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).

"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!"

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."

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).