Boston-born Ralph Waldo Emerson lost his father, a Concord minister, when he was eight years old, leaving the family in difficult circumstances.
27 Memorial Drive West, Bethlehem, PA 18015
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)
"John Burroughs tells of the staff of a leading daily paper in New York, assembled on Saturday afternoon to be paid off, greeting the passages that were read aloud to them with 'peals upon peals of ironical laughter.' Whitman's family were indifferent. His brother George said he 'didn't read it at all-didn't think it worth reading- fingered it a little. Mother thought as I did...Mother said that if 'Hiawatha' was poetry, perhaps Walt's was'" (364).
After Swinburne's fiercest attack on Whitman, Burroughs recalls: "I could not discover either in word or look that he [Whitman] was disturbed a particle by it. He spoke as kindly of Swinburne as ever. If he was pained at all it was on Swinburne's account and not on his own. It was a sad spectacle to see a man retreat upon himself as Swinburne had done'" (375).
Boynton discusses the shifting literary centeres of the United States, noting: "With the passing of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant the leadership in American letters was lost to New York. Indeed, by 1850, while all this trio were living, four men in eastern Massachusetts were in full career,-Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier; and before the death of Irving, in 1859, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Homes came into their full powers" (190).
In regards to the careers of popular New England writers, Boynton states that "They matured slowly. Emerson was past middle life before America heeded him" (191).
"Centering about Concord, but by no means located within it, was a 'Transcendental Movement' of which Emerson is considered the chief exponent" (194).
Boynton provides a description of the activities of the writers associated with the Transcendental movement: "Two undertakings chiefly focused the group activity of the Transcendentalists. The first of these was the Dial, a quarterly publication which ran for sixteen numbers, 1840-1844. After much discussion the Transcendental Club undertook the publication of this journal of one hundred and twenty-eight pages to an issue. For the first two years it was under the editorship of Margaret Fuller. When her strength failed under this extra voluntary task, Emerson, with the help of Thoreau, took charge for the remaining two years. Its paid circulation was very small, never reaching two set of publishers, it had to be discontinued, Emerson personally meeting the final small deficit. It contained chiefly essays of a philosophical nature, but included in every issue a rather rare body of verse. The essays reflected and expounded German thought and literature and oriental thought, and discussed problems of art, literature, and philosophy. The section given to critical reviews is extremely interesting for its quick response to the new writings which later years have proved and accepted" (195).
"[...] and Emerson stayed in Concord with the comment: "I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger.... I have not yet conquered my own house. It irks and repents me. Shall I raise the siege of this hen coop, and march baffled away to a pretended siege of Babylon?" (196).
Boynton provides an abridged bio of Emerson. He also provides a descriptions of Emerson's ideals on nature, beauty, living in the present, etc. (199-220).
Boynton also discusses Emerson's friendship with Thoreau (221-222). Boynton highlights that the between Thoreau and Emerson's ideas of independence was "that Emerson discharged his duties in the family and in the state and that Thoreau protested at his obligations to the group even while he was reaping the benefits of other men's industry."
Boyton notes, however, in his comparison of Emerson and Thoreau that the similarity between the two men was that "both were more social in their lives than in their writings."
Boynton writes of Concord: "What the town was by tradition and what it had become through Emerson's influence made it the most congenial spot in America for Hawthorne" (236).
"The philosophy of Gilder was the philosophy of his most enlightened contemporaries. There is in it much of Emerson, whom he called the 'shining soul' of the New World, and there is much of Whitman, though it is not clear whether their likeness does not lie in their common accord with Emerson rather than in direct influence from 'the good gray poet' to Gilder. The immanence of God in nature and in heart of man (see 'The Voice of the Pine'); the unity of all natural law (see 'Destiny'); the conflict between religion and theology (see 'Credo'); and a faith in the essentials of democractic life,- these are the wholesome fundamentals of modern thinking shared alike by Emerson and Whitman and Gilder" (339-340).
"Emerson was the single man of influence to 'greet [Whitman] at the beginning of a great career'" (364).
"Emerson wrote of self-reliance in general, 'Adhere to your act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.' Yet he remonstrated with Whitman, and in the attempt to modify his extravagance used arguments which were unanswerable. Nevertheless, said the younger poet, 'I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way'; in doing which he bettered Emerson's instructions by disregarding his advice. Hostile or brutal criticism left him quite unruffled. It reenforced him in his conclusions and cheered him with the thought that they were receiving serious attention" (375).
"Bryant, Irving, Halleck, and Greeley led the way for a succeeding group of self-educated men" (325).
"During his fifteen years in New York, Greeley and Bryant, two newspaper editors, were perhaps the dominant figures in the literary and intellecgtual stratum" (328).
"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).
"[...] 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).
Boynton writes that "Stoddard, more stable and unexcited than Taylor or than Stedman, was occupied in a succcession of uninspired literary ventures" (324).
"[...] lovers of refined literature-men like Stedman, for example, who wrote to Bayard Taylor, 'The whole country, owing to contagion of our American newspaper 'exchange' system, is flooded, deluged, swamped, beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic [bathos], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not with'" (386).
"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).
"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).
Howells wrote: "'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).
Howells wrote a poem called "My Mark Twain" (393).
Boyton remarks, "To Whitman respect is paid because he is so essentially American in his subject matter and point of view" (173). Boyton also states on the subject of "American" writers that "Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Mark Twain are the two authors whom the rest of the world have chosen to regard as distinctively American" (362). Boyton provides a comparison of these two writers(407-408).
"[...] [Thoreau had] eager friendship for two of the most strikingly unconventional men of his day- Walt Whitman and John Brown 'of Harper's Ferry.' Of Whitman he wrote, when few were reading him and few of these approving: 'I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time....I have found his poems exhilarating, encouraging....We ought to rejoice greatly in him. He occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can't confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn or New York. How they must shudder when they read him!...Since I have seen him, I find I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident'" (232).
"At thirty-one he was a natural Bohemian, independent enough not even to do the conventional Bohemian things like drinking and smoking, but he had shown no marked promise of achieving anything more than his own personal freedom. His writing and public speaking had been commonplace, and his journalistic work respectably successful. Then in 1855 came the evidence of an immensely expansive development, a development so great and so unusual that it met the fate of its kind, receiving from all but a very few neglect, derision, or contempt" (364).
"The flight of birds, the play of waves, the swaying of branches, the thousandfold variations of motion, are easy to reproduce and easy to perceive, but Whitman went far beyond these to the innate suggestions of things and of ideas" (369).
"The most violent objections launched at Whitman were based on his unprecedented frankness in matters of sex [...] So Whitman was made a scapegoat [...]" (370).
"For the carrying out of such a design the only fit vehicle is the purest sort of democracy; all other working bases of human association are only temporary obstacles to the course of things; and as Whitman saw the nearest approach to the right social order in his own country, he was an American by conviction as well as by the accident of place. Governments, he felt, were necessary conveniences, and so-called rulers were servants of the public from whom their powers were derived. The greatest driving power in life was public opinion, and the greatest potential molder of public opinion was the bard, seer, or poet. This poet was to be not a reformer but a preacher of a new gospel; he was, in fact, to be infinitely patient in face of 'meanness and agony without end' while he invoked the principles which would one day put them to rout" (374).
"Whitman was not in the usual sense a 'nature poet.' The beauties of nature exerted little appeal on him. He had nothing to say in detached observations on the primrose, or the mountain tops, or the sunset. But nature was, next to his own soul, the source of deepest truth to him, a truth which science in his own day was making splendidly clear. The dependence of biological science on the material universe did not shake his faith in immortality. He simply took what knowledge science could contribute and understood it in the light of his faith, which transcended any science. Among modern poets he was one of the earliest to chant the paean of creative evolution" (376).
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).
Boston-born Ralph Waldo Emerson lost his father, a Concord minister, when he was eight years old, leaving the family in difficult circumstances.
27 Memorial Drive West, Bethlehem, PA 18015