Birth of Jones Very: Flee to the mountains

Jones Very was born August 28, 1813 to two unmarried first cousins, the oldest of what would become six children. His father, also named Jones Very, was a sea captain, and his mother Lydia was an outspoken atheist who believed marriage was a personal moral obligation which did not need any legal recognition. At 10, young Jones Very took his first sea voyage with his father, sailing to Russia; he served as a cabin boy a year later to New Orleans (his father did not survive the return trip).

As a teenager, Very became the breadwinner for the family, serving at an auction house and as a teaching assistant to a principal in his native Salem, Massachusetts. It was in this period that Very began studying religion deeply, offsetting his mother's atheism. It was also in his home town's newspaper that he first began publishing poetry. After graduating from Harvard, he enrolled in the Divinity School there but never graduated. He became known for his enthusiasm for literature and his engaging conversational style (which seemed to disappear when he was in larger groups). Ralph Waldo Emerson brought him into his circle and inspired him with his Transcendentalist philosophies. But then Very went insane.

He had become a bit eccentric over the years, deeply moved by his beliefs in God. In the summer of 1838, while tutoring Harvard students, he suddenly called out, "Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand!" He had a "nervous collapse" was fired from his job. He returned to Salem, where he told people he was the "Second Coming" of Christ and offered to baptize people "with "the Holy Ghost and with Fire," including his neighbor and fellow Transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody. Bronson Alcott was impressed by the fervor of the young man and noted, "He is insane with God — diswitted in the contemplation of the holiness of Divinity." A local minister finally had him committed in an insane asylum. The superintendent determined Very's condition was due to digestive problems.

In fact, Very believed his role as a prophet would last only twelve months. After that period, he calmed down considerably and became reclusive, living with family in Salem, while occasionally serving as a guest minister. He lived a quiet and uneventful life until his death in 1880. He published one major book, with the help of Emerson (who questioned Very's claim that the Holy Spirit guided his pen as he wrote, asking, "cannot the spirit parse & spell?"), collecting his essays on William Shakespeare and his poetry (mostly sonnets), including "In Him We Live":

   Father! I bless thy name that I do live,
   And in each motion am made rich with thee,
   That when a glance is all that I can give,
   It is a kingdom's wealth if I but see;
   This stately body cannot move, save I
   Will to its nobleness my little bring;
   My voice its measured cadence will not try,
   Save I with every note consent to sing;
   I cannot raise my hands to hurt or bless,
   But I with every action must conspire;
   To show me there how little I possess,
   And yet that little more than I desire;
   May each new act my new allegiance prove,
Till in thy perfect love I ever live and move.

Baker: heard the booming cannon roar

Throughout the Civil War, Obadiah Ethelbert Baker kept a journal which he addressed to his wife and mailed to her throughout his tenure with the Iowa Cavalry Volunteers. She, in turn, kept her own journal which she exchanged with him. Interspersed with updates about the War, Baker included poems — both of love and describing his battle experiences as a common soldier. He was hospitalized in St. Louis, Missouri (possibly at the Jefferson Barracks, pictured here in 1899) when he wrote his poem "My Army Birth" on August 24, 1863, which describes his motivations for enlistment:

I left my home in the distant north,
   My much loved prairie home,
To help to fight my country's foes,
   Not for a love to roam.

But because a rebel horde had scorned,
   The banner of the free,
That bright and shining starry flag,
   Emblem of liberty.

I tired to be content at home,
   But no, I could not stay,
While rebel feet were tramping o'er
   The flag that sheltered me.

The flag that waved o'er grandsire's head,
   That bore him through the strife,
 I could not see dishonored now,
   Though I left a widowed wife.

And so I left one April day,
   And soon was in the strife,
Soon heard the booming cannon roar,
   Soon heard the drum and fife.

Baker had a long tenure during the Civil War. His enlistment began in September 1861 and he was not honorably discharged until April 1865. His journal entries document various battles, his experiences in Mississippi, Missouri, Louisiana, and Tennessee, expressing a range of emotions including sympathy and grief for his fallen enemies after the carnage of battle. After the war, he became a teacher in Mississippi and Iowa and spent his final years in California. He died in 1923 and his papers, including his journals and poems, are now at the Huntington Library in that state.

*Information for this post, including the text of the poem, is from "Words for the Hour": A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry  (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), edited by Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller. I highly recommend this incredible compilation of both well-known and lesser-known works from this contentious and emotional period in American history.

Birth of Gallagher: Land of the West

The death of William Davis Gallagher's Irish father in 1841 prompted the family's move from Philadelphia to Mount Healthy, Ohio. Born in that Pennsylvania city on August 21, 1808, Davis would become forever enmeshed with his adopted state of Ohio. The trip was made across Pennsylvania in horse-drawn carriage before embarking on the Ohio River to the Cincinnati area. Educated in part in a log schoolhouse and working as a farm hand in his youth, he began to recognize the rural west as a place of distinct importance. While serving as a newspaper editor in and around Cincinnati,  he had his first experience with poetry — though it wasn't initially positive. "I wondered," he noted decades later, "why the stupid contributors didn't put what they had to say plainly, instead of cutting it up ridiculously, in short lines, with capitals at one end and rhymes at the other."

But Gallagher had interacted with several Ohio poets, including Otway Curry and the Cary sisters, and began writing his own poetry which celebrated the west "plainly" (some were even set to music). He also traveled through Mississippi and Kentucky, reflecting similarly on their raw, rural nature. Among his longest works is Miami Woods, a seven part work with a "Proem" and "L'Envoi" celebrating southern Ohio. He also collected a significant anthology of Western writers. Here are the first and final parts of his poem "The West":

      Land of the West—green Forest-Land!
        Clime of the fair, and the immense!
      Favorite of Nature's liberal hand,
        And child of her munificence!
      Fill'd with a rapture warm, intense,
        High on a cloud-girt hill I stand,
      And with clear vision gazing thence,
        Thy glories round me far expand:
      Rivers, whose likeness earth has not,
        And lakes, that elsewhere seas would be,—
      Whose shores the countless wild herds dot,
        Fleet as the winds, and all as free;
      Mountains that pierce the bending sky,
        And with the storm-clouds warfare wage,—
      Shooting their glittering peaks on high,
        To mock the fierce red lightning's rage;
      Arcadian vales with vine-hung bow'rs,
        And grassy nooks, 'neath beechen shade,
      Where dance the never resting Hours,
        To music of the bright cascade;
      Skies softly beautiful, and blue
        As Italy's, with stars as bright;
        Flow'rs rich as morning's sun-rise hue,
      And gorgeous as the gemm'd midnight.
        Land of the West—green Forest-Land!
      Thus hath Creation's bounteous hand,
        Upon thine ample bosom flung
Charms such as were her gift when the gray world was young...

        Land of the West!—beneath the Heaven
        There's not a fairer, lovelier clime;
      Nor one to which was ever given
        A destiny more high, sublime.
      From Alleghany's base to where
        Our Western Andes prop the sky—
      The home of Freedom's hearts is there,
        And o'er it Freedom's eagles fly.
      And here,—should e'er Columbia's land
        Be rent with fierce intestine feud,—
      Shall Freedom's latest cohorts stand,
        Till Freedom's eagles sink in blood,
And quench'd are all the stars that now her banners stud.

Death of Kennedy: not worth a debate

John Pendleton Kennedy was 74 years old when he died in Rhode Island on August 18, 1870, so the Baltimore newspaper was rounding up when it asked, "Where is the young man of to-day who is so young as John P. Kennedy at seventy-five?" This tribute considered the man's life a model for all Americans who wished to live good lives, calling him: "A man of wealth, he did not labor to acquire untold riches; a man of leisure, he was not an idler, but dedicated his energies to politics and literature."

Kennedy had served under President Millard Fillmore as Secretary of the Navy after time in Congress for his home state of Maryland (and a stint as Speaker of the House of Delegates there). Earlier than that, however, Kennedy was one of the first American writers of note. His novel, Swallow Barn, or A Sojourn in the Old Dominion was published in 1832, and Horse-Shoe Robinson in 1835. The latter, a historical novel, was compared with the works of his contemporary James Fenimore Cooper; one reviewer called the title character "another Leather Stocking." 

Kennedy sent an early draft of Horse-Shoe Robinson to Washington Irving who, despite being asked to keep it secret, was so "tickled with some parts of it" that he read it aloud to friends. The novel is set during the American Revolution and, as the author noted in a preface, was an attempt "to furnish a picture, and embody the feelings of a period of great excitement and difficulty." Set in the Southern provinces, unlike many contemporary histories which focuses on northern battles, the title character makes his way through the Carolinas and Virginia. Much of the novel depicts the difficulty and uncertainty of this contentious time (especially when the main character meets a traitor to the cause).

Kennedy was mostly retired by the mid 1850s and wrote little other than his early novels. In 1870, he was directed by a physician to go north for his health. After a few weeks in Saratoga, he went on to Newport. In a letter from that summer, he wrote to a friend: "The doubt is, whether my trouble is organic or functional, to which i say that at seventy-five or thereabouts, the difference is not worth a debate." At his death, he was buried in Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery, the same graveyard where lies Southern poets Sidney Lanier and Edward Coote Pinkney.

Philip Nolan: The Man Without a Country

Philip Nolan's obituary was published "in an obscure corner" of the New York Herald on August 13, 1863. The text was simple, announcing only that he died aboard his ship about three months earlier. "And now the poor creature is dead," wrote Edward Everett Hale of his fictional character, "it seems to me worth while to tell a little of his story, by way of showing young Americans of to-day what it is to be A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY."

Though the story is fiction, Hale peppered "The Man Without a Country" with an apparent historical basis (including the exact issue of the New York Herald which, in fact, did not include the obituary quoted above), leading some to believe it was a true account. Nolan had become a follower of Aaron Burr when the former Vice President of the United States began a campaign to create an independent nation from the western territories. Other conspirators renounced the plan but Nolan told the judge he had no remorse, crying out in court: "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!”

The judge saw fit to sentence Nolan to the exact fate he called for. Assigned to a ship bound out of the country, the man would never see his country again. Sailors were ordered never to discuss or even acknowledge national affairs, his reading materials were all censored, and for some 50 years, Nolan was without a country, condemned to frequent ship changes, always avoiding those which would take him back to the United States. Though he was technically a criminal and a prisoner, his companions treated him cordially and respectfully; some, including the narrator, even came to admire him. Nolan, of course, came to repent his actions and his words: Only in the forced distance from his home did he come to appreciate it. On the edge of death, he is finally visited by the narrator in his private room - a room decorated with patriotic symbols and a United States map drawn from history. As he tells the narrator, "Here, you see, I have a country!"

If it wasn't clear enough that the 1863 story was analogous to the Civil War and the secession of the Confederate States, one extended scene features the crew (and Nolan) coming across a boat illegally loaded with enslaved Africans. Nolan serves as a translator for the captain, who offers to take the rescued Africans to a local port. They protest, and instead demand to be taken to their native continent, lest they never see their families, friends, and homes again. Nolan is clearly affected by their pleas and, in privacy with the narrator, offers:

"Youngster, let that show you what it is to be without a family, without a home, and without a country. And if you are ever tempted to say a word or to do a thing that shall put a bar between you and your family, your home, and your country, pray God in his mercy to take you that instant home to his own heaven. Stick by your family, boy; forget you have a self, while you do everything for them. Think of your home, boy; write and send, and talk about it. Let it be nearer and nearer to your thought, the farther you have to travel from it; and rush back to it when you are free, as that poor black slave is doing now. And for your country, boy,” and the words rattled in his throat, “and for that flag,” and he pointed to the ship, “never dream a dream but of serving her as she bids you, though the service carry you through a thousand hells. No matter what happens to you, no more matter who flatters you or who abuses you, never look at another flag, never let a night pass but you pray God to bless that flag. Remember, boy, that behind all these men you have to do with, behind officers, and government, and people even, there is the Country Herself, your Country, and that you belong to Her as you belong to your own mother. Stand by Her, boy, as you would stand by your mother, if those devils there had got hold of her to-day!"

Berryhill: Beyond the blue ether above

Courtesy: Findagrave

Lucinda L. Portman died on August 10, 1856. Her nephew was the Alabama-born and wheelchair-using Mississippi poet S. Newton Berryhill. Berryhill's verses often fall into one of two categories: romantic, nature-inspired poems and wrathful anti-Northern poems. His response to his aunt's death, however, provides a peaceful, spiritual alternative. Moved by Portman's death, he wrote a poem titled "Lines (in memory of my Aunt Lucinda L. Portman, who died August 10, 1856)":

Hushed fore'er is the voice that in infancy soothed
My sorrow, and sickness, and pain;
And the hands that so often my pillow have smoothed,
In mine shall be clasped ne'er again.

The dear, cherished hours of the long winter night,
No more in sweet converse we'll spend;
Nor read by the light of the fire blazing bright
What our favorite authors have penned.

Thy dear-loved form lieth cold in the ground—
No more will it gladden our eyes,
Till the archangel's trumpet from heaven shall sound,
And bid the pale sleepers arise.

Though we sorrow for thee, hallelujah to God!
For the blessed assurance He's given,
That though thy cold body lies under the sod,
Thy spirit is living in Heaven.

For we know thou art gone to the land of delight,
Beyond the blue ether above,
Where the seraphim robed in their garments of white
Are chanting their anthems of love.

No fierce tempest raves in that bright summer clime;
The skies are forever serene;
The amaranth trees are in bloom through all time,
And the valleys eternally green.

Pain, sorrow, and death are unknown to the band
Who dwell in that bright world above;
For Jesus, the Savior, is the king of the land,
And the law of His kingdom is love.

Like most of his poems, "Lines" was published in Berryhill's only book, the 1878 collection Backwoods Poems. The moderate success of that book earned him the nickname, "The Backwoods Poet."

Alcott: A Golden Goose (and a phoenix)

Weary after the sudden success of Little Women after years of hard work as a writer, Louisa May Alcott traveled to Europe with her sister May Alcott and a friend. The trip was in part for rest but also because she found her new celebrity status more than a bit burdensome. In Bex, Switzerland on August 7, 1870, she wrote to Thomas Niles, her agent for the Roberts Brothers publishing house, that she was still receiving multiple requests for contributions. "I am truly grateful," she told him, "but having come abroad for rest I am not inclined to try the treadmill till my year's vacation is over." Instead, Alcott offered Niles a poem which she called "a trifle in rhyme," which she said would serve "as a general answer to everybody." The poem, "The Lay of a Golden Goose," is among her most autobiographical works (and the title is a pun; "lay" is a synonym for "poem"):

Long ago in a poultry yard
One dull November morn,
Beneath a motherly soft wing
A little goose was born.

Who straightway peeped out of the shell
To view the world beyond,
Longing at once to sally forth
And paddle in the pond.

"Oh! be not rash," her father said,
A mild Socratic bird;
Her mother begged her not to stray
With many a warning word.

But little goosey was perverse,
And eagerly did cry,
"I've got a lovely pair of wings,
Of course I ought to fly."

The poem obviously references Alcott's own upbringing and the influence of her parents, but it also references her lack of success before Little Women. Owl characters in the poem note, "No useful egg was ever hatched / From transcendental nest." But the little goose was determined and soon is able to fly. Here, the poem directly addresses Niles, who inspired and pushed Alcott to write the book that became her most famous:

At length she came unto a stream
Most fertile of all Niles,
Where tuneful birds might soar and sing
Among the leafy isles.

Here did she build a little nest
Beside the waters still,
Where the parental goose could rest
Unvexed by any bill.

And here she paused to smooth her plumes,
Ruffled by many plagues;
When suddenly arose the cry,
"This goose lays golden eggs."

At the revelation of the goose's golden eggs, her previous critics, including fellow fowl, change their tune and begin praising the awkward little goose ("Rare birds have always been evoked / From transcendental nests!"). In fact, her newly converted supporters demanded she keep laying more and more golden eggs. After a while, however, she refused:

So to escape too many friends,
Without uncivil strife,
She ran to the Atlantic pond
And paddled for her life.

Soon up among the grand old Alps
She found two blessed things,
The health she had so nearly lost,
And rest for weary limbs.

But still across the briny deep
Couched in most friendly words,
Came prayers for letters, tales, or verse,
From literary birds.

Whereat the renovated fowl
With grateful thanks profuse,
Took from her wing a quill and wrote
This lay of a Golden Goose.

Despite her promises to herself, however, Alcott did find time to write during her vacation. While she was in Rome, she completed the sequel to her book, Little Men. Still, she also enjoyed the rest she so desperately desired. In the same letter to Niles, she concluded, "I am rising from my ashes in a most phoenix-like manner."

Birth of Merrill: spitting on America

Stuart Merrill was born in Hempstead, New York on August 1, 1863. Much of his childhood, however, was spent in France, where his father was a diplomat in Paris. Among young Merrill's teachers was French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Merrill himself grew into this style of writing and published several works, mostly in French, though he was also a critic and translator.

Though Merrill returned to the United States to study at Columbia Law School in the 1880s, he preferred his life as a European. America, he thought, was too chauvinistic, while France was "the most sacred of countries." In fact, Merrill's longest poem was titled "Ma patrie, c'est l'Amérique et je crache dessus" ("My Homeland is America and I Spit on Her"). His major American book was Pastels in Prose (1890), a collection of French prose poems translated into English (with an introduction by William Dean Howells). Despite this, he was an admirer of Walt Whitman and believed there was a musical simplicity in English verse which he wanted to bring to French writing.

His poem "Soir de Tempête" ("Evening Storm")*:

Under a pallid veil of mist and fog
The sea hurls upon the rocks its panting foam.

The caverns, on the hollows of the iron cliffs,
Through the voices of the blue-green water moan toward hell.

On the horizon of the waves a ghost ship
Glides against a cloud the color of a Sodomite blush.

And in the shadow of the north where the petrels fly,
Precursory specters of supernatural evenings,

One hears the golden horn blasts resonate
And the drums of the triumphant lightning roar.

*Translated from the French with the help of my friend Erin Lynch.