Willis: 'With the highest admiration for his genius, and a willingness to let it atone for more than ordinary irregularity, we were led by common report to expect a very capricious attention to his duties, and occasionally a scene of violence and difficulty. Time went on, however, and he was invariably punctual and industrious. With his pale, beautiful and intellectual face, as a reminder of what genius was in him, it was impossible, of course, not to treat him with deferential courtesy, and, to our occasional request that he would not probe too deep in a criticism, or that he would erase a passage colored too highly with his resentments against society and mankind, he readily and courteously assented-far more yielding than most men, we thought, on points so excusably sensitive'" (175).