A History of American Literature

Called a "Metropolitan Poet." Boynton claims Aldrich returned to Boston always feeling like a newcomer (324).

(Boynton's description of Aldrich's interactions with the Pfaffians and his New York experience):
"[...] 'Bohemia,' with its rallying point at Pfaff's restaurant, the visible rallying place for the authors. Aldrich gravitated toward this group, but never really belonged to it. Just why he did not can be inferred from a sentence by Howells, whose nature was very like his own: 'I remember that, as I sat at the table, under the pavement, in Pfaff's beer-cellar, and listened to the wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell, the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat's, and felt that I had fallen very far.' The men who gathered at Pfaff's were very conscious of Boston, though their consciousness came out in various ways. The most violent said that the thought of it made them as ugly as sin; others loved it thought they left it, as Whitman did 'the open road'; 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.' Aldrich was of like mind, and readily accepted Osgood's invitation to 'the Hub' and to the editorship of Every Saturday. Years after he wrote to Bayard Taylor, who could understand: '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.' And later, to Stedman: 'In the six years I have been here, I have found seven or eight hearts so full of noble things that there is no room in them for such trifles as envy and conceit and insincerity. I didn't find more than two or three such in New York, and I lived there fifteen years. It was an excellent school for me-to get out of!'" (328-239).

(Boynton's description of the motivation/mood of some of the writers known to visit Pfaff's)
"Stedman, Aldrich, and Stoddard had courted the muse as a kind of alien divinity and enjoyed excursions into the distant land of her dwelling-place. But their poetry was a poetry of accomplishment; an embellishment of life, and not an integral part of it (see pp. 324-326). It was a period when people were tempted with some reason to dwell on the 'good old days,' and for a while it seemed as though it would be long before the world would see their like again." (453-454)

"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).

"This same discipline was enjoyed-among later American authors-by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Walt Whitman, all of whom were scrupulously careful writers" (49).

Boynton claims that "No single group has done more to bring honor to the United States in courts of Europe during the nineteenth century than writers like Irving, Hawthorne, Motley, Howells, Bayard Taylor, Lowell, Hay, and their successors down to Thomas Nelson Page and Brand Whitlock" (118).

Boynton relates Howells' discussion of Samuel Clemens' (Mark Twain) English experience: "'I did not care,' said Mr. Howells of Mr. Clemens, 'to expose him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his popularity was as instant as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged that for a much longer time here than in England polite learning hesitated his praise.... I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less" (293).

"[Mark Twain's] home from 1871-1891 was in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was a neighbor of Charles Dudley Warner and an intimate of the Reverend Joseph Twitchell (the original of Harris in 'A Tramp Abroad'), and where William Dean Howells, his friend of over forty years, often visited him" (384).

Boynton mentions that Howells wrote a poem called "My Mark Twain" (393).

In regards to Howells' writing, Boynton states, "To his old power to portray the individual in his mental and emotional processes he added a criticism of the role the individual played in society. He added a new consciousness of the institution of which the individual was always the creator, sometimes the beneficiary, and all too often the victim. His maturity as a man and as a writer secured him in his human and artistic equilibrium, and in this degree has distinguished him from younger authors who have written with the same convictions and purposes"(420). Boynton also notes that "In his later studies Mr. Howells is always dealing unaggressively but searchingly with the problem of economic justice, but this is only one of three broad fields" (427).

"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).

Aldrich wrote in a letter to Stedman about Boston, "In the six years I have been here, I have found seven or eight hearts so full of noble things that there is no room in them for such trifles as envy and conceit and insincerity. I didn't find more than two or three such in New York, and I lived there fifteen years. It was an excellent school for me-to get out of!"

"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 notes that Emerson and Whitman shared many similar fundamental beliefs (339-340). Boynton also states that Emerson was the single man of influence to greet Whitman at the start of a great career (364).

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).