The Progress Poem in America, a Long View
Whitman’s “A Passage to India,” Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and Beyond
Kenneth Silverman’s offhand remark that American “rising glory” poems like Freneau’s all derive from the English genre of the “progress poem” is very helpful – helpful, that is, if one is familiar with that genre in the first place, which I confess I was not (Cultural History, 229). The term, it seems, still has some currency, but it is apparently not widely understood or used, even among specialists of the period. Critical literature is sparse, and I discovered the best source of information in an old doctoral dissertation by John Richard Crider, “The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Progress Pieces” (Crider 1960). As I learned more, however, I discovered that this genre sheds a great deal of light not only on the “rising glory” tradition but on a number of later American poems that have engrossed me – poems like Whitman’s “Passage to India” or Hart Crane’s The Bridge – mid-length poems that engage with the whole history and (manifest) destiny of the United States. These are not epics; but if an epic is, in Ezra Pound’s words, “a poem including history” (Essays, 86), then so do these. Like the epic, progress poems articulate the heritage of cultural values belonging to a nation. But the progress poem is distinct from the epic, and the confusion of the two has had significant consequences for the development and theorization of the American long poem.
Crider’s work is an old-school dissertation that enumerates, categorizes, and describes a large number of related texts, about two hundred pieces mostly in verse but a few in prose (e.g., Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), many but not all of which bear the word “progress” in the title.1 The only American work that catches his attention is John Trumbull’s Swiftian satire “The Progress of Dulness” (1772–73), and he does not mention the rising glory poems. He divides English progress pieces into the biographical, like Bunyan’s narrative, that deals with an individual figure, and the historical, that deals with some element of society – the progress of “love,” or “civility,” or “poetry.” The treatment may be either realistic or allegorical. And this being the age of satire, any form might become the object of ridicule: no sooner did Lord Lansdowne publish “The Progress of Beauty” (1701) but some anonymous wag produced a “Progress of Deformity.”
The most significant of these types is the one that concerns me here: the historical progress poem. This type, says Crider, takes as its subject “the historical manifestations of a human quality or activity and assumes the unity or continuity of this universal throughout its particular occurrences. The sense of unity is maintained and the gaps between specific manifestations are bridged through giving the central idea and its historical career concrete form: Most frequently, the abstraction is personified as a queen or goddess, or identified metaphorically with the sun, or both” (“Progress Pieces,” 113). The appearance of the type clearly parallels the rise of historical consciousness during the period. The historical progress poem typically focuses on a single human activity: religion, female beauty, the sciences, the arts, “Civil Society,” “Liberty.” In such poems, the historical sequence “seems first to have taken shape in the medieval and Renaissance ideas of translatio imperii and translatio studii” (158). However, “broad histories of civilization in one poem constituted a late and atypical phase of the progress piece” (168).2
The purpose of such poems is both didactic and epideictic. A poem like “Essay on Painting” (1778) by Blake’s patron William Hayley strives to stir up appreciation for that art. Historically, the effort is not so much to “teach history” in terms of important events, individuals, chains of causation – but to lay out a broad mythic template, according to the ideology and temperament of the author. The translatio studii idea naturally suggests a cyclical model of rise and fall, but this may be coupled with a larger narrative of overall decline or improvement. In the earlier phase, during the ancients versus moderns controversy, decline was favoured. John Denham’s “The Progress of Learning” (1668), one of the earliest pure examples, portrays the decline of learning since the Roman era. In a sombre foreshadowing of Pope’s Dunciad, Lucifer sends the printing press to complicate and confuse. Every man becomes his own interpreter. The poem is an attack on modern science, published one year after Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society.
The word “progress” at this point meant simply “movement,” the metaphor deriving from a monarch’s royal progress. The modern meaning of progress as “improvement” did not begin to appear, Crider claims, until the 1740s (“Progress Pieces,” 268), after the appearance of James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–36), but this is about a century late.3 Thomson’s long poem, which that good Tory Dr Johnson claimed he was unable to read, marks the first poetic stirring of Whig historiography. But Thomson’s own meliorist attitudes are confused by his profound admiration for the Greeks and Romans. Liberty has been called a “dissident Whig panegyric” (209), being simultaneously “the most flattering of all the verse-pamphlets in praise of the Whig dogma” (66, quoting C.A. Moore) and an attack on the Whig prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. In this quasi-medieval dream vision, the goddess Liberty first instructs the speaker of the poem in the attainments of civil liberty in ancient Sparta, Athens, and Republican Rome. This vision is clearly modelled after the final two books of Paradise Lost, where the Archangel Michael prophesies the coming history of humankind to Adam and Eve: their present tragedy will be redeemed through the providential power of a redemptive God. In Thomson, the site of Rome may lie in ruins, but a final and permanent home for the goddess Liberty will be found in Britain: “Hence Britain, learn – my best established, last, / And, more than Greece or Rome, my steady reign.” Progress pieces like Thomson’s are thus often accompanied by “a strong current of patriotism” (273): Liberty ends with a prophetic vision of British glory, an “enthusiastic prospect of empire, which will be established through British sea-power and commerce” (275). In accord with Whig ideology, commerce is the root of Liberty, and, furthermore, Liberty is the necessary condition for the well-being of the arts. In the words of the poet Mark Akenside, “great Poetical Talents and high Sentiments of Liberty do reciprocally produce and assist each other” (quoted 212–13). Thus the translatio imperii of Liberty becomes simultaneously a translatio Musarum.
Crider focuses on pre-romantic English poetry, and his careful eye dims in later periods and scarcely glances across the Atlantic. His own appendix, which does not claim to be thorough, lists some twenty-two nineteenth-century pieces, including poems by Landor, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, and Christina Rossetti, not to mention “The Ages” by William Cullen Bryant. More recently, two other scholars have discussed the genre as it appears in Shelley’s “Ode to Liberty” and Anna Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.”4
The progress poem found its natural home in America, however, where the great mass of colonists, having entrepreneurial middle-class Whiggish sympathies, produced the rising glory phenomenon.5 John P. McWilliams lists twelve such poems written between 1769 (Alexander Martin’s “America”) and 1791, and his list does not include Joel Barlow’s mighty Vision of Columbus (1787) or its revision as The Columbiad (1807), which he notes is “best regarded not as an epic narrative but as a gigantic expansion of the rising glory orations” (McWilliams, “Poetry,” 161). Where the English poem “meditated upon a pastoral civilization,” the American was “relentlessly futuristic”: “In its most extreme form, it projected an entire culture upon a void” (160–1). Before 1769, however, the translatio imperii motif had already become popular as soon as Americans began to realize that imperium might sail across the Atlantic Ocean. As the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley had famously proclaimed, “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” His verses, written as early as 1726, but not published until 1752, were reprinted in the colonies repeatedly thereafter. In the same year, 1752, William Smith (not mentioned by McWilliams) attempted awkwardly to balance his patriotic fervour for America with his loyalty to the Crown, despite a conviction that England’s might was dying:
… since Death’s th’inevitable Doom
Of every Body, th’Animal alike
And Politic, who does not, pensive, see
That even Britannia’s self, the finest State
That e’er was built, tho’ founded on the Rock
Of Freedom and of Right, must tumble down.
(Andrews, “Smith,” 38)
Twenty years later, Freneau and Brackenridge printed their collaborative poem, “the first full sounding of the Imperial theme,” according to Silverman, which “may be said to end the colonial period of verse.”6 The “rising glory” theme became so ubiquitous that, as Leon Howard remarked, “American poems that opened with the trouble with England and closed with the Day of Judgment” could only have flourished “in the hothouse atmosphere of optimistic patriotism” (Connecticut Wits, 136–7). If the American Revolution truly “took place in the minds of the people” (John Adams as paraphrased by Ezra Pound in Canto 33), then these rising glory poems create an index of this mental process.
The crucial matter here, as William C. Dowling notes, is “the idea of poetry involved in the Augustan warfare against corruption and social decline, a real sense that individuals and societies are constituted in an essential way by systems of ideas or perceptions, and that literature may intervene in the process in a decisive way” (Poetry and Ideology, xv). The unprepossessing title of Dowling’s book disguises an argument that will resonate throughout these chapters. Since the modernist era of lyricization, we are accustomed to thinking with W.H. Auden that “poetry makes nothing happen” – “all the sadness of a presumed divorce between language and the world is in his utterance” (xv). But the authors of the rising glory poems wrote in a world “where poems are symbolic interventions with enormous consequences in the domain of the real” (xv). This concept of the important social and political and moral mission of poetry clings to all the subsequent writers of American progress poems, from Freneau and the Connecticut Wits, through Whitman, Lanier, Hart Crane, MacLeish, Rukeyser, Tolson, and Ginsberg. All stake their claims on the role that “poems may honorably and importantly play in the ongoing construction of the world.” They represent “what poetry ought to be” (xv).
Timothy Dwight’s “America, or A Poem on the Settlement of the British Colonies Addressed to the Friends of Freedom and Their Country” serves as a typical example of the English historical “progress poem” in its American costume. Though not published until 1780, it was written before the Revolution in the fall of 1771 (Howard, Connecticut Wits, 83). Dwight’s political position was far removed from that of the radical Freneau, whom he denounced as “a mere incendiary.”7 Nonetheless, in Silverman’s words, “while differences of temperament, family, belief, and education distinguish the satirical Trumbull, the pious Dwight, and the anxious Freneau, their enlarged ambitions, reformist tendencies, and romantic leaning stamp them as members of a single generation” (Cultural History, 228). This is not to say that the pre-Revolutionary poets conceived of separation from England – certainly not Dwight, Brackenridge, or even Freneau. But their poems articulate the growing cultural self-confidence of the colonies and their certainty of a sunny future. They do not conceive a full-blown cultural nationalism in the manner of Emerson and Whitman but, instead, call on the colonies to join the international world of letters and moral society (229).
Dwight’s historical narrative in 346 lines of heroic couplets divides neatly into three parts: past, present, and prophetic future. Nearly half the text surveys colonial history, first, like Freneau, speculating on the origins of the Native Americans – who, it seems, arrived as Tartars “thro’ the vast western Ocean” – and deploring their condition of barbarity and superstition. Dwight then touches on the period of exploration, on Columbus and Raleigh, and the Puritan flight from Charles I; he praises the early settlers, including the Quaker Penn and the Anglican reformer Oglethorpe; and he celebrates Wolfe in Quebec and British victory over the Catholic French. Catholics aside, however, Dwight, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, is remarkably tolerant of diverse Protestant sects.
The middle portion of the poem (lines 159–240) is a hymn of thanksgiving to God for the present prosperity, culminating in a theophany (a recurrent event is these poems): an allegorical female deity appears. Here she is named Peace, “descending from the sky,” the colonies thriving “like growing grain” amid the reign of “bright Liberty”:
O Land supremely blest! to thee tis given
To taste the choisest joys of bounteous heaven;
Thy rising Glory shall expand its rays,
And lands and times unknown rehearse thine endless praise.
In the third section of the poem, Dwight conceives an allegory of meeting the personified Lady Freedom in a grove. These allegories are routinely feminine, perhaps to counterbalance the exclusively male personae of the historical record. Freedom shows him a sequence of three future visions. The first, anticipating the revolution to come, is a troubling glimpse of discord and warring heroes, followed by “white-rob’d Peace.” Then follows, as in John Trumbull’s “Prospect of the Future Glory of America,” an allegorical procession of the Seven Arts: Philosophy, Religion, History, Poetry, Sculpture, Painting, and Eloquence. (His list differs from Trumbull’s – Dwight has no time for Architecture or Music.) Finally there is the inevitable apocalyptic vision of future glory, with prosperity spanning the world. The heavenly kingdom will descend, and we shall see “Th’Almighty Saviour his great power display,” until the last trump, when God’s happy children “mount to worlds above, / Drink streams of purest joy, and taste immortal love.”
The principal topoi of the American version of the genre, then, are these: (1) A three-part division into past-present-future, sometimes present-past-future. (2) A belief in historical progress, and an orientation to the future, though other mythic templates of history are possible. (3) A curiosity about origins or primitive roots. (4) A roll call: praise for admirable or heroic figures, blame for the corrupt and violent. In America, the blameworthy, in the spirit of Jonathan Edwards, are regularly associated with the Old World: “the other continent hath slain Christ … God has therefore probably reserved the honour of building the glorious temple to the daughter that has not shed so much blood, when those times of the peace, prosperity, and glory of the church, typified by the reign of Solomon, shall commence.”8 (5) A vision of America as not merely the present beneficiary but as the completion and fulfilment of the westward movement of the translatio imperii, site of the Millennium, and concluding point of history. As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it: “Most Americans believed that history in the large sense [macrohistory] stopped with the American Revolution, but history in a more restricted sense [microhistory] did not. Rather, it continued as the setting in which Americans strove to keep faith with their special destiny. By contrast with Europeans, the Americans of the Middle Period lacked a sense of time … If macrohistory taught Americans to be complacent, microhistory pressed them to locate themselves in an unending struggle between the forces of good and evil” (Jeremiad, 144–5).9 (6) A prospect of the future: under the pressure of Puritan mythos, the American poems are particularly concerned to anticipate the biblical Millennium. This assurance of millennial peace and prosperity became an assumption of the way things would be, or ought to be, in a New World cleansed of Old World sins. Peace is a kind of surrogate salvation, and it appears as an entitlement. (7) A Whiggish concern for commerce: economic prosperity as precondition for the rise of civilization and the arts. This eighteenth-century idea has produced a number of works on subjects that nowadays often seem anti-poetical. In England, John Dyer, in Book 2 of The Fleece (1757), surveys the history of the wool trade from primitive times to the efficient present-day British methods. In America, it helps explain oddities like Sidney Lanier’s economic odes “Corn” and “The Symphony,” in which this romantic and musical Southern aesthete exposes a Whiggish utilitarian impulse, and it further manifests in the usury theme of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. (8) Affirmation of translatio imperii. The New World under the banner of Liberty (however that word is understood) will be a light unto the world and show the path to the Old World still in chains. World leadership will, as a matter of course, endow the New World with imperial power. (9) Affirmation of a translatio studii that sometimes includes a translatio Musarum, made possible by the shift in political and economic power. (10) An appeal to fundamental imagery of light and sun. As Crider remarks, “sunlight imagery became a standard accouterment of the historical progress piece in regard to the rise in the East and the westward movement of the arts and sciences” (“Progress Pieces,” 251). Hence the “rising glory” motif (the phrase appears in Dwight’s poem, line 161). (11) Personification of a goddess (always gendered female). If neoclassical personification is, as Bertrand Bronson long ago argued, a sign of the diminishing power of religion – “the last historical effort to stave off the collapse of those sustaining postulates which for centuries had given dignity and importance to mankind” (Bronson, 177) – then such personified figures may be read as further signs of American slippage from a theist to a secular vision of the nation. If, as Robert Eisenhauer claims, the traditional ode is typically “energized by the invocation of a Weltgeist, Oversoul, et al., or a channeling of ghosts, poetical, political, tribal familial” (Ode Consciousness, ix), then this goddess or Muse figure is a point of contact between the shorter, more lyric ode on the one hand, and the epic on the other, ensuring a special status for the utterance.
Before turning forward to Joel Barlow’s prolonged versions of the progress poem, I look backward to Anne Bradstreet’s extraordinary “Dialogue between the Old England and the New.” To approach this poem from a reading of the eighteenth-century progress poems is to be struck immediately by similarities. Like many of the poems studied in this book, Bradstreet’s “Dialogue” was written in response to a political crisis, most likely in 1643, early in the English Civil War and before the execution of Charles I in 1649 (White, Bradstreet, 164). The Bradstreets were Dissenters, not Separatists. They had not, like the Plymouth Pilgrims, given up the old country as a lost cause; instead, they were torn between an abiding patriotic devotion to England and a conviction that the established Church of England was gangrenous with Papism. Like the earl of Essex, executed by the Puritans in 1649 though praised in Bradstreet’s poem, the New Englanders struggled to remain loyal to the king even while their sympathies were wholly with the parliamentary party. Events were gradually making such a position untenable. News travelled slowly in 1643, but readers of William Bradford’s History are invariably surprised to discover how busy maritime traffic was at the time, so that alarming news from Old England arrived in a steady trickle.
The fiction of the poem is a dialogue between an ailing mother and her strong, healthy Puritan daughter. Bradstreet’s personifications are not demi-goddesses – she would have recoiled from the suggestion – but they speak with communal authority. The dialogue format was often found in mid-seventeenth-century poetry and customary in books of instruction, including the dialogue of Brackenridge and Freneau, and it is not unlike the instructive personifications in Thomson’s Liberty or Dwight’s America. The daughter here not only comforts but instructs the ailing mother. Bradstreet’s survey of English history duly divides into clear past, present, and future segments. The New England daughter peers back into earliest times, even to Hengist, “that brave and valiant Dane,” and the two speakers review the violent history of the monarchy. Recent years have seen the corruption of true religion:
Idolatry, supplanter of a Nation,
With foolish superstitious adoration,
Are lik’d and countenance’d by men of might,
The Gospel is trod down and hath no right.
Church Offices are sold and bought for gain
That Pope had hope to find Rome here again.
This corruption extends to the financial sector, to “Usury, Extortion, and Oppression.” And her lines on the Huguenot struggles in France, the 1641 massacre of Protestants in Ireland, and the Lutheran strife in Germany – “her people famish’d, Nobles slain” in the Thirty Years’ War – indicate that the corruption extends beyond England itself to the entire Old World.
Given this state of affairs, Mother England bemoans the present dispute “’twixt King and Peers,” “’twixt Subjects and their Master.” But the New England daughter is more optimistic, even if unsettlingly bloodthirsty, about the future:
Your griefs I pity much but should do wrong,
To weep for that we both have pray’d for long,
To see these latter days of hop’d-for good,
That Right may have its right, though’t be with blood.
After dark Popery the day did clear,
But now the Sun in’s brightness shall appear.
The earliest rays of Enlightenment sunlight shine on her hope for a monarchy newly washed in the blood of the Lamb:
Go on, brave Essex, show whose son thou art,
Not false to King, nor Country in thy heart,
But those that hurt his people and his Crown,
By force expel, destroy, and tread them down.
Let Gaols be fill’d with th’ remnant of that pack,
And sturdy Tyburn loaded till it crack.10
The New England is still hoping to reconcile her Puritan cause with her loyalty to King Charles. But in faithful Puritan fashion, she rationalizes this violence as the beginning of the imminent Apocalypse and the coming Millennium:
Bring forth the beast that rul’d the world with’s beck,
And tear his flesh, and set your feet on’s neck,
And make his filthy den so desolate
To th’astonishment of all that knew his state.
This done, with brandish’d swords to Turkey go, –
(For then what is it but English blades dare do?)
And lay her waste, for so’s the sacred doom,
And do to Gog what thou hast done to Rome.
This needful slaughter of Romish and Turkish infidels accomplished, a providential God will bring about the conversion of the Jews, harmony among the remaining nations, and blessings to the surviving millennial remnant:
Then fullness of the Nations in shall flow
And Jew and Gentile to one worship go.
Then follows days of happiness and rest.
Whose lot doth fall to live therein is blest.
The Second Coming will thus bring an end to both conflict and historical contingency.11
Although Anne Bradstreet’s “Dialogue” fulfills so many criteria of the historical progress poem, it in fact antedates in composition the earliest of the pieces in John Crider’s massive survey, which identifies the earliest examples as Sir Richard Fanshawe’s “Canto of the Progress of Learning,” eighteen Spenserian stanzas appended to his translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (1647), and Sir John Denham’s “Progress of Learning” (1668).12 The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America may thus lay claim to having written the first poem in a significant new genre. The progress piece was fully at home in the New World from the very beginning.
As McWilliams notes, Joel Barlow’s Vision of Columbus (1787), as well as its expanded revision The Columbiad (1807), are both best regarded not as epics but as gigantic expansions of the rising glory poems (“Early Republic,” 160–1). Yet the progress poem was from the beginning conflated with epic. This was true in Barlow’s own mind, as he struggled to explain why he was writing an epic that was not really an epic. Roy Harvey Pearce, in his once influential overview of American poetry, argues that The Columbiad establishes the precedent in American poetry for “an epic without the sort of linear, form-endowing narrative argument which takes its substance and its very life from the hero, the supra-human being, at its center.” Pearce goes on to argue that four later poems – Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Crane’s The Bridge, Pound’s Cantos, and Williams’s Paterson – follow from Barlow’s work as “plotless epics in which poetical and moral objects are fused” (Continuity, 61).13 This view has been repeated frequently in discussions of the American long poem, but awareness of the progress poem template reveals a tension in such poems between narrative, which belongs to epic proper, and the eighteenth-century preference for an abstracting and expository kind of thinking, a sorting into past, present, and future categories. Progress poems may contain narrative, but they tend to subordinate it to the expository and argumentative modes – the modes that more often govern lyric. This is equally true of modernist fragmented epics in the tradition of Pound’s Cantos. The American epic without a hero is in fact not an epic at all, but a progress poem. The genre thus throws light on the fusions and confusions about epic form in American studies of the long poem – confusions that are themselves part of the tradition in the minds of poets and critics alike.
Barlow himself lays great weight on the absence of epic hero and epic plot. His Columbus is wholly passive, a prisoner in chains. His Muse appears in the form of an Angel (named Hesper in The Columbiad), a personified “guardian genius of the Western Continent” in Pearce’s phrase (Continuity, 64). Pearce does not mention the borrowing from Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost – another epic without a “hero” – and its appearances in progress pieces like those of Thomson or Dwight. But he is correct in saying that Barlow’s true subject is not Columbus himself but the American historical mythos: Barlow’s “actual hero is what he and his contemporaries liked to call the ‘republican institution,’ toward which all history, natural and human, progressed” (65). Barlow spends many pages telling the story of one Manco Capac – a prototypal Hiawatha of the Incas, who brought political coherence, morality, and enlightenment to his Aboriginal but urban civilization in South America. The fall of Inca civilization, however, is part of the rational cycle, in which “progress meant a sacrifice of a lower to a higher good” (64).14 Barlow’s conclusion in Book 10 articulates “an unabashed utopianism – a vision of the brave new world, at last unified through a universal language, so that all is caught up in one grand political harmony” (64). In this astonishing scene, Barlow envisions a prototypal United Nations, led by America upholding the torch of Liberty.15
Barlow’s poem was determined to be American, writes Christopher Phillips, “meant to celebrate everything that America could produce involving books.”16 However, his effort to write a democratic epic, according to Pearce, was frustrated because he “could not write a traditional poem”: “Subordinating fictional to real, moral design, he perforce creates a poem which works neither as would a traditional epic, in which fictional and moral design are fused and so move to a higher level of reality, nor as would the essentially propaedeutic poem which, subliminally, he seems to have wanted” (Pearce, Continuity, 66). To reply that Pearce’s assumptions are wrong, that Barlow was writing a progress poem, not an epic at all, would be facile, because Barlow, given the scale of his enterprise, himself wrestles with the epic model.
Barlow dutifully employs the external trappings of epic, some of which Pearce enumerates: “The opening ‘I sing …’; the concentration on superhuman actions; the elaborate cataloguing and passing-in-review; the focussing on the ‘sublime’; the couplets which Pope and others had institutionalized as a proper vehicle for epic in English” (Continuity, 66). Barlow too takes pains to establish the heroic character of Columbus, in his preface if not in the poem itself: “this extraordinary man,” he tells us, “appears to have united in his character every trait, and to have possessed every talent, requisite to form and execute the greatest enterprises” (Vision, ix / Columbiad, xvii). Yet in his preface to The Columbiad, Barlow enumerates his objections to the epics of classical tradition. The “real design” of the Iliad, he says – that is, the moral as opposed to the fictional design – is “to inflame the minds of young readers with an enthusiastic ardor for military fame; to inculcate the pernicious doctrine of the divine right of kings; to teach both prince and people that military plunder was the most honorable mode of acquiring property; and that conquest, violence and war were the best employment of nations” (vi). Virgil’s Aeneid is “nearly as pernicious,” he says; “the real design of his poem was to increase the veneration of the people for a master” (vi–vii).17 Barlow does not portray the Native Americans as Latians, Christopher Phillips notes, “precisely because a repetition of the Aeneid narrative would cast America as a conquering heir” to the translatio imperii tradition, after a lengthy praise of the republican instincts of the South American Incas (Epic, 45). In all, Barlow insists that “there is one point of view in which I wish the reader to place the character of my work before he pronounces on its merit: I mean its political tendency” (Columbiad, v). Like Timothy Dwight, Barlow had his eye not only on his own accomplishment but on a collective effort “to elevate the entire cultural enterprise” of the American nation “to heroic stature” (Phillips, Epic, 43).
Widespread discomfort with epic conventions in antebellum America is now well understood, but the remarks of Walt Whitman and Barlow both need to be considered in a wider context. English writers, not feeling the goad of literary nationalism like their American cousins, likewise articulated a wide range of opinions about every aspect of epic – form, fable, machinery, morality. From the middle of the eighteenth century, critics in England “looked with ever increasing skepticism on the rules and theories which almost countless commentators had handed onto them from Aristotle” (Swedenberg, Theory of the Epic, 94). Among many others, William Hayley in his “Essay on Epic Poetry” (1782) rejected the epic conventions once held to be necessary:
Perish that critic pride, which oft has hurl’d
Its empty thunders o’er the Epic world;
Which, eager to extend its mimic reign,
Would bind free Fancy in a servile chain;
With papal rage the eye of Genius blind,
And bar the gates of Glory on the mind!
Hayley is best known to literary history as the sometime friend and patron of William Blake, whose “America: A Prophecy” is another important text that deserves mention in this brief history of the American progress poem. Hayley’s Longinian critical stance, in Herbert F. Tucker’s phrase, exhibits disdain “for the clipping of eagle pinions to critical specifications” (Epic, 47). Barlow not only read Hayley’s poem but was befriended by him when he visited England – “the only English literary figure who took much interest in Barlow’s work.”18 In The Columbiad, writes Tucker, he produced “one of the few American epics that had any impact in nineteenth-century Britain” (130).
In America, much of the discomfort with epic arose from moral or Christian or even sexual squeamishness. William Cullen Bryant exclaimed that the conduct of the pagan gods is “so detestable that I am sometimes half tempted to give up them and Homer together.”19 But Whitman, like Barlow, rested his objections solely on grounds of the political unsuitability of traditional epic to the literature of the rising republic. Ironically, while objecting to the imperial designs of classical epic, Whitman produced the most powerful depiction in poetry of American unconscious imperialism, “Passage to India,” where the trope of translatio imperii, having given birth to manifest destiny, suddenly discovers in the technology of railroad, canal, and cable the material means for America’s global embrace. Earlier critics, focusing on the last three sections of the poem, exalted the spiritual nature of this embrace. Pearce the New Critic emphasized language, arguing that Whitman’s search for a democratic epic drove him in the direction of a common vernacular, a sublimation of slang – an impulse, he says, that takes on “special import when read in the light of Barlow’s performance in The Columbiad.” Yet both the spiritual Whitman and the New Critical Whitman are, unlike Barlow, untroubled by the epics of tradition: this new bard has “finally discovered the way to the poem made out of that ‘living language’ which will ‘warm the world with one great moral soul’” (Pearce, Continuity, 71).
Discussions of Whitman’s epic ambition commonly focus on “Song of Myself” or on Leaves of Grass as a whole. For Pearce, “Song of Myself” marks the second stage in the development of the American plotless, heroless epic (Continuity, 72). For McWilliams, “instead of an elaborate proposition repeating the conventional phrase ‘Of — I sing,’ America’s heroic poem would begin with a brash seriocomic, democratized assertion, ‘I celebrate myself’” (American Epic, 223). Whitman’s vernacular anti-hero, who “loafs” and “loiters,” is the progenitor of a fertile line of populist and affirmative American free verse poets.20 Critics habitually stumble over terms in discussion of these plotless epics, or epics without a hero, or democratic epics, or just “long poems.”
Betsy Erkkila, however, persuasively resituated Whitman’s antebellum epic affirmations in the context of the painfully fracturing political union. The poems of that 1855 Leaves of Grass“were not, as is commonly assumed, a product of Whitman’s unbounded faith in the democratic dream of America; on the contrary, they were an impassioned response to the signs of the death of republican traditions he saw throughout the land and his growing fear that the ship of American liberty had run aground” (Whitman, 67). Setting Emerson to one side, she argues that “the poet Whitman describes in his 1855 preface … bears the rhetorical traces of the revolutionary enlightenment. ‘The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots’” (69). Whitman in 1855 was writing to a national crisis, and in the process he not only invented a new way of writing poetry, but, as classicist W.R. Johnson has claimed, he revived the art of “choric” poetry that was practised by Greek poets like Pindar, a kind of lyric that gives voice not to the isolated self but to the concerned citizen (Idea of Lyric, 176–95). This element in Whitman’s volume ties him directly back to his neoclassical predecessors, as Erkkila points out: “Wrestling with the same problems that Philip Freneau and Joel Barlow had in trying to create a distinctively American literature, Whitman seeks to reconcile politics and poetry, activism and art, revolutionary ideology and a revolutionary creation” (Whitman, 71). Christopher N. Phillips, in the most recent formulation, points out that Whitman did not add the phrase “and sing myself” – the Virgilian cano – to the first line of “Song of Myself” until the postwar 1881 printing of Leaves of Grass – in 1855. When he called for a new kind of poetry “not direct or descriptive or epic,” he revealed not a disavowal but a “fascinating tension” with epic: “The new work is not epic, but must go through it” (Phillips, Epic, 156). Pearce, McWilliams, Erkkila, Phillips, and many others all seem to posit an invisible link between the colonial writers and Whitman.21
Unfortunately, no one has been able to show that Whitman actually read Barlow, Freneau, Dwight, or any of the rising glory poets. But The Columbiad was well known by reputation, and Barlow’s radical politics were as congenial to Whitman as were his epic ambitions. Barlow had been a friend of Thomas Paine, whom Whitman’s father knew and admired, and whom Whitman honoured in Specimen Days (section 122). If my concern were with the epic genre, this lack of hard evidence would not be a problem. As Phillips notes, “through the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries, Americans expected an epic poem to be the benchmark of national literary achievement” (Epic, 8).
In any case, it is harder to believe (though it is possible) that Whitman’s virtual replication of the American rising glory poem in “Passage to India” is, like Anne Bradstreet’s “Dialogue,” a mere accident of the Zeitgeist. Faith in progress, a confident orientation to a visionary future, and the translatio imperii are the very subject of Whitman’s poem, which is duly divided into present, past, and future segments, three numbered sections of the poem given to each.22 There is interest in the primitive roots of civilization – Adam and Eve “from the gardens of Asia descending” (88) – and a roll call of past explorers – Marco Polo, Batouta the Moor, Vasco da Gama, and inevitably “the chief histrion,” Columbus (152). All history leads to the invention of America, which in the final section becomes a kind of NASA launching pad to “sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!” (240) – a cosmic future worthy the Millennium. Whitman celebrates science and technology with rapturous enthusiasm, while commerce – the underlying motive of all this exploration – is very much present.23 Gravely, Whitman prophesies the power of universal love encompassing all of humanity, even foreseeing the races “to marry and be given in marriage,” just as Joel Barlow had envisioned a future humanity in which the darker races will evolve to “a fairer tint” while Europeans gain “a ruddier hue and deeper shade” (Columbiad 2:120ff). Whitman’s prophecy is as optimistic as Freneau’s or Barlow’s, and even more clearly a benevolent hope for future world domination of the American idea.
Not surprisingly, earlier critics of the poem muted this call for global sway, insisting that its intent is spiritual, a “paean to spiritual progress.”24 But as the postcolonialist implications of Whitman’s poem have gradually become inescapable, it has quietly slipped from many undergraduate anthologies. Significantly as well, where Freneau had displayed harmonious equipoise between commerce and agriculture, the urban Whitman in his enthusiasm for technological progress all but forgets agriculture entirely. His postwar praise of technology leaves him wide open to Allen Tate’s agrarian critique that Whitman is the poet of mechanized and corporatized industrialism (see below, 55). Another element missing from Whitman’s poem is the goddess Liberty herself; but she makes an appearance in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” with a Spanish accent as Libertad. Whitman added this neoclassical allegory to his poem after the Civil War in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass.25 During the same period, in a closely related poem, Whitman produced a famous passage of translatio Musarum:
I say I see, my friends, if you do not, the illustrious emigré, (having it is true in her day, although the same, changed, journey’d considerable,)
Making directly for this rendezvous, vigorously clearing a path for herself, striding through the confusion,
By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d,
Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers,
Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay,
She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware!
In “Song of the Exposition,” Whitman ceremoniously introduces the Muse to an allegorical Columbia, and, in Lawrence Buell’s account, “make[s] grotesque a trope from the traditional repertoire of Eurocentrism, the translatio studii … a trope that had been invoked to underwrite colonization efforts and subsequently the hegemony of the late colonial gentry” (“American Literary Emergence,” 420).
The change of purpose of Whitman’s postwar poetry, with its new neoclassical overtones, is now generally recognized. To McWilliams, Whitman’s “epic of democracy” (American Epic, 233) is displaced to the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman placed the wholly rewritten and expanded “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” immediately after the Civil War poems, clearly intending to provide “a reinvocation of the muse suitable for a reunited nation … It recalls Milton’s reinvocation at the beginning of Book Seven of Paradise Lost … Libertad makes her promised appearance, looking perilously like an eighteenth-century Columbia who has been to Appomatox” (232). If James Perrin Warren attempts a refreshing defence of “Passage to India,” analyzing its unity of argumentation in the light of Whitman’s new-found ideas of Darwinian evolution,26 the ecocritic M. Jimmie Killingsworth associates the poem with Whitman’s alarming “Song of the Redwood Tree,” in which the tree, in dramatic monologue, joyfully sacrifices itself to the building of the nation.27 Killingsworth correctly identifies the subservience of nature to human power, “the kind of thinking all too easily enrolled in the service of political imperialism.” Only recently, and remarkably late in its critical history, has the poem opened itself fully to postcolonial analysis, even of a half-apologetic kind. In “Passage to India,” Whitman “constructs a subtext of Western imperialism, and yet he eventually casts doubt on the political priorities of the imperial project he himself endorses.” Jerome Loving assures us in 1999 that Whitman’s imperialism is that of a democratic ideology “which must and will transcend its shortcomings but probably only (for now at least) by going beyond the material and the moral” (Whitman, 333). Yet Whitman’s global fantasy, we now more clearly see, “is related to the assumption of imperial hegemony on the part of the United States” and “directly committed to the commercialization and striation of Pacific space.”28 Within a few decades, America would find itself in possession of a number of Pacific territories, among them Hawaii and the Philippines.
None of these writers, however, sees the “rising glory rhetoric” of the poem noticed by Erkkila as having wider generic significance in later American poetry. My view is that “Passage to India” was most likely intended to be a latter-day progress poem after the eighteenth-century pattern; and furthermore, that it served as the principal model for Hart Crane’s The Bridge; and further yet, that The Bridge in turn became a formative model for Muriel Rukeyser’s “Theory of Flight,” for Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, a debt he freely acknowledged, and (to a lesser extent) for Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” a progress poem manqué haunted by the ghosts of Whitman, Blake, and Crane. The importance of the American progress poem has never been recognized.
The link between Hart Crane and Whitman was loudly trumpeted by Crane himself; and every Crane critic discusses it, but there has been surprisingly little sustained examination. According to Pearce, Crane belonged to a generation of poets who had “to go to school to Whitman, not to worship him”: The Bridge was “Crane’s attempt to assure himself … that America would again be ‘worthy to be spoken of’ as soon as the proper words could be found. In the right words, if only the poet could discover them, lay not only the means of poetry but its end” (Continuity, 101–2). Crane is thus, like Whitman, the Emersonian liberating God who can lead America to its destiny through the power of poetry.
The structural analogy between “Passage to India” and The Bridge is a critical commonplace, and I have been so teaching it for years, but without recognizing the progress poem template. My sense now is that (echoing Silverman on The Columbiad), The Bridge is best regarded not as an epic but as an updated expansion of the rising glory poem, through the intermediary of Whitman. Crane’s “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” is a shorter sketch along similar lines (Colangelo, “Progress”). The critic who comes closest to this view is R.W.B. Lewis, who in 1967 described “Passage to India” as “no doubt the most seminal of Whitman’s poems for The Bridge as a whole” (Hart Crane, 243). Broadly speaking, Brooklyn Bridge is the artefact of technology that spans not just the East River but, like Whitman’s transcontinental railroad, stretches “from far Rockaway to Golden Gate.” It symbolizes the ties of communication that will eliminate the distances between peoples, cultures, and nations around the globe, accomplishing a spiritual Atlantis in the material world. The poem is suspended from three towering apostrophes, to the bridge itself in the “Proem,” to Whitman in “Cape Hatteras,” and to the “steeled Cognizance” in “Atlantis.” The poem falls into past, present, and future segments. The past looks back yet again to Columbus. Positioned on the same waters where Whitman cruised on the Brooklyn Ferry, the poem salutes Lady Liberty as it sets out in the “Proem”; and it later celebrates the Native American figure of Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, who stands in as the tutelary goddess, finally to be metamorphosed and further eroticized in the “Three Songs.” Commerce takes its place in the advertising slogans of “The River” and the tea trade of “Cutty Sark,” but, like Whitman, Crane is more interested in celebrating scientific progress. Quoting “Passage to India” in his epigraph to the pivotal “Cape Hatteras,” he places Whitman (unhistorically of course) at the site where airplane flight became a reality. The second half of the poem turns to present time, and the picture is notably dispirited in “Quaker Hill” and “The Tunnel.” But in “Atlantis” (the earliest section of the poem to be written), the poet looks to the future, to the “Deity’s glittering Pledge” and the promised parousia of Atlantis – or is it Cathay? Crane’s imagination is firmly planted on American soil, so he escapes most of the imperialistic assumptions of “Passage to India,” but otherwise the template fits.
One extraordinary feature of Whitman’s template is that his version of American history wholly bypasses the Civil War. Perhaps he thought he had dealt with the war sufficiently in Drum Taps and the Lincoln poems; perhaps he felt the painful war memories conflicted with the meliorist tone of his progress poem. Or maybe he was actually following the “rising glory” template. Recently, the Irish observer Justin Quinn has speculated that “the decline in Whitman’s poetry after the War” occurred because the later poetry “does not take into account the lessons of the War … Whitman disengages thus from political events in favour of the idealistic sphere of mystic nationalism” (American Errancy, 19). But this omission of the pivotal tragedy of American experience was subsequently followed by Crane, Rukeyser, and Ginsberg. The “Indiana” section of The Bridge, where the son leaves home in search of El Dorado, has recollections of Whitman’s “Come Up from the Fields Father,” where the parents receive a letter bearing pathetic news from the Civil War battlefield. Crane’s evasion seems deliberate. The Southerner Sidney Lanier felt obliged to include the Civil War in his progress poem and, as we shall see, with ludicrous results. Melvin Tolson’s African American progress poem also makes significant reference to it, even though his subject is the nation of Liberia (an African mirror of America). An argument might be made that this phenomenon reflects a regional division in American historical thinking: Southern poets rightly see the Civil War as the single most crucial event in the making of America, however they interpret it, while Northern poets assume the conflict is done with, a pointless side-track, and err by leaving it out. On the other hand, each of these poems offers its own idiosyncratic realization of Freneau’s heavenly Jerusalem come to earth – from Whitman’s transcendent universes where, “the Elder Brother found, / The Younger melts in fondness in his arms” (223–4), to Crane’s Atlantis, to Tolson’s buzzing Futurafrique, to Ginsberg’s Rockland of safekeeping with Carl Solomon.
Crane also blurs the political topic of his progress poem by adopting not a public but a private lyric voice. Only in his Proem and the final “Atlantis” is there a strong sense of public address, and even there it is full of subjectivities. As R.P. Blackmur wrote long ago, Crane “used the private lyric” to “write the cultural epic” (Language, 305–6). In Justin Quinn’s formulation, Crane on one hand “embraces the idea of America as a ‘City upon a Hill,’ with extra helpings of manifest destiny, but on the other, he realizes that this utopian idea of America is restricted to his private imagination of the country” (American Errancy, 21). Langdon Hammer sees this lyricization of his “epic” as an intensification of the gregarious Crane’s isolation as a result of his homosexuality. By his sexual and cultural identification with Whitman, he felt “permanently divided from friends like Tate.” Writing on the Isle of Pines in Cuba, he felt “symbolically excluded” not only from the heterosexual household of Tate and his wife Caroline Gordon – who had taken him in and then sent him packing – “but also from the nation” (Hart Crane, 173).29 But conflicts between the private and the public Crane raise jarring emotional discrepancies left unresolved.
Crane’s execution of his design is by common consent uneven, ranging from the brilliance of most of the poetry to the forced rhetoric of “Cape Hatteras” and the flatness of a few other sections. I am inclined to blame this unevenness not on any fault in Crane’s design but on his catastrophic alcoholism – the faulty sections were all written very late in his disease. But at the time, Crane’s allegiance to the Emerson-Whitman tradition was trounced by two of his strongest friends and supporters. Yvor Winters was undergoing his own conversion from modernist young Turk to moralizing old curmudgeon, and Crane probably had no idea how virulent Winters’s campaign against “Whitmanian Rousseauism” had become. To Winters, The Bridge, although filled with “magnificent fragments,” demonstrated only “the impossibility of getting anywhere with the Whitmanian inspiration. No writer of comparable ability has struggled with it before, and, with Mr. Crane’s wreckage in view, it seems highly unlikely that any writer of comparable genius will struggle with it again.”30
Crane was disturbed enough by Winters’s review not only to reply to him but to send a copy of his reply to Allen Tate. Tate, for his part, had already drafted his own review, which was not much different from that of Winters. He told Crane in a now famous letter (after assuring him that his “case against Winters seems to be very strong”) that he, too, felt that Crane’s tribute to Whitman was, “while not excessive, certainly sentimental in places, particularly at the end of Cape Hatteras … in some larger and vaguer sense your vision of American life comes from Whitman. I am unsympathetic to this tradition, and it seems to me that you should be too. The equivalent of Whitman in the economic and moral aspect of America in the last sixty years is the high-powered industrialism that you, no less than I, feel is a menace to the spiritual life of this country” (Untereker, Voyager, 621). As Jake Adam York has written, “most of the body of Crane criticism is eaten up with the cancers introduced by the first and overwhelmingly negative assessments of The Bridge by Yvor Winters and Allen Tate” (Architecture, 100).
Tate’s objections point clearly to the post-bellum Whitman who sang of Suez and apostrophized locomotives in winter. Would he have reacted differently if Crane had stuck to his original plan and depicted Whitman the Wound Dresser (Letters, 241)? Probably not. Whitman in any guise was persona non grata to Tate, the unreconstructed Southerner. Tate’s animus against both Whitman and Crane targeted their pretense of writing a national mythos rather than a sectional one (Aronoff, Composing Cultures, 163). The feelings in his letter compact a host of resentments, including the Union victory over the Confederacy, the unbridled industrialism and corporationism that ensued, not to mention the worldwide neo-futurist celebration of “machine art” (with its Marxist inflections) that was a phenomenon circa 1930. But while Crane already understood some of Tate’s reservations about his poem, these words probably stung even more than did those of Winters because Tate attacked not Crane’s literary understanding, in which he felt confident, but his historical understanding, in which he did not.
For all Crane’s word-smithing brilliance, and a native intelligence that won the respect of formidable minds like Winters, Tate, and others, Crane was all too conscious of his poor education. Crane’s autodidactic reading was prodigious, but from the evidence of his letters, it was limited almost exclusively to literature. If one examines Lawrence Kramer’s annotated edition of The Bridge, for example, one is told that no one can “understand the pivotal ‘Cutty Sark’ section” without “detailed knowledge of the history of clipper ships and their trade.” Yet on turning to the notes, one finds no trace of such history. Was it transmitted to Crane verbally by sailors during their liaisons? Perhaps my own long immersion in the study of Pound’s Cantos raises false expectations, but Kramer sends us to Melville’s poems (little read in the 1920s), Moby Dick, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Burns’s “Tam o’ Shanter,” Plato’s Ion, Job, The Golden Bough, and a 1921 book on Turkey called Stamboul Rose – the last only for its title.31 No one could claim that Crane was ill read. But there is no inkling of the breadth of interests found in the classical education described by, say, Milton or Matthew Arnold and reflected in the wide-ranging curiosities of writers like Pound, or Eliot, or Tate, or even the medically educated Williams. Crane’s mind, furthermore, despite its adherence to certain broad ideals, was undisciplined. He never articulated his ideas at length in prose: indeed, writing prose was for him throughout his life a painful task. He is fluent in his letters (which bear comparison with those of Keats), but one wishes Crane had more fully developed the poetics of his “Modern Poetry” or the posthumously published “General Aims and Theories.” One wishes that The Bridge might have had some of the capacious curiosity of Pound’s Cantos or Williams’s Paterson. Even more, however, one wishes for profounder meditation on the historical matter of The Bridge. For this, Crane seems to have relied on the myths of the school primer (the “copybook” of “Van Winkle”) and on attitudes gleaned from Whitman’s Democratic Vistas and Waldo Frank’s Our America. Later in the writing of The Bridge, he plundered William Carlos Williams’s essays that became In the American Grain.32 In Tate’s blunt words, Crane’s history “is the history of the motion picture, of the most naïve patriotism” (Poetry Reviews, 101). Whitman’s reading was far more various than Crane’s.
One aspect of this problem is Crane’s submission to the lyricization of poetry, his use of private lyric to write the cultural epic.33 My view is mollified somewhat by Jeffrey W. Westover, whose brilliant essay reads The Bridge through a postcolonial lens and illuminates in Crane’s imagery a good deal of social history not readily apparent. Although he cites Blackmur’s remark and suggests that Crane is “more interested in transcending American history than reporting it” (“Empire and America,” 134), he notes that Crane, writing his poem in 1926 on the Isle of Pines in Cuba, could not have been unaware of American “hemispheric hegemony” with the ownership of the property in a legal limbo since the Spanish-American War. He sees a “dialectic” (141) between his patron, Otto Kahn, who supported him, and the Otto Kahn who captained an industry that involved trains and ships and aeroplanes like those in the poem. He reads the unemployed hobos, the Indians dispossessed of their lands, and the placid golfing businessmen of “Quaker Hill” as part of Crane’s personal experience of the American cultural landscape. And if Kahn is honoured as the great “Chan” in “Atlantis,” he is the same man who delivered an address on “The Myth of American Imperialism” to the League for Industrial Democracy in 1924 (166–7).
If Crane’s critics, like Whitman’s, have placed undue emphasis on the spirituality of the final sections of both poems, more recent critics have made their tacit imperialism far more audible. Killingsworth notes that Democratic Vistas too – contemporary with Whitman’s poem and its “prose companion” – celebrates Whitman’s “commitment to the technological version of manifest destiny” in which “spirituality” alternates as a critique of materialism and a rationale for it (Whitman, 78). If The Bridge, even in the “Atlantis” section, does not quite replicate Whitman’s possessive embrace of foreign lands (“Long before the second centennial arrives there will be some forty to fifty great states, among them Canada and Cuba”), its relationship of the spiritual to the material is just as ambivalent.34 Nonetheless, as I have said, the true subject of Crane’s poem, as of any progress poem, is not history per se but a mythic template of history. The Bridge remains important because – and was pronounced a “failure” because – it strives to maintain the millennial patriotic optimism Whitman had articulated in his great poem, as Freneau and Barlow had in theirs.