Death of George Arnold: a wasted life

Though scarcely remembered today, the poet George Arnold was mourned by many when he died on November 3, 1865. A contributor to magazines like Vanity Fair, Arnold often wrote under the pseudonym "McArone," with works that crossed a variety of styles and genres but, mostly, he was a humorist.

When he died at age 31, those who remembered him included the group that frequented Pfaff's, a bar in Manhattan known for its Bohemian clientele of artists and writers. For that group, he allegedly first presented one of his most anthologized poems, an ode to beer. One of those who frequented the establishment was Walt Whitman, who once scuffled with Arnold over the question of the Confederacy. One account says their debate grew so heated, Arnold (who supported the secession of the Southern states) assaulted Whitman by grabbing him by the hair. In Whitman's own account, it was merely a loud argument, which resulted in the elder poet's leaving the building.

Another of those who met him at Pfaff's was artist/poet Elihu Vedder. Many years after Arnold's death, Vedder recalled, "He died young; I do not know of what he died, but he seemed to be worn out even when I first met him... He thought his life a wasted life; it was with him a gorgeous romance of youthful despair; but into that grave went a tender charm, great talent, and great weakness."

Also among the Pfaff's crowd was William Winter, who elsewhere recalled Arnold's time in the established: "[He was] one of the sweetest poets in our country who have sung the beauties of Nature and the tenderness of true love; and he never came without bringing sunshine." Winter collected Arnold's poems and published them with a biography. Editor/critic/author Edmund Clarence Stedman memorialized Arnold in verse not long after his burial at Greenwood Cemetery in Trenton, New Jersey. More appropriate than Stedman's poem, however, is Arnold's own, "The Lees of Life":

   I have had my will,
Tasted every pleasure;
   I have drank my fill
Of the purple measure;
   It has lost its zest,
   Sorrow is my guest,
O, the lees are bitter, — bitter, —
   Give me rest!

   Love once filled the bowl
Running o'er with blisses,
   Made my very soul
Drunk with crimson kisses;
   But I drank it dry,
   Love has passed me by,
O, the lees are bitter, — bitter, —
   Let me die!

*Note: At least one source gives the date of Arnold's death as November 9.

Victorian poets: sing more sweetly there

I am very glad to have a copy of your " Victorian Anthology." It is another monument to your learning, judgment, and taste. You certainly have done great service to the Victorian Age and to its bards. I had no idea there were so many singers—but the woods of England are full of birds and the birds sing more sweetly there than anywhere else.

Above is the letter from poet William Winter to editor Edmund Clarence Stedman, November 6, 1895. The book in question, Victorian Poets, was one of several editions of compilations; originally published in 1875, it had a companion in Stedman's popular anthology of American poets. The book was more than just a compilation, however, as it included lengthy discussions of the poets, their verses, and the period. These sorts of critical anthologies, and a few others, helped Stedman earn a place as the preeminent scholar of poetry by the turn of the century. His books regularly went into 30th editions and beyond. Fellow anthologist and poet Richard Henry Stoddard called his work "the most important contribution ever made by an American writer to the critical literature of the English poets."

But Stedman also took an odd step backward in the development and understanding of American poetry. Some 50 years earlier, Rufus Wilmot Griswold had established himself in the similar role of the arbiter of poetic taste and he clearly emphasized a need to improve American poetry, to celebrate distinctly American topics, and to overtake the assumption that English writers were inherently superior. Stedman reversed that, as Winter's letter shows.

To his credit, Stedman was open-minded and broad in his assessment. He considered somewhat controversial poets like Algernon Charles Swinburne, newer poets like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and several women poets like the politically charged Augusta Webster. Perhaps most importantly, Stedman was able to establish the term for the period, the Victorian period, as the accepted term.

Edward Rowland Sill: like a fly on a pin

When Edward Rowland Sill heard that the well-known and highly-respected editor Edmund Clarence Stedman intended to include him in a book of poetry, he was hesitant. On October 13, 1885, he wrote to their mutual friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich:

Can you not tell Mr. Stedman (if his book is not yet beyond proofcorrecting) that one, at least, of the "twilight" poets, namely, "Sill," would much prefer to be left out of his enumeration? He had me in his "Century " article. I am not a publishing author (the booklet of verses of which I think I sent you a copy — "The Venus of Milo," etc., was never published, and never will be), and so might escape being stuck in his catalogue, like a fly on a pin. Don't you think?

Sill, Connecticut-born but widely-traveled, apparently refused to call himself an author or, perhaps more likely, refused to live up to the scrutiny of national exposure which Stedman's book would have drawn. Sill was not exaggerating. At the time of his letter, he had only published one book — a translation of another person's book. The manuscript he had shown Stedman was intended only for his friends, never for publication. He claimed many of his poems — "the confounded little things" he burned in manuscript. He died two years later, having never published a book. The poem he mentioned to Aldrich, however, "The Venus of Milo," was collected posthumously. From that poem:

  Before the broken marble, on a day,
There came a worshiper: a slanted ray
Struck in across the dimness of her shrine
And touched her face as to a smile divine;
For it was like the worship of a Greek
At her old altar. Thus I heard him speak: —

  Men call thee Love: is there no holier name
Than hers, the foam-born, laughter-loving dame?
Nay, for there is than love no holier name:
All words that pass the lips of mortal men
With inner and with outer meaning shine;
An outer gleam that meets the common ken,
An inner light that but the few divine.

Thou art the love celestial, seeking still
The soul beneath the form; the serene will;
The wisdom, of whose deeps the sages dream;
The unseen beauty that doth faintly gleam
In stars, and flowers, and waters where they roll;
The unheard music whose faint echoes even
Make whosoever hears a homesick soul
Thereafter, till he follow it to heaven.

Ultimately, Sill received only a passing comment, and not even his full name, in Stedman's book, which turned out to be a much more significant undertaking than a mere compilation. Stedman, in fact, produced a massive, all-encompassing, running catalogue of American poetry. Poets of America (1885) was meant to prove the important role that poetry played in defining American cultural and intellectual development. The book was a sort of historic record which meant to add to the more typical record of politics and war that end up in history books. Stedman believed that, with the advancement of the United States in general, with its power and wealth in particular, one would see it best reflected in its imaginative creations, with poetry as "its highest forms of expression." After all, he said, "The song of a nation is accepted as an ultimate test of the popular spirit."

Stedman: Give us a MAN!

As the Civil War raged, Edmund Clarence Stedman was serving as a field correspondent for the New York Tribune. Infused with a burst of patriotism, on September 6, 1862, he wrote his poem "Wanted—A Man." The poem, printed three days later in the Tribune, called for leadership in the time of crisis (and served as a decent inspiration for enlistment, as well). It is said that President Abraham Lincoln, who was directly addressed in the poem, read it to his cabinet.

Back from the trebly crimsoned field
   Terrible words are thunder-tost;
Full of the wrath that will not yield,
   Full of revenge for battles lost!
   Hark to their echo, as it crost
The Capital, making faces wan:
   End this murderous holocaust;
Abraham Lincoln, give us a MAN!

Give us a man of God's own mould,
   Born to marshal his fellow-men;
One whose fame is not bought and sold
   At the stroke of a politician's pen;
   Give us the man of thousands ten,
Fit to do as well as to plan;
   Give us a rallying-cry, and then,
Abraham Lincoln, give us a MAN!

Is there never one in all the land,
   One on whose might the Cause may lean?
Are all the common ones so grand,
   And all the titled ones so mean?
   What if your failure may have been
In trying to make good bread from bran,
   From worthless metal a weapon keen?—
Abraham Lincoln, find us a MAN!

The same day that pro-Unionist and abolitionist Stedman wrote this poem, a pro-Confederate wrote a poem advocating the other side.

Stedman: melodious thunders

The copyright for Poems, Lyrical and Idyllic, by Edmund Clarence Stedman was taken out on April 12, 1860. It was the 26-year old's first book and, with a few exceptions, none of the poems included within had been published previously. In his preface, he offers a bit of an apology (in a third-person voice):

If they exhibit too great variety of purpose, it is because he has not been able, at any one period during the last few years, to prepare enough matter to offer in the present form. What has been done is the result of unequal moments, saved from that daily taskwork, which must first be met by every true man on whom it is imposed.

Only 30 poems were included, though most were quite long; some stretched out to a dozen pages or more. Stedman most often used short lines and frequently alluded to nature in the form of flowers or wildlife. He described both sunny days and rainy days, windy days and snowfall, ultimately making the book a very pastoral one. In the ensuing decades, Stedman would become a major figure in the New York literary scene, and an advocate for international copyright but his first book is hardly impressive. Somewhat atypical is a short poem which serves as an invocation of the god of poetry, "Apollo":

  Vainly, O burning Poets!
  Ye wait for his inspiration,
    Even as kings of old
    Stood by the oracle-gates.
Hasten back, he will say, hasten back
  To your provinces far away!
  There, at my own good time,
  Will I send my answer to you.
    Are ye not kings of song?
  At last the God cometh!
  The air runs over with splendor:
  The fire leaps high on the altar;
Melodious thunders shake the ground.
  Hark to the Delphic responses!
  Hark! it is the God!

Stoddard: most favored of the gods

The Authors' Club in New York threw a dinner in honor of Richard Henry Stoddard on March 25, 1897. Edmund Clarence Stedman opened the evening with a welcoming address, calling Stoddard "the most distinguished poet of his country and generation." In a toast, Stedman asked for "the continued years, service, happiness of our strong and tender-hearted elder comrade, our white-haired minstrel, Richard Henry Stoddard."

In response, the 71-year old Stoddard himself stood (amid cheers) and recited a few lines from his poem "A Curtain Call." Several others offered short speeches and toasts. Perhaps the most memorable came from a relative up-and-comer named James Whitcomb Riley, who offered a poem "Your Height is Ours":

O Princely poet!—kingly heir
   Of gifts divinely sent,—
Your own!—nor envy anywhere,
   Nor voice of discontent.

Though, of ourselves, all poor are we,
   And frail and weak of wing,
Your height is ours—your ecstasy—
   Your glory, when you sing.

Most favored of the gods, and great
   In gifts beyond our store,
We covet not your rich estate,
   But prize our own the more.—

The gods give as but gods may do—
   We count our riches thus,—
They gave their richest gifts to you,
   And then gave you to us.

Stedman: the Guest of the Evening

When the New York-based Authors Club honored Edmund Clarence Stedman on December 6, 1900, it was done specifically to recognize the completion of his An American Anthology. The book was meant as an exhaustive study of American poetry in the century just ended; it remains impressive today. Even so, by then the Connecticut native had already left an impressive trail of literary criticism, biography, scholarship, copyright advocacy — and a few poems of his own.

That evening, Stedman addressed the rumor that the night marked his retirement from literature. "This would be exceptionally hard to do," he noted, admitting that he finally had enough leisure time to think about future writings. He never dreamed that he would ever "voluntarily cease from trying to perform the labor" — even now in his elder years. He went on:

Which of us toiler of the pen, if born with the art to write, does not know that it is as the last analysis of his love, his wealth, his religion, his solace, and that to it he must return, for better or worse, again and again, so long as breath is in him?

During this reception, a toast in the form of a poem was written by Stedman's friend Charles Henry Webb (who was but a few months younger than Stedman). It was titled "To the Guest of the Evening":

Dear Edmund, when I count the years
    That over us have rolled,
It seems to me I must be young,
    And only thou art old.
For, yet a private in the ranks,
    At best I close the rear,
Whilst thou dost ride in front bestarred, —
    A mounted Brigadier...

Ah, dearest friend and poet, best
    Of all who woo the muse,
I am not envious, but I'd like
    To stand there in thy shoes.
While all this mighty guild press round
    With words of love and praise,
None baying at thy heels, but all
    Enwreathing thee with bays.

And well they may, for hast thou not
    Been generous to them,
To each extending the glad hand
    And not thy garments' hem?
To thee they twang their rusty harps,
    Old men, and wonder why
Thou stretchest too the helping hand
    To youngsters such as I.

If asked, Webb writes, why Stedman performs these duties, offering always "the helping hand" or "words of cheer," he should be compared to zoo animals: Why do lions and tigers bark and bite? It is in their nature. Further, Stedman is presented as someone who is kind to all ("women as well as men"). Webb concludes that "I will drink":

A cup to him who from his heart
    Pours Poesy's choicest wine,
And as a critic never wrote —
    Or thought — one unkind line.

Stedman: Ring! ring the bells

On October 18, 1859, the New York Tribune published a poem that nearly cost Edmund Clarence Stedman his life. Only a few days earlier, the wealthy Cuban landowner Don Esteban Santa Cruz de Oviedo married the 18-year old Frances Amelia Bartlett, nearly four decades his junior. The lavish ceremony was held in New York, and the young bride was showered with jewelry and other gifts. In the days leading up to the great event, the media began to call it "The Diamond Wedding."

Within a day and a half of the wedding, Stedman wrote a 218-line satirical poem he named "The Diamond Wedding." The struggling poet admitted that, at the time, he was "at that happy period of obscurity," and expected the "piece of trash" would either never get published or not draw attention if it did. Upon its publication in the New York Tribune, however, it was a local sensation. Stedman's name was not withheld and it was reprinted as early as a few hours later in the evening paper. This stanza comes about halfway through:

Ring! ring the bells, and bring
The people to see the marrying!
Let the gaunt and hungry and ragged poor
Throng round the great cathedral door,
To wonder what all the hubbub's for,
    And sometimes stupidly wonder
At so much sunshine and brightness which
Fall from the church upon the rich,
    While the poor get all the thunder.

The wealthy and influential family of the new Mrs. Oviedo had been annoyed by the press coverage of the wedding. As one newspaper put it, Stedman's poem was the straw that broke the camel's back. When her father (a former Navy lieutenant/captain named Washington A. Bartlett) expressed his rage, Stedman did not deny he wrote the poem. Captain Bartlett called it a "gross libel" full of "licentious allusions." Stedman's immediate response was to defend the humor of the poem; he refused the apology demanded of him. A duel was threatened and, for a time, Stedman sincerely feared for his life. The threat was never carried out.

Only a few years later, during the Civil War, Stedman and Bartlett crossed paths. Stedman now admitted it was his "careless pen" that led to the poem. Bartlett noted that "in a time of public grief, private differences may well be forgotten." And so was "The Diamond Wedding," though it forever remained Stedman's most (in)famous poem.

Birth of Stedman: we are somewhat pleased

Edmund Clarence Stedman was born on October 8, 1833 in Hartford, Connecticut. His father reported the birth to a family member of "a fine Stout Boy, & you must know that we are somewhat pleased... [I] pray that he may be a blessing to his parents." His father reported that the boy was remarkably quiet and sedate, he rarely cried (or smiled, for that matter). One of his nurses predicted if he lived to adulthood, he would not be an ordinary man. About two years later, the boy's father went to sea to alleviate an illness. He never returned.

Young Stedman did grow to be an extraordinary man. He lived a varied life as a poet, critic, advocate of copyright law, and influential voice in the world of American letters. Yet, he often struggled financially. He assumed that he would inherit a substantial sum of money on his 21st birthday but a newer will from his grandfather was found.

Stedman often used his birthday as a test of his progress from year to year. In 1864, for example, he noted: "My thirty-first birthday. Since October 8, 1863, I have published my second volume, made $10,000, which came like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land... It has been the happiest year of my toilsome, turbulent manhood." By his 37th birthday in 1870, however, Stedman was despondent:

[I] have passed the fatal — to poets — 37th year, and begin to think I am no poet: only a poor, gray haired, unsuccessful dreamer, trying to get fat by feeding on the wind. Am as poor as on my 20th birthday... O, how poor, and how precarious the future! And how my genius, whatever it may be, is cramped, warped, and gradually atrophying away.

In fact, Stedman had turned away from a life of literature and put it aside as a hobby. His new career was on Wall Street. On his birthday in 1866, he reopened a brokerage business, concluding "Am now obliged to leave Art again and take up the Muck Rake." Ultimately, he worked on Wall Street for some 35 years.

There is a glory, even in his loss

June 25, 1876 was the first day of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Montana), when combined forces of Native Americans fought against the 7th Cavalry Regiment led by George Armstrong Custer. It did not end well for Custer and his troops and the incident has been nicknamed "Custer's Last Stand." It inspired several poetic tributes, including "Custer" by poet, critic and copyright advocate Edmund Clarence Stedman:

   What! shall that sudden blade
      Leap out no more?
   No more thy hand be laid
Upon the sword-hilt smiting sore?
      O for another such
   The charger's rein to clutch, —
One equal voice to summon victory.
   Sounding thy battle-cry,
Brave darling of the soldiers' choice!
   Would there were one more voice!

      O gallant charge, too bold!
      O fierce, imperious greed
To pierce the clouds that in their darkness hold
   Slaughter of man and steed!
      Now, stark and cold.
   Among thy fallen braves thou liest,
   And even with thy blood defiest
      The wolfish foe:
   But ah, thou liest low,
And all our birthday song is hushed indeed!

   Young lion of the plain,
   Thou of the tawny mane!
Hotly the soldiers' hearts shall beat.
   Their mouths thy death repeat.
Their vengeance seek the trail again
   Where thy red doomsmen be;
But on the charge no more shall stream
Thy hair, — no more thy sabre gleam, —
   No more ring out thy battle-shout.
      Thy cry of victory!

   Not when a hero falls
   The sound a world appalls:
   For while we plant his cross
There is a glory, even in the loss:
   But when some craven heart
   From honor dares to part,
Then, then, the groan, the blanching cheek,
   And men in whispers speak.
Nor kith nor country dare reclaim
   From the black depths his name.

   Thou, wild young warrior, rest.
By all the prairie winds caressed!
   Swift was thy dying pang;
   Even as the war-cry rang
Thy deathless spirit mounted high
   And sought Columbia's sky: —
There, to the northward far,
   Shines a new star,
And from it blazes down
      The light of thy renown!

A Foregone Conclusion: best of all your books

On December 7, 1874, Edmund Clarence Stedman (pictured left) wrote to William Dean Howells (below) that he had just read the latter's A Foregone Conclusion. Stedman, himself a poet and advocate for copyright law, admitted, "I... like it the best of all your books."

A Foregone Conclusion (the name borrows from a line in Othello) features a Catholic Priest, Don Ippolito, who admits his love for a woman named Florida. The story, told through the eyes of Mr. Ferris, drew some criticism from Catholics (including poet John Boyle O'Reilly) but scholar Susan M. Griffin suggests the story really undercuts the realism vs. idealism debate in literature.

In the eyes of Stedman, however, the story was flawless. Having read it in installments in The Atlantic Monthly (which Howells edited), he refers to the "gradual but steady progress in construction" of the story. He also praises Howells for his ability to manage several separate characters, noting: "This is a faculty which every schoolgirl seems to have, and which men of brains have to train themselves in by sheer force of intellect and practice."

In the same letter, Stedman also offered Howells a poem, "The Skull in the Gold Drift," for him to consider for publication. That, and his tendency for over-the-top praise of his friends (which was repaid in kind), can leave us skeptical of his assessment of A Foregone Conclusion.

Stanzas on Music: Stedman's high water mark

"Thanks for the volume," Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote to Edmund Clarence Stedman in a letter dated November 16, 1873. The volume that Stedman had sent was his 1873 Poetical Works (which he sent to many other influential literary figures). "The poem of yours that I envy — your high water mark if I know anything about it, and one of the very choicest things in our literature," Higginson continued, "is that exquisite 'Stanzas for Music'... It rises in one delicious swell, and the ending is as perfect as the waves of the sea it describes." Higginson, a fellow poet and editor (later wrapped up in the controversy to publish Emily Dickinson's poems posthumously) compared the poem to Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous "Chambered Nautilus."

Here is the poem that Higginson loved so much, "Stanzas on Music":

Thou art mine, thou hast given thy word;
   Close, close in my arms thou art clinging;
   Alone for my ear thou art singing
A song which no stranger hath heard:
But afar from me yet, like a bird,
Thy soul, in some region unstirred,
   On its mystical circuit is winging.

Thou art mine, I have made thee mine own;
   Henceforth we are mingled forever:
   But in vain, all in vain, I endeavor—
Though round thee my garlands are thrown,
And thou yieldest thy lips and thy zone—
To master the spell that alone
   My hold on thy being can sever.

Thou art mine, thou hast come unto me!
   But thy soul, when I strive to be near it—
   The innermost fold of thy spirit—
Is as far from my grasp, is as free,
As the stars from the mountain-tops be,
As the pearl, in the depths of the sea,
   From the portionless king that would wear it.

Stedman: Let there be light!

Honoring the dedication of the Statue of Liberty only days earlier, the October 30, 1886 issue of Harper's Weekly included the above illustration by Harry Fenn. It also included a poem by Connecticut-born poet, critic, essayist, and promoter of international copyright Edmund Clarence Stedman. The poem carries the title "Liberty Enlightening the World":

..."My name is Liberty!
   From out a mighty land
I face the ancient sea,
   I lift to God my hand;
By day in Heaven's light,
A pillar of fire by night,
   At ocean's gate I stand
      Nor bend the knee.

"The dark Earth lay in sleep,
   Her children crouched forlorn,
Ere on the western steep
   I sprang to height, reborn:
Then what a joyous shout
The quickened lands gave out,
   And all the choir of morn
      Sang anthems deep.

"Beneath yon firmament,
   The New World to the Old
My sword and summons sent,
   My azure flag unrolled:
The Old World's hands renew
Their strength; the form ye view
   Came from a living mould
      In glory blent.

"O ye, whose broken spars
   Tell of the storms ye met,
Enter! fear not the bars
   Across your pathway set;
Enter at Freedom's porch,
For you I lift my torch,
   For you my coronet
      Is rayed with stars..."

O wonderful and bright,
   Immortal Freedom, hail!
Front, in thy fiery might,
   The midnight and the gale;
Undaunted on this base
Guard well thy dwelling-place:
   Till the last sun grow pale
      Let there be light!

Stedman and the International Copyright Act of 1891

The passing of the International Copyright Act of 1891 was certainly reason to celebrate. It marked the first time that United States law protected foreign books, preventing piracy. Up to this point, many books printed overseas (particularly British ones) were republished without the author's permission at no cost to the publisher. This meant that potential American authors were shunned by publishers who did not want to pay for new works. Why pay a new author when you can just steal from an established one? Some authors, like Washington Irving, did the extra work to copyright their writings twice (on different continents) for better protection.

The passage of this new law was important enough that, on April 13, 1891, a group of writers gathered in New York to celebrate. This group had worked hard to promote better copyright law and, as such, took the name the American Copyright League. Presiding over the celebration was critic and poet Edmund Clarence Stedman, who broke down the importance of the occasion this way:

You know, gentlemen, that this was fought for, during many years, chiefly on grounds relative to the welfare of American authors and the development of a home literature. For one, I always have felt that the wrongs experienced by foreign writers, however prejudicial to our reputation among nations, and outrageous as they were, have been less severe than the cruel ills so long inflicted upon our own men of letters — of less moment than the repression of American ideas, the restricted growth of our national literature.

Stedman gave credit to the many who fought for copyright law before him, including William Cullen Bryant and George Palmer Putnam. He did acknowledge that both foreign authors and home-grown authors should be thankful for the new law. "Primarily, this is an author's jubilee," he said. "We hope that foreign authors — and especially our English fellows of the craft — are rejoicing, are rejoicing just a little."