The literary influences of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The universe hangs on moral foundations...There is something in this universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying, "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." There is something which justifies James Russell Lowell in saying, "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future.

Martin Luther King, Jr. used these lines in his essay, "Going Forward by Going Backward," in April 1954, but he often reused the sentiment and the quotes. He references Bryant's 1839 poem "The Battlefield" and Lowell's 1844 poem "The Present Crisis." King frequently quoted Lowell in particular, including lines like "Beyond the dim unknown God keeps watch over His own."

In the 1840s, Lowell was at his strongest as an advocate for civil rights, particularly in the abolition of slavery in the United States. His poem, "The Present Crisis," remains recognized one of his greatest works and its title was later adopted for the official magazine of the NAACP (the name was chosen with its first issue in 1910, edited by W. E. B. DuBois). Elsewhere, Dr. King quoted from Lowell's equally powerful "Stanzas on Freedom": "They are slaves who fear to speak / For the fallen and the weak." As he said in 1954:

These words from the pen of James Russell Lowell are quite expressive of all that I intend to say this morning. Usually we think of slavery in the physical sense, as an institution inflicted on one group of people by another group. But there is another type of slavery which is probably more prevalent and certainly more injurious than physical bondage, namely mental slavery.

Among his other inspirations, Dr. King also often cited Henry David Thoreau and, in particular, Thoreau's essay on "Civil Disobedience." In his autobiography, he refers to first reading that essay as a college freshmen:

During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience" for the first time. Here, in that courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance... I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau.

*For this post, I am particularly indebted to an edition of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vol. VI: "Advocate of the Social Gospel" (University of California Press, 2007), Clayborne Carson, senior editor.

Hayne: looked down upon with contempt

Southern writing suffered a slow development in the early history of the United States, and certainly in the first half of the 19th century. Literary culture was sparse at the time; Southern authors who were successful typically relied on Northern readers for their popularity. Worse, those who did write in the South were scoffed at by their neighbors.

On December 28, 1859, struggling Southern poet Paul Hamilton Hayne complained about it to the highly successful Northern poet and editor James Russell Lowell: The "very profession [of poet] ... is looked down upon with contempt." Hayne was particularly bitter because he hoped to use poetry as his sole source of income.

By the date on his letter, Hayne was less than a month shy of his 30th birthday, though he had already published two volumes of poetry and was working on his third. The first, simply titled Poems, was published in 1855 in Boston — not the South. Two years later, his Sonnets, and Other Poems was published in his native Charleston, receiving little attention. Hayne's third book would be printed by Lowell's Boston publishers, Ticknor and Fields.

By the time he died in 1886, Hayne was recognized as the "Poet Laureate of the South" and one of the writers most responsible for a "new South" which respected literature. Some of his works were printed in the Atlantic Monthly while Lowell was the magazine's editor. Here is one of his earlier poems, "The Poet's Trust in His Sorrow":

O God! how sad a doom is mine,
    To human seeming:
Thou hast called on me to resign
So much—much!—all—but the divine
    Delights of dreaming.

I set my dreams to music wild,
    A wealth of measures;
My lays, thank Heaven! are undefiled,
I sport with Fancy as a child
    With golden leisures.

And long as fate, not wholly stern,
    But this shall grant me,
Still with perennial faith to turn
Where Song's unsullied altars hum
    Nought, nought shall daunt me!

What though my worldly state he low
    Beyond redressing;
I own an inner flame whose glow
Makes radiant all the outward show;
    My last great blessing!

Lowell: we bring the shroud

James Russell Lowell had been ousted from the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly for a few months when he apparently had writer's block. His friend Charles Eliot Norton suggested that reading poetry could inspire the writing of some. However, as Lowell reported to Norton on October 12, 1861, the assistance was no longer required: "Well, I haven't been reading any, but I have written something." The subject, he said, "had been in my head for some time" but needed a push from new Atlantic editor James T. Fields in the form of a reminder about his approaching deadline. "Wholly absorbed" in his writing, he nevertheless admitted he wasn't sure if it qualified as poetry. He was particularly self-conscious about the meter and "almost glacier-slow measure." The 105 line poem is called "The Washers of the Shroud" and is partially inspired by Legends of Brittany by Émile Souvestre:

Along a river-side, I know not where,
I walked one night in mystery of dream;
A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair,
To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam
Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air.

Pale fireflies pulsed within the meadow-mist
Their halos, wavering thistledowns of light;
The loon, that seemed to mock some goblin tryst,
Laughed; and the echoes, huddling in affright,
Like Odin's hounds, fled baying down the night.

The narrator then comes across a stream which "is of Death" a shroud is being washed in it bythree sisters "known to the Greek's and to the Northman's creed." As they wash, the fair sisters sing, "Time was, Time is, and Time shall be."

"Still men and nations reap as they have strawn,"
So sang they, working at their task the while;
"The fatal raiment must be cleansed ere dawn:
For Austria? Italy? the Sea-Queen's isle?
O'er what quenched grandeur must our shroud be drawn?

"What make we, murmur'st thou? and what are we?
When empires must be wound, we bring the shroud,
The time-old web of the implacable Three:
Is it too coarse for him, the young and proud?
Earth's mightiest deigned to wear it,—why not he?"

The narrator moans in despair, "Is there no hope?" Apparently, he worries that the shroud is being prepared for his own nation. "But not for him," cries the narrator, "Not yet for him!" Lowell admitted the poem was "about present times" (specifically the Civil War), though he hoped it was "abstract enough" too. The poem concludes:

So cried I with clenched hands and passionate pain,
Thinking of dear ones by Potomac's side;
Again the loon laughed mocking, and again
The echoes bayed far down the night and died,
While waking I recalled my wandering brain.

Lowell: better in conception than execution

"Amid infinite interruptions," wrote James Russell Lowell on February 25, 1845, "I have at last managed to finish a poem for you which is better in conception than in execution." Lowell, living in Philadelphia at the time, addressed the poem "The Ghost-Seer" to his good friend Charles Frederick Briggs, then editing a newspaper called The Broadway Journal. Typical for Lowell, the poem did not meet his own expectations: "I intended it to be one of the best I have ever written, but have a sort of notion that it is rather flat. It certainly is so (as all poems must be) compared with the conception." He suggested, for example, that it was too long. He might have been right; here are excerpts:

Ye who, passing graves by night,
Glance not to the left or right,
Lest a spirit should arise,
Cold and white, to freeze your eyes,
Some weak phantom, which your doubt
Shapes upon the dark without
From the dark within, a guess
At the spirit's deathlessness,
Which ye entertain with fear
In your self-built dungeon here,
Where ye sell your God-given lives
Just for gold to buy you gyves, —
Ye without a shudder meet
In the city's noonday street,
Spirits sadder and more dread
Than from out the clay have fled,
Buried, beyond hope of light,
In the body's haunted night!

The living, Lowell suggests, experience a sort of walking death as sin follows at their heels and are further harried by poverty and suffering. Lowell was, no doubt, inspired in part by spiritualism (he toyed with Swedenborgianism for several years) and, further, by his studies of Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy. He describes the temptation of deadly sins like Envy and Pride. Perhaps the worst experience is that of a poet, whose nature compels him to empathize with those who suffer:

Who is he that skulks, afraid
Of the trust he has betrayed,
Shuddering if perchance a gleam
Of old nobleness should stream
Through the pent, unwholesome room,
Where his shrunk soul cowers in gloom,
Spirit sad beyond the rest
By more instinct for the best?
'Tis a poet who was sent
For a bad world's punishment,
By compelling it to see
Golden glimpses of To Be,
By compelling it to hear
Songs that prove the angels near;
Who was sent to be the tongue
Of the weak and spirit-wrung,
Whence the fiery-winged Despair
In men's shrinking eyes might flare.

Lowell almost certainly had himself in mind; at the time, he was a contributing editor for the abolitionist newspaper The Pennsylvania Freeman. As he wrote against the suffering of enslaved people, he also witnessed his wife's decay due to disease.

But enough! Oh, do not dare
From the next the veil to tear,
Woven of station, trade, or dress,
More obscene than nakedness,
Wherewith plausible culture drapes
Fallen Nature's myriad shapes!
Let us rather love to mark
How the unextinguished spark
Still gleams through the thin disguise
Of our customs, pomps, and lies,
And, not seldom blown to flame,
Vindicates its ancient claim.

O life, and light, and gladness

Maria White was 32 years old when she died of tuberculosis on October 27, 1853. In her short life, she outlived three of her children, who all died in infancy. Her doting husband James Russell Lowell, whom she married in 1844, was devastated by her death. Just before she was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, her coffin was opened so that her daughter Mabel could take one final look.

Shortly after, the still grieving husband oversaw the publication of a posthumous edition of White's poetry. Its 50 copies were privately distributed, though they ensured that her work survived long enough that a new edition was republished in 1907. No doubt Lowell would have further suffered editing this book, especially when preparing her poem "The Sick-Room" (White had suffered for years before her death):

A spirit is treading the earth,
     As wind treads the vibrating string;
I know thy feet so beautiful,
     Thy punctual feet, O Spring!

They slide from far-off mountains,
     As slides the untouched snow;
They move over deepening meadows,
     As vague cloud-shadows blow.

Thou wilt not enter the chamber,
     The door stands open in vain;
Thou art pluming the wands of cherry
     To lattice the window pane.

Thou flushest the sunken orchard
     With the lift of thy rosy wing;
The peach will not part with her sunrise
     Though great noon-bells should ring.

O life, and light, and gladness,
     Tumultuous everywhere!
O pain and benumbing sadness,
     That brood in the heavy air!

Here the fire alone is busy,
     And wastes, like the fever's heat,
The wood that enshrined past summers,
     Past summers as bounteous as fleet.

The beautiful hanging gardens
     That rocked in the morning wind,
And sheltered a dream of Faery,
     And life so timid and kind,

The shady choir of the bobolink,
     The race-course of squirrels gay, —
They are changed into trembling smoke-wreaths,
     And a heap of ashes gray.

Lowell and Poe: lacking in character

James Russell Lowell and Edgar Allan Poe had been friends and colleagues; both were poets, prose writers, critics, and editors. As Poe became more daring in his role as a literary critic, however, he alienated more and more people, most often because of his frequent accusations of a lack in originality. Lowell wrote to his friend (and a former business partner of Poe) named Charles Frederick Briggs on August 21, 1845:

Poe, I am afraid, is wholly lacking in that element of manhood which, for want of a better name, we call character. It is something quite distinct from genius—though all great geniuses are endowed with it... I have made Poe my enemy by doing him a service. In the last Broadway Journal he has accused me of plagiarism, and misquoted [William] Wordsworth to sustain his charge... Poe wishes to kick down the ladder by which he rose. He is welcome.

The Broadway Journal, which Lowell alludes to, was a newspaper founded by Briggs with John Bisco. The two brought in Poe within its first year as a one-third owner of the publication. Poe was enlisted specifically because of his reputation and ability to draw attention. Briggs, however, soon left his project when he saw how caustic Poe had become in his reviews. Bisco left soon after, leaving the Broadway Journal in debt and solely in the control of Poe. He did the best he could, but the journal folded within another year.

Lowell became part of the New England literary elite despite early difficulties in his career, and was happy to remove his connection to Poe. Lowell had published Poe's famous story "The Tell-Tale Heart," for example. Only a few months before this letter, in fact, instead of criticizing Poe's lack of character, Lowell had offered this view of him:

Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power... It is not for us to assign him his definite rank among contemporary authors, but we may be allowed to say that we know of none who has displayed more varied and striking abilities... Mr. Poe is at once the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America. It may be that we should qualify our remark a little, and say that he might be, rather than that he always is, for he seems sometimes to mistake his phial of prussic-acid for his inkstand." 

The above quote was published in Graham's Magazine, February 1845.

Lowell: Here, where we stand, stood he

Legend has it that, when George Washington first took command of the Continental Army in the early days of the American Revolution, he did so while standing under the shade of an elm tree on Cambridge Common in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He certainly did take command on July 3, 1775, but the question is not yet settled whether there was an elm tree involved or not.

That did not stop American writers from advocating the legend. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in a home that witnessed the event, just across from the Common. His poem "Under the Washington Elm" was written 80 years after the alleged event. 20 years after that, on the centennial of Washington's taking command, a large ceremony was held under the elm tree. The poet of the day was James Russell Lowell (whose own birthplace, though standing in 1775, was too far to have witnessed Washington; by coincidence, Lowell and Washington also share a birthday). From "Under the Old Elm," presented on July 3, 1875:

Words pass as wind, but where great deeds were done
A power abides transfused from sire to son:
The boy feels deeper meanings thrill his ear,
That tingling through his pulse life-long shall run,
With sure impulsion to keep honor clear,
When, pointing down, his father whispers, "Here,
Here, where we stand, stood he, the purely great,
Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere,
Then nameless, now a power and mixed with fate."
Historic town, thou holdest sacred dust,
Once known to men as pious, learned, just,
And one memorial pile that dares to last;
But Memory greets with reverential kiss
No spot in all thy circuit sweet as this,
Touched by that modest glory as it past,
O'er which yon elm hath piously displayed
These hundred years its monumental shade.

Lowell muses that there is no greater monument than a tree as it renews itself every spring. Its physical presence serves as a reminder of the event and connects the present to the past. Whether that event really happened or not, Lowell looks back in awe at Washington:

Beneath our consecrated elm
A century ago he stood...
Firmly erect, he towered above them all,
The incarnate discipline that was to free
With iron curb that armed democracy.

Lowell, who would become U.S. Minister to Spain two years later, wrote to a friend that he hoped poetry would reunite the country in the decade after the Civil War. Six members of Lowell's family were killed in Virginia during the Civil War and he noted to a friend that his poem was meant "to hold out a hand of kindly reconciliation to Virginia":

Virginia gave us this imperial man
Cast in the massive mould
Of those high-statured ages old
Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran;
She gave us this unblemished gentleman:
What shall we give her back but love and praise
As in the dear old unestranged days
Before the inevitable wrong began?

*For more on the Washington Elm legend, visit the Cambridge Historical Society or this post on Boston1775.com by historian J. L. Bell.

Lowell and Cranch: with this abominable pen

In a letter dated December 18, 1868, James Russell Lowell wrote to Christopher Pearse Cranch, "I... would rather have (if I can say so with this abominable pen) one old friend with a silver-mine in his hair, than all the new ones that were ever turned out." Lowell notes that he intends to send "C.P.C." a copy of his new book once it is printed but admits he doesn't care if he likes it, "provided you will continue to like J.R.L." In fact, Lowell says, he almost hopes Cranch will dislike it, saying he'd rather have "a pennyweight of honest friendship than a pound of fame, or — what is about as solid — flattery."

Lowell was approaching 50 years old, as he notes in the letter, and demands a "test of friendship" from Cranch: for his birthday, he wants him to pay a visit at the Lowell home, Elmwood. Though living in New York at the time, Cranch came through, and even wrote a birthday poem for Lowell. Perhaps as a response to Lowell's value of fame mentioned above, the poem concludes that "our love" makes "his fame."

The letter is sincere and warm, reflecting a friendship not generally recognized by history. Cranch, a minister, was also a poet and artist — and deserves the title of best sense of humor among the Transcendentalists. Lowell, for all his varied efforts, was also a humor poet, publishing his A Fable for Critics in 1848 at the age of 29.

As Lowell concludes his letter to Cranch:

My old clock in the entry has just given that hiccup with which tall fellows of their hands like him are wont to prelude the hours — and the hour is midnight. My fire and my pipe are both low. I must say good-night. I have had great difficulty in saying what I wished with this pen, which has served me I know not how long. But I have stood by it, and that should convince you (if you needed convincing, as I am sure you didn't) that I don't give up an old friend even when he has lost his point. But that is something you can never do for me, and I shall expect you on [my birthday]... You shall... have a warm welcome from Mrs. Lowell (who thinks you handsome — that way madness lies!).

Dana and a "select company"

In his journal entry for December 16, 1854, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. noted his dinner plans. The author of Two Years Before the Mast, a novel published in 1840, was among a "select company" that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, A. Bronson Alcott, and a young Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. Presumably with restraint, he concluded, "It was very agreeable."

Of Emerson, Dana recorded he was "a gentleman, never bores or preaches or dictates... and has even skill and tact in managing his conversation." He said the same of Alcott and noted, "it is quite surprising to see these transcendentalists appearing well as men of the world."

Perhaps more interesting, however, is that all these gentlemen were anti-slavery men. Dana himself had only recently defended the fugitive Anthony Burns in a trial meant to challenge the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Dana also paired with Robert Morris, an African-American lawyer; their efforts, however, were unsuccessful.

Emerson was a strong voice against slavery in the 1850s through his speeches; Lowell used his pen. For a short time, he edited an apolitionist newspaper in Pennsylvania but focused his poetic voice on the cause in poems like "The Present Crisis" and "On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves Near Washington." Alcott hosted at least one man escaped from enslavement in his Concord home years earlier and was part of a crowd that attempted to free Anthony Burns from a Boston courthouse. Dana referred to the young Sanborn, then a Harvard student, as "clever and promising." Only a few years later, Sanborn funded the radical abolitionist John Brown in his raid on Harper's Ferry as a member of the so-called "Secret Six."

Lowell in a Chatty Mood

The October 24, 1886 issue of the New York World included an article focused on James Russell Lowell, then Minister to the Court of St. James in England. The interview with the aging poet-turned diplomat was titled "Lowell in a Chatty Mood."

The author of the article, Julian Hawthorne (pictured below), was an up-and-coming writer, perpetually in the shadow of his father Nathaniel Hawthorne. Years earlier, Lowell had tutored him in German while at Harvard; Julian dropped out without graduating

Hawthorne reported in his article that Lowell thought the House of Lords was made up of fools, and that the Prince of Wales was "immensely fat." As for English writing, Lowell was completely uninterested: "I have not followed it," he said. Upon being told that Thomas Hardy was "very good," Lowell began to read one of his books. "I did not get on with it," he said. "Afterwards, I met him; he is small and unassuming in appearance — does not look like the genius of tradition." Hardy was not amused.

Henry James wrote privately that he knew Hawthorne had played an "infamous trick", leaving him "the basest cad" and deserving of a flogging. Lowell denied much of what Hawthorne reported and claimed that the whole interview was off the record. He also worried that the article made him seem like "a toothless old babbler." In fact, Lowell printed a reply only a few days later in the World. "The reporter has made me say the reverse of what I really must have said and of what is the truth." James was disappointed by Lowell's relatively calm dismissal of the incident. "His protest, however," wrote James, "ought to have been sharper."

Elmwood: The house itself is dead

"I have written a poem of one hundred lines or so," wrote Thomas Bailey Aldrich in a letter dated October 16, 1891. The letter's recipient, Prof. George Edmund Woodberry, would have been very interested in the poem: it was dedicated to James Russell Lowell.

The poem, "Elmwood," was subtitled "In Memory of James Russell Lowell"; he had died only two months earlier. The title refers to Lowell's family home in Cambridge, which Aldrich rented in 1872 while Lowell traveled through Europe.

Here, in the twilight, at the well-known gate
I linger, with no heart to enter more.
Among the elm-tops the autumnal air
Murmurs, and spectral in the fading light
A solitary heron wings its way
Southward — save this no sound or touch of life.
Dark is that window where the scholar's lamp
Was used to catch a pallor from the dawn.

The poem is surprisingly personal and sad. At one point, the poem's narrative voice even trails off, leaving a thought unfinished. He pauses:

And listened to the crooning of the wind
In the wide Elmwood chimneys, as of old.
And then — and then...

He continues observing the now-silent home. "The vacant windows stare across the lawn," Aldrich writes. "The house itself is dead."

Woodberry, a prolific literary historian, elsewhere wrote how impressed he was by Lowell's varied career as a poet, critic, scholar, and diplomat. Woodberry noticed, however, that his works "have not been hitherto so much recognized as was right." He concluded that Lowell was "a great writer."

Birth of James Gates Percival

James Gates Percival was born on September 15, 1795 in Berlin, Connecticut. He went on to become a poet, doctor, chemistry professor at West Point, one-time assistant of Noah Webster, as well as a geologist (who served for a time as the state geologist of Wisconsin). As a poet, Percival built up a substantial enough popularity, though he was not financial successful. In one year, for example, his writing reportedly earned him only $65. His personal woes were strong enough that he attempted suicide at age 25. When he died in 1856, his grave remained unmarked for some time.

Perhaps it is somewhat appropriate, considering his difficulty in both life and in poetry, that Percival later witnessed the abandonment of the home of his birth. It inspired a poem in which he still saw its beauty, despite the home's desertion:

...Lonely, desolate appears,
Pale as in the vale of years,
The mansion where my infant eye
First saw the rocks, the woods, the sky.
O! it was a lovely sight,
Though obscured by shades of night;
And though the ivy-mantled wall
At intervals was heard to fall,
Breaking with faintly rattling sound
The quiet hush that reigned around.

...I wandered slow, and fondly viewed
This scene in evening tears bedewed,
And felt around my heart the throe
Of tender grief and melting wo,
To see a spot so sweet, so dear,
Now laid on desolation's bier...

With trembling hand I oped the door,
And wandered o'er the mouldering floor,
Along the slowly crumbling wall,
Where wintry fires were wont to fall
And smile with beams of ruddy light,
Chasing away the gloom of night,
Nought was seen but shadows drear
And sights that filled my soul with fear.

He witnesses "wild fantastic stains" from "trickling autumn rains," a creeping snail leaving a trail of slime, the silken web of a spider, and even a bat which suddenly darts through a broken pane of glass. Percival concludes that, despite its poor condition, the home of his birth can still charm his "wearied eye," like a "genial balm."

Whatever fame remained at the end of Percival's life, James Russell Lowell crushed after the poet's death. In a review of the life and works of Percival, Lowell concluded he did not know the object or purpose of poetry and that most of his "pieces" ("and it is curious how literally the word 'pieces' applies to all he did") are preaching about how to write poetry, without actually doing so. Percival was, according to Lowell, unsympathetic and self-involved, and incapable of turning human emotion into poetry. His works are contrived, unreadable, and artificial. "He never in his life wrote a memorable verse," says Lowell.

Lowell: I will like it and therefore I do

James Russell Lowell had a storied career while a student at Harvard College. He enrolled at age 15 and was soon in trouble — a state he held for most of his time there. His sophomore year, for example, he was absent from the required chapel attendance 14 times and from classes 56 times. As he prepared to graduate, he admitted, "During Freshman year, I did nothing, during Sophomore year I did nothing, during Junior year I did nothing, and during Senior I have thus far done nothing in the way of college studies."

Shortly before graduating, Lowell was elected class poet. However, he was suspended and was not allowed to participate in his graduation exercises. Part of the problem was that Lowell did not know what to do with his life, something of a concern for the son of an old and respected New England family. He "settled" on going back to school to study law.

However, when Lowell met Maria White, his uncertainty (and his bad behavior) had to stop. Her father, the wealthy Abijah White, insisted his daughter's betrothed find gainful employment. Lowell hit the books hard. On June 4, 1839, he wrote to a friend:  "I begin to like the law. And therefore it is quite interesting. I am determined that I will like it and therefore I do." In the same letter, Lowell also included a few lines from his poem on "Consistency" that sort of poked fun at his earlier hesitance:

He is a fool who would thy faith deride
  If youth's opinions change before life's close.
Doth not thy shade fall on a different side
  When the sun sets than when his light first rose?

About a year later, Lowell was admitted to the bar. He did not practice law for very long before changing his career path entirely.

The shot heard round the world

The morning after Paul Revere's famous ride marked the first real battle of the American Revolution. April 19, 1775 was later commemorated by several Massachusetts poets who looked back at the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

 "Concord Hymn" (1836) by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Some of Emerson's words were engraved at the base of a statue by Daniel Chester French at the Old North Bridge in Concord. Across the river is a small memorial to the British soldiers who were killed which quotes from Emerson's friend James Russell Lowell:

"Lines [Suggested by the Graves of Two English Soldiers at Concord Battle Ground]" (1845)

The same good blood that now refills
The dotard Orient's shrunken veins,
The same whose vigor westward thrills,
Bursting Nevada's silver chains,
Poured here upon the April grass,
Freckled with red the herbage new;
On reeled the battle's trampling mass,
Back to the ash the bluebird flew.

Poured here in vain; — that sturdy blood
Was meant to make the earth more green,
But in a higher, gentler mood
Than broke this April noon serene;
Two graves are here: to mark the place,
At head and foot, an unhewn stone,
O'er which the herald lichens trace
The blazon of Oblivion.

These men were brave enough, and true,
To the hired soldier's bull-dog creed;
What brought them here they never knew,
They fought as suits the English breed:
They came three thousand miles, and died,
To keep the Past upon its throne;
Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,
Their English mother made her moan.

The turf that covers them no thrill
Sends up to fire the heart and brain;
No stronger purpose nerves the will,
No hope renews its youth again:
From farm to farm the Concord glides,
And trails my fancy with its flow;
O'erheard the balanced hen-hawk slides,
Twinned in the river's heaven below.

But go, whose Bay State bosom stirs,
Proud of thy birth and neighbor's right,
Where sleep the heroic villagers
Borne red and stiff from Concord flight;
Thought Reuben, snatching down his gun,
Or Seth, as ebbed the life away,
What earthquake rifts would shoot and run
World-wide from that short April fray?

What then? With heart and hand they wrought,
According to their village light:
'T was for the Future that they fought,
Their rustic faith in what was right.
Upon earth's tragic stage they burst
Unsummoned, in the humble sock;
Theirs the fifth act; the curtain first
Rose long ago on Charles's block.

Their graves have voices; if they threw
Dice charged with fates beyond their ken,
Yet to their instincts they were true,
And had the genius to be men.
Fine privilege of Freedom's host,
Of humblest soldiers for the Right! —
Age after age ye hold your post,
Your graves send courage forth, and might.

Dark without & within

James Russell Lowell was known as a boastful, loud, fun-loving intellectual. Throughout his life, however, he suffered many tragedies, struggled financially, and hid a deeper, darker side to his personality. After a rambunctious youth, which carried into his time as a student at Harvard, his marriage to Maria White in 1844 had a calming influence. She pulled him deep into the world of abolitionism (and, for a time, temperance) and seemed to stabilize his life.

The couple, however, faced much hardship. They had four children but three (Blanche, Rose, and Walter) died within a couple years of their birth. Only his daughter Mabel survived into adulthood. But Mabel's mother did not live to see her grow up. Maria White Lowell died in October 1853; she was 32.

Lowell was struck with an overwhelming grief. Cutting himself off from others, he sheltered himself at Elmwood, the family estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He lived with his father (now deaf) and his sister (who often went days without speaking a word). His private diaries from this period are riddled with the initials of his dead wife. On March 10, 1854, for example, he wrote: "Dark without & within. M.L. M.L. M.L."

Lowell's friends helped him publish a posthumous collection of Maria White's poems, including this sonnet:

I love thee — not because thy love for me,
Like a great sunrise, did o'ervault my day
With purple light, and wrought upon my way
The morning dew in fresh emblazonry;
Nor that thou seest all I fain would be,
And thus dost call me by mine angel's name,
While still my woman's heart beats free of blame
Beneath the shelter of thy charity.
Oh, no! for wearily upon my soul
Would weigh thy golden crown of unbought praise,
Did I not look beyond the hour's control,
To where those fruits of perfect virtue raise
Their bloom, that thou erewhile, with prophet eyes,
Didst name mine own, in groves of paradise.

*The gravestone pictured above marks the burial place at Mount Auburn Cemetery of Maria White Lowell, James Russell Lowell, and his second wife Frances Dunlap. And if you think this journal entry is dark, wait until you hear about the incident with the pistol...

Birth of William Dean Howells as editor

"Don't despise Boston!" publisher James T. Fields once said to William Dean Howells, a native of Ohio. The two were meeting at the home of poet Bayard Taylor. Three days later, Fields sent a letter inviting Howells to serve as assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He started working in that role on March 1, 1866 – the anniversary of his birth on March 1, 1837.

The details, as Howells noted, involved proof-reading, correspondence with contributors, gathering manuscripts, and writing a few reviews for each issue. He negotiated with Fields for a $50 a week salary. "Upon these terms we closed," Howells wrote, "and on the 1st of March, which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston and began my work."

Howells also met with James Russell Lowell, the monthly's founding editor, to get his blessing. Howells spent the next fifteen years with the magazine, the last ten as its head editor. He enjoyed it, noting he "found it by no means drudgery." Under his guidance, the Atlantic moved beyond its traditional New England roots and established itself as an important national periodical. Through his association with the magazine, he built friendships with Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Celia Thaxter.

Howells was a writer himself; by the end of his life, he published poetry, travel essays, novels, biographies, and everything else. Later in his life, he wrote about his experience as editor of the Atlantic Monthly in "Recollections of an Atlantic Editorship."

Lowell's birthday verses

Though he has since faded into relative obscurity, James Russell Lowell was a well-known poet, critic, editor, scholar, abolitionist, and diplomat. During his lifetime he had a strong following, particularly in his native New England. On February 22, 1843, he celebrated his 24th birthday by writing a sonnet which read, in part:

Now have I quite passed by that cloudy If
That darkened the wild hope of boyish days,
When first I launched my slender-sided skiff
Upon the wide sea's dim, unsounded ways.

Perhaps Lowell's boyhood was long-gone at age 24, but he had a long way to go in life; he would live almost to the end of the century. His birthday (February 22, 1819) was on the anniversary of the birth of George Washington; it would continue to be celebrated for many years — often with help from other poets. One of his closest friends was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who celebrated Lowell's birthday in verse in 1859 (Holmes was also the only one of the Fireside Poets to outlive Lowell).

In his poem to Lowell, "At a Birthday Festival," Holmes wrote that "We will not speak of years to-night." Indeed, Lowell was only 40 years old that day. Holmes emphasized that each coming year would bring "floods" of life and song (e.g. poetry). The poem emphasizes friendship, optimism, and joy:

We will not speak of years to-night,—
  For what have years to bring
But larger floods of love and light,
  And sweeter songs to sing?

We will not drown in wordy praise
  The kindly thoughts that rise;
If Friendship own one tender phrase,
  He reads it in our eyes.

We need not waste our school-boy art
  To gild this notch of Time;—
Forgive me if my wayward heart
  Has throbbed in artless rhyme.

Enough for him the silent grasp
  That knits us hand in hand,
And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
  That locks our circling band.

Strength to his hours of many toil!
  Peace to his starlit dreams!
Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
  The music-haunted streams!

Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
  The sunshine on his lips,
And faith that sees the ring of light
  Round nature's last eclipse!

The influence of Robert Burns

The Scottish poet Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759. His centennial, 100 years after his birth, was during the period known as the American Renaissance — a period which saw massive accomplishments in the development of American culture, particularly in literature. Many of the major "heavy-hitters" in American literary history, then, were part of celebrating Burns's 100th birthday.

Poet James Russell Lowell wrote a memorial to burns specifically for the centennial in 1859. The author of the 24-stanza piece was then entering his 40th year. Lowell's poem, "At the Burns Centennial," incorporates just a little humor as it depicts the soul of Burns attempting to enter heaven ("You've let in worse, I 'se wager!"). In typical Lowell fashion, however, the poem is mostly just tedious to read.

But, perhaps no American poet owes more to Burns than John Greenleaf Whittier, the so-called Quaker Poet of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Whittier and Burns shared a rural background. The story goes that Whittier always kept a copy of Burns's poetry in his pocket while doing his chores on the family farm. To Burns, he wrote a poem called "Burns: On Receiving a Sprig of Heather in Blossom." In it, Whittier uses the sprig of heather as a metaphor for the work of Burns:

No more these simple flowers belong
  To Scottish maid and lover;
Sown in the common soil of song,
  They bloom the wide world over.

In smiles and tears, in sun and showers,
  The minstrel and the heather,
The deathless singer and the flowers
  He sang of live together.

...Through all his tuneful art, how strong
  The human feeling gushes!
The very moonlight of his song
  Is warm with smiles and blushes!

Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time,
  So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry;
Blot out the Epic's stately rhyme,
  But spare his Highland Mary!

Prohibition, temperance, and T. S. Arthur

On this day, January 16, in 1919, the 18th Amendment took effect in the United States — establishing 13 years of prohibition of the sale, manufacture, and consumption of alcohol. In honor of this "Noble Experiment," it's worth looking into some of the literary figures who believed in the sober lifestyle back in the 19th century.

Early in his career, editor/anthologist Rufus Wilmot Griswold advocated for a temperate lifestyle in the 1830s. Years later, he would come to enjoy vintage wines. Poet/abolitionist James Russell Lowell was a teetotaler for a (short) time after his marriage, likely due to the influence of his wife Maria White. His anti-alcohol stance was so strong for a time that his neighbor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow worried that Lowell would force him to destroy his wine cellar. Lowell, however, was infamous for his drinking while an undergraduate at Harvard and, perhaps, sneaking a few drinks when his wife wasn't looking.

Edgar A. Poe struggled to control what would now be called alcoholism throughout his short life. Aware of his problem, he went as long as 18 months without drinking at one point before finally looking for help. In 1849, he took a vow of sobriety and became a card-carrying member of the Sons of Temperance. Thirteen years before Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman published a book called Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (1842) — a temperance novel. The poet later called the book "a damned rot" and said he was actually drunk when he wrote it.

Perhaps the most important anti-alcohol writer was Timothy Shay Arthur, the New York author of Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854). The story is told by an infrequent visitor to a new tavern in Cedarville named Sickle and Sheaf, founded by Simon Slade. Over his ten visits, the narrator witnesses the downfall of the tavern owner, his guests, and the town in general — all because of alcohol.

According to the publisher's preface:

"Ten Nights in a Bar-Room" gives a series of sharply drawn sketches of scenes, some of them touching in the extreme, and some dark and terrible. Step by step the author traces the downward course of the tempting vender and his infatuated victims, until both are involved in hopeless ruin. The book is marred by no exaggerations, but exhibits the actualities of bar-room life, and the consequences flowing therefrom, with a severe simplicity, and adherence to truth.

Halfway through the novel, Slade the tavern-keeper is described by a character: "He does not add to the general wealth. He produces nothing. He takes money from his customers, but gives them no article of value in return —nothing that can be called property, personal or real." The book's chapter titles include "Some of the Consequences of Tavern-Keeping," "More Consequences," "Sowing the Wind" and (wait for it) "Reaping the Whirlwind." Alcohol leads to neglect, domestic abuse, gambling, and even murder. According to the book, not only is the tavern-keeper ruined, but also the entire town. "Does the reader need a word of comment on this fearful consummation?" the author asks at the end of one chapter. "No: and we will offer none."

During Prohibition (which lasted from 1920 to 1933), a feature film of Arthur's book was released, directed by William O'Connor (his other films were mostly Westerns), based on a 19th-century stage version adapted by William H. Pratt. Cheers!

*The image above is the bar room in question, from an early edition of Arthur's book.