Death of Cooke: the writer of the South

John Esten Cooke died of typhoid fever at his Virginia home on September 27, 1886. He was 55 years old. Cooke, like his brother of Philip Pendleton Cooke, became a lawyer but also pursued writing as a hobby. Eventually, shortly after his father's death, he abandoned his law practice entirely to focus on writing. His literary work paused during the Civil War, however. "I can't compose," he admitted, "I can't think of anything but Virginia's degradation." He served as a militia man and, soon, an officer, working with major Confederate names like J. E. B. Stuart and others. He didn't stop writing entirely, however, and occasionally offered dispatches from the war front.

After the war, Cooke resumed his fiction writing, often focused on detailing the Southern experience. Before the war, many of his writings were set in colonial times; after the war, they were almost exclusively set in war time. Perhaps more importantly, he had been somewhat liberal and reform-minded before the war. After, he conformed to certain standards for Southern writers in the hopes of achieving significant commercial success. As he admitted, his intention was "to become the writer of the South yet!" To that end, his version of the Southern experience was bucolic, full of myth, and sometimes antagonistic to the north.

By the end of his life, he had published more than 30 books. Among those books are historical romances, biography (including one of Robert E. Lee and another of "Stonewall" Jackson, and collections of short stories. In more recent years, an organization has named a fiction prize in Cooke's honor; it is granted to books on the Civil War or Southern heritage. From Cooke's 1867 novel Wearing the Gray:

Of all human faculties, surely the most curious is the memory. Capricious, whimsical, illogical, acting ever in accordance with its own wild will, it loses so many "important events" to retain the veriest trifles in its deathless clutch. Ask a soldier who has fought all day long in some world-losing battle, what he remembers most vividly, and he will tell you that he has well-nigh forgotten the most desperate charges, but recalls with perfect distinctness the joy he experienced in swallowing a mouthful of water from the canteen on the body of a dead enemy.

Birth of Watkins Harper: to stir like a battle-cry

Frances Ellen Watkins was born on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland. Like her parents, she was born free but of African descent. Her parents died when she was still a child and she was raised with the help of her uncle, a minister and educator who ensured his niece attended an academy for "Colored Youth." Her formal schooling ended when she was 13 but she continued teaching herself. She was eventually hired as a teacher herself, first in Ohio and then in Pennsylvania.

Watkins started publishing poetry as a teenager. It was as a public figure that she would make her long career. In her nearly 86 years, she became a published poet, novelist, essayist, a public speaker, an abolitionist, a civil rights and women's rights advocate, particularly under her married name Frances Watkins Harper. Often, Watkins Harper used popular forms of poetry to spread her beliefs in equality, temperance, and piety. Her poetry in particular was meant to inspire an emotional response to ally others in her causes using a simple, almost conversational style. Among her most moving works is her 1895 poem "Songs for the People" (which sums up her life and work quite well):

Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.

Not for the clashing of sabres,
For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
With more abundant life.

Let me make the songs for the weary,
Amid life's fever and fret,
Till hearts shall relax their tension,
And careworn brows forget.

Let me sing for little children,
Before their footsteps stray,
Sweet anthems of love and duty,
To float o'er life's highway.

I would sing for the poor and aged,
When shadows dim their sight;
Of the bright and restful mansions,
Where there shall be no night.

Our world, so worn and weary,
Needs music, pure and strong,
To hush the jangle and discords
Of sorrow, pain, and wrong.

Music to soothe all its sorrow,
Till war and crime shall cease;
And the hearts of men grown tender
Girdle the world with peace.

Weeks: I am glad to be alive!

Robert Kelley Weeks was born in New York City on September 21, 1840. A graduate of Yale, Weeks went on to study law at Columbia and passed the bar in New York. In 1866, however, he took a literary turn and published a book simply titled Poems by Robert K. Weeks, which he dedicated to his mother. Much of the poetry in that compilation offers Weeks's observations of nature and the natural world.

By the time he published his second book four years later, Episodes and Lyrics Pieces, Weeks had given up on practicing law and focused on writing. That book, however, was not met positively. A review in Philadelphia called Weeks "a student of poetry rather than a poet" who merely imitated others (namely Tennyson, Swinburne, Browning) with "considerable exactness." Though the reviewer called Weeks a "graceful verse-writer" with a book full of "melodious" works showing "a refined poetical sentiment," the critic concluded: "The best of [his] pieces lack the one thing necessary to raise them above the level of respectable mediocrity—inspiration."

Negative reviews, however, could not have weakened Weeks's poetic optimism. Nevertheless, he died shortly before his final book, Twenty Poems, was published in 1876; he was 35 years old. For his birthday, it is perhaps best appropriate to look at Weeks's short poem (sonnet?) "In September" from his last book:

Feathery clouds are few and fair,
Thistle-down is on the air,
Rippling sunshine on the lake.
Wild grapes scent the sunny brake,
Wild bees murmuring take the ear,
Crickets make the silence dear;
Butterflies float in a dream,
Over all the swallows gleam.
Here and yonder, high and low,
Golden-rod and sunflowers glow,
Here and there a maple flushes,
Sumach reddens, woodbine blushes,
Purple asters bloom and thrive,—
I am glad to be alive!

Unexpected Chopin: shuddering, shrinking, shriveling

Vogue magazine's issue for September 18, 1895 included the short story "The Unexpected" by Kate Chopin (one of several by the author in that magazine in the 1890s). The short sketch opens with the separation of Randall and Dorothea, an engaged young couple in an unspecified place in the northern United States. Randall was ill, and doctors told him to go South. "The parting was bitter," Chopin writes, and their final moments together were spent in a passionate embrace.

Randall would be away for less than a month and the two exchanged letters daily. After a time, however, his illness worsened and his letters became less frequent. His return was delayed and delayed again. "All this was torture to the impatient Dorothea," though her parents would not allow her to travel to be by his side.

When his physicians tell him he would need to spend the winter in the South, he refused to let another day pass without seeing his love Dorothea. He forewarns her, however, that the illness has left him changed. When he arrives, they embrace and kiss — just as they had done before he parted from her. Now, however, Dorothea no longer recognizes the man she agreed to marry: " What hideous transformation had he undergone, or what devilish transformation was she undergoing in contemplating him?" She feels a physical change in herself as well, "something within her seemed to be shuddering, shrinking, shriveling together." Chopin explains: "She felt as if it was her heart; but it was only her love."

Dorothea realizes she no longer loves this man who has now become so sick. She does not say so, however, and listens to his proposal that they get married immediately and return to the South together. In case he dies, he wants her to have all his wealth. A coughing fit, however, calls his physician to take him away and rest. As soon as he leaves, so does Dorothea:

She sped along the familiar roadway, seemingly borne on by some force other than mechanical — some unwonted energy — a stubborn impulse that lighted her eyes, set her cheeks aflame, bent her supple body to one purpose — that was, swiftest flight.

The story ends with Dorothea lost and alone in an unrecognized place deep within uncivilized nature, where she finally answers (to herself) the answer to Randall's proposal: "Never!" The story offers a cynical view of youthful idealism in beauty, love, and marriage. The reader is left to wonder if Dorothea will ever marry at all, and if Randall ever receives her message.

Very: something dangerous in his air

In the summer of 1838, Jones Very had surprised a group of Harvard students he was teaching when he shouted to them, "Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand!" Fired from his job, he was sent back to his native Salem, Massachusetts for rest and relaxation to combat what others thought was a nervous collapse.

Instead, Very became more and more convinced he was a prophet and went door to door in Salem in an attempt to find recruits for this belief. On September 16, 1838, he went to his neighbor Elizabeth Palmer Peabody who, like him, was an early member of the Transcendentalist movement. To Peabody, Very quoted from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, before offering his own interpretation of the text. As Peabody later recalled,

He looked much flushed and his eyes very brilliant and unwinking. It struck me at once that there was something unnatural—and dangerous in his air—As soon as we were within the parlor door he laid his hand on my head—and said "I come to baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with Fire"—and then he prayed—I cannot remember his words but they were thrilling—and as I stood under his hand, I trembled to the centre.

Peabody said she tried to stay quiet and allow Very to have this experience. When he was finished, he sat down and the two sat quietly for a moment. He then asked how she felt. "I feel no change," she admitted. "But you will," he said, before revealing himself as the Second Coming of Christ. She was moved by his connection with "Absolute Spirit" but was nervous about his "frenzy." When Very repeated the incident with the local minister, he was institutionalized for insanity. Peabody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, meanwhile, were concerned for the young man's health but were somewhat awed by his profound thoughts on the human spirit and its relationship with the deity. Emerson particularly encouraged Very's writings, including essays on Shakespeare and a huge number of sonnets — written, Very claimed, with the Holy Spirit. His poem "Worship":

There is no worship now: the idol stands
Within the Spirit's holy resting-place I
Millions before it bend with upraised hands,
And with their gifts God's purer shrine disgrace.
The prophet walks unhonored 'mid the crowd
That to the idol's temple daily throng;
His voice unheard above their voices loud,
His strength too feeble 'gainst the torrent strong;
But there are bounds that ocean's rage can stay
When wave on wave leaps madly to the shore:
And Boo'n the prophet's word shall men obey,
And hushed to peace the billows cease to roar;
For He who spake — and warring winds kept peace,
Commands again — and man's wild passions cease.

Willis's Fugitive Poetry: cheer me as I go

It was on the September 11, 1829 that Nathaniel Parker Willis copyrighted his book Fugitive Poetry, a collection mostly of previously published works. Willis, only 23 years old upon the book's publication, had already met with early success and popularity as a writer. This was in no small part due to his family's long history in publishing and journalism. Willis's title page included a quote from Washington Irving, repeated on his copyright page: "If, however, I can, by lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment of sorrow; if I can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my reader more in good humor with his fellow beings and himself, surely, surely, I shall not then have written entirely in vain." His earliest major biographer said most of the book was "of no importance."

Many of the poems in Fugitive Poems remained among his famous works throughout Willis's career, including his free verse poem "April." Several showed the influence on him from his conservative religious father. Many are addressed to women — some romantically, some more platonic — and those poems with titles like "On Seeing Through a Distant Window a Belle Completing Her Toilet for a Ball" did little to remove rumors that Willis was living a dissipated and idle life. Even so, at about the same time he was preparing Fugitive Poetry for the press, he was also beginning his career as a periodical editor, first of an annual giftbook called The Token and then a new newspaper he called the American Monthly Magazine. After its failure a couple years later, Willis moved to Europe for a time; it was there that his reputation as a writer began to soar. His poem "The Solitary":

Alone! alone! How drear it is
     Always to be alone!
In such a depth of wilderness,
     The only thinking one!
The waters in their path rejoice,
     The trees together sleep—
But I have not one silver voice
     Upon my ear to creep!

The sun upon the silent hills
     His mesh of beauty weaves,
There's music in the laughing rills
     And in the whispering leaves.
The red deer like the breezes fly
     To meet the bounding roe,
But I have not a human sigh
     To cheer me as I go.

I've hated men—I hate them now—
     But, since they are not here,
I thirst for the familiar brow—
     Thirst for the stealing tear.
And I should love to see the one,
     And feel the other creep,
And then again I'd be alone
     Amid the forest deep.

I thought that I should love my hound,
     And hear my cracking gun
Till I forgot the thrilling sound
     Of voices—one by one.
I thought that in the leafy hush
     Of nature, they would die;
But, as the hindered waters rush,
     Resisted feelings fly.

I'm weary of my lonely hut
     And of its blasted tree,
The very lake is like my lot,
     So silent constantly.
I've lived amid the forest gloom
     Until I almost fear—
When will the thrilling voices come
     My spirit thirsts to hear?

War Poetry of the South: favorable or inverse

William Gilmore Simms dated his preface to the anthology War Poetry of the South as September 8, 1866. Written in Brooklyn, the introduction to the book explains the editor's reason for collecting such a book: the South's sufferings have prompted a high degree of mental and artistic development. Further, Simms writes, though the sentiments seem sectional and anti-Union, the Confederate states' re-assimilation into the fold means the rest of the country assumes these writings as part of their history. He continues:

The emotional literature of a people is as necessary to the philosophical historian as the mere details of events in the progress of a nation. This is essential to the reputation of the Southern people, as illustrating their feelings, sentiments, ideas, and opinions — the motives which influenced their actions, and the objects which they had in contemplation, and which seemed to them to justify the struggle in which they were engaged. It shows with what spirit the popular mind regarded the course of events, whether favorable or adverse; and, in this aspect, it is even of more importance to the writer of history than any mere chronicle of facts.

Facts, says Simms, do not show the emotion which poetry and song allow. These works are without reservation and, therefore, "gush freely and freshly from the heart." His hope is that these poems will be recognized, "not only as highly creditable to the Southern mind," but also as a sincere expression of Southerners — people whose rich sentiments sustained them through war. The book opens with Henry Timrod's "Ethnogenesis" (a poem announcing the birth of a new people) and ends with a few post-war verses. The most emotional are the poems which express grief, as in "Only a Soldier's Grave," credited to "S. A. Jones of Aberdeen, Mississippi":

Only a soldier's grave! Pass by,
For soldiers, like other mortals, die.
Parents he had — they are far away;
No sister weeps o'er the soldier's clay;
No brother comes, with a tearful eye:
It's only a soldier's grave — pass by.

True, he was loving, and young, and brave,
Though no glowing epitaph honors his grave;
No proud recital of virtues known,
Of griefs endured, or of triumphs won;
No tablet of marble, or obelisk high;—
Only a soldier's grave — pass by.

Yet bravely he wielded his sword in fight,
And he gave his life in the cause of right!
When his hope was high, and his youthful dream
As warm as the sunlight on yonder stream;
His heart unvexed by sorrow or sigh;—
Yet, 'tis only a soldier's grave: — pass by.

Yet, should we mark it--the soldier's grave,
Some one may seek him in hope to save!
Some of the dear ones, far away,
Would bear him home to his native clay:
'Twere sad, indeed, should they wander nigh,
Find not the hillock, and pass him by.

Melville Crazy (Or, Pierre: idol of the critics)

The headline screamed from the page, "Herman Melville Crazy." Published in the New York Day Book on September 8, 1852, the article was a mock news story inspired by the author's latest book, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. The book had been published only about two months earlier (Melville apparently had originally considered publishing it anonymously). The article notes:

A critical friend, who read Melville's last book, 'Ambiguities," between two steamboat accidents, told us that it appeared to be composed of the ravings and reveries of a madman. We were somewhat startled at the remark, but still more at learning, a few days after, that Melville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment. We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringently secluded from pen and ink

Other reviews were no more laudatory. Another review called it "the late miserable abortion of Melville." Another called it repulsive, unnatural and indecent." The negative critical response to the book and its abysmal sales (continuing the trend established by his previous failure Moby-Dick) severely harmed Melville's literary career. His wife, incidentally, later claimed the book had little to do with the author becoming more reclusive and more embittered about his literary reputation. Nevertheless, his publisher Harper and Brothers rejected his next manuscript (now lost) and, as the above review requested, Melville kept away from pen and ink for a time. He took to lecturing, for example, and eventually took a long-term job at a custom house in New York.

In fact, the irony is substantial when looking at the content of Pierre. As he was writing the manuscript in January 1852, Melville decided to make the title character an author. Coming from an illustrious family (much like Melville himself), Pierre Glendinning, Jr. encounters a woman named Isabel who claims to be his illegitimate half-sister. He hopes to find a way to give her a portion of his father's inheritance but is kicked out of the family when he pretends he has married the woman. He turns to writing to support himself, Isabel, and a female companion named Delly. The woman to whom Pierre had previously been engaged (and who almost married his cousin) comes back into his life, and now he attempts to support three women with his pen. He finds, however, that despite his early success his more recent life experiences leave him unable to meet the demands of the literary marketplace and his book is rejected by the publisher.

The book is complicated and edged with much darkness, particularly in the fatal conclusion. As for Pierre, he became successful as a writer in his youth because of his sentimentality, his gentility, respectability, and romanticism; critics noted he was free from the crude, the vulgar, and excessive vigor — in short, he wrote the safe effusions that a general public would enjoy. From chapter XVI: "Young America in Literature":

A mind less naturally strong than Pierre's might well have been hurried into vast self-complacency, by such eulogy as this, especially as there could be no possible doubt, that the primitive verdict pronounced by the editors was irreversible, except in the highly improbable event of the near approach of the Millennium, which might establish a different dynasty of taste, and possibly eject the editors. It is true, that in view of the general practical vagueness of these panegyrics, and the circumstance that, in essence, they were all somehow of the prudently indecisive sort; and, considering that they were panegyrics, and nothing but panegyrics, without any thing analytical about them; an elderly friend of a literary turn, had made bold to say to our hero—" Pierre, this is very high praise, I grant, and you are a surprisingly young author to receive it; but I do not see any criticisms as yet."

"Criticisms?" cried Pierre, in amazement; "why, sir, they are all criticisms! I am the idol of the critics!"

"Ah!" sighed the elderly friend, as if suddenly reminded that that was true after all—"Ah!" and went on with his inoffensive, non-committal cigar.

Death of Lanier: The day being done

Sidney Lanier contracted the tuberculosis that would kill him while in a military prison during the Civil War. Even so, he spent the next several years enjoying his life: he became an educator and a musician, then he passed the bar and became a lawyer, married, and published poems and even a novel. He traveled to or lived in Maryland, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, hoping to find a cure for his illness. He never did, and Lanier died in North Carolina on September 7, 1881; he was 39 years old.

Lanier's grave in Baltimore, MD

In his last year, Lanier had taken a job at Johns Hopkins University (his friends and colleagues there hosted a memorial about a month after his death). Notes for his lectures were dictated in strained whispers to his wife. Allegedly, students worried that their lecturer would die mid-lecture. In this same period, he also completed his final poem, "Sunrise," which one critic called "his masterpiece, radiant with beauty, and strong with the spiritual strength which outbraves death." As his wife noted, the poem was written "while his sun of life seemed fairly at the setting, and the and which first pencilled its lines had not strength to carry nourishment to the lips."

"Sunrise" is a fairly lengthy poem written in a conversational yet bouncing meter akin to Walt Whitman. In it, Lanier celebrates his connection to natural world around him. He particularly calls out the trees and their leaves at night:

    Teach me the terms of silence, — preach me
    The passion of patience, — sift me, — impeach me, —
            And there, oh there
As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air,
            Pray me a myriad prayer.

The poem continues in a passionate, almost frenzied, series of observations, questions, and exasperated pleas for answers. The sun is slowly rising throughout, and Lanier combines his poetic sentiments with his sincere belief in the connection between verse and musicality. "I am lit with the Sun," he says, and those words now mark his grave in Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery. The poem picks up pace, almost feeling like a symphony as it draws to its conclusion, with the all-powerful, almost godlike sun:

Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas
        Of traffic shall hide thee,
Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories
                        Hide thee,
Never the reek of the time's fen-politics
                        Hide thee,
And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee,
And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee,
        Labor, at leisure, in art,— till yonder beside thee
           My soul shall float, friend Sun,—
              The day being done.

Nye's 'Baled Hay': really no excuse

"There can really be no excuse for this last book of trite and beautiful sayings," wrote Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye in the preface to the third volume of his book Baled Hay. In this preface, dated September 5, 1883, from Hudson, Wisconsin, he admits that he will not palliate the "wrong" of its publication — even if he "had an idea what palliate meant." These short pieces, he reminds us, are absolutely prose: "I have taken great care to thoroughly eradicate anything that would have the appearance of poetry."

Nye, a humorist, offers a series of short, funny sketches filled with uproariously clever one-liners and punch lines. In one titled "The Decline of American Humor," he writes of how an editor declined an essay about American Humor (the joke goes by fast, he actually ends by asking Sabe?). Some are as short as a half a page, some even are only two sentences, and many are illustrated thanks to Frederick Burr Opper of Puck magazine, and some are about contemporary topics (one pokes fun at Western author Joaquin Miller). Most were reprintings from Nye's newspaper Boomerang based in Laramie, Wyoming. One, titled "About Saw Mills," features a hilariously gory scene (with illustration):

At one of these mills, not long ago, a man backed up to get away from the carriage, and thoughtlessly backed against a large saw that was revolving at the rate of about 200 times a minute. The saw took a large chew of tobacco from the plug he had in his pistol pocket, and then began on him.

But there's no use going into details. Such things are not cheerful. They gathered him up out of the sawdust and put him in a nail keg and carried him away, but he did not speak again. Life was quite extinct. Whether it was the nervous shock that killed him, or the concussion of the cold saw against his liver that killed him, no one ever knew.

The mill shut down a couple of hours so that the head sawyer could file his saw, and then work was resumed once more.

We should learn from this never to lean on the buzz saw when it moveth itself aright.

Concerned about the safety of his readers, however, Nye asks that the book be read in small parts. "If you read it all at once, and it gives you the heaves, I am glad of it, and you deserve it," his preface concludes. "I will not bind myself to write the obituary of such people."

Birth of Pollock: with wild delight

Edward Pollock was born in Philadelphia on September 2, 1823. As a boy, he was never educated formally and started working at age 11. By 14, he had run away from home to find better prospects; he ended up apprenticed to a sign-painter. By 1852, he was in California. He quickly earned respect in the young state and was popular among fellow gold prospectors. He studied law and eventually passed the bar in California.

Pollock also became a poet when, two years after his arrival on the west coast, a friend started a literary journal in need of contributions. The earliest of his published works was "The Falcon," a long poem of 64 stanzas. He wrote mostly poetry with an occasional short story or essay.

A posthumous collection of poems from 1876, though printed by J. B. Lippincott in Pollock's native Philadelphia, was dedicated and "respectfully inscribed" to his adopted state of California. From the collection, his poem "The Choice":

How beats the heart with wild delight
   When on the soul the spells arise
That gladly gush from wine so bright
   And fondly beam from starry eyes!
How melt the clouds of care away
   When sunned in beauty's roseate sheen!
And life how like a cloudless day
   If star-eyed pleasure reigns the queen!
Oh, then no magic so divine
As woman's love, and sparkling wine!

But, ah! the power of light gone by,
   The whirl of passion's tempest o'er,
The cares that clouded life's bleak sky
   Seem darker, heavier than before;
And faint and cold the spirit turns
   From cloud-built halls to earth again,
And the sad soul in darkness mourns
   Earth's weariness and toil and pain:
So pleasure's fairy-dreams depart,
And leave behind an aching heart.

Then let me shun the fading glow
   Of beauty's bright but meteor gleam,
And let my only light below
   Be reason, and religion's beam;
So shall my path, though storms sweep by,
   On warring winds by fury driven,
Be all beneath a cloudless sky,
   Till lost at last in light and heaven,
Where shines o'er blissful climes above
The sunlight of eternal love.