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“Speaking as an American to Americans”

James Russell Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode” and the Idea of Nationhood

When I first encountered James Russell Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode,” I was a precocious young browser in an old anthology of American literature on the family bookshelf. At that age, my reading skills were too undeveloped to read through the poem. The editor’s note, however, assured me that “like all the later poems of the author, it is full of condensed thought and requires study” (Foerster, American Poetry, 772). So I turned the page. Later on, of course, I learned that the “schoolroom poets,” or “fireside poets,” wrote bad poetry; that they were sentimental, moralistic, simple minded; that they had been force-fed to schoolkids by schoolmarms for all the wrong reasons; and that they were safe to ignore. So they have been ignored and unread now by generations of students, the extravagant claims of one era replaced by the wilful ignorance of another. Through all this I privately sustained an affection for the poetry of Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier – even while the Brahmins, Lowell and Holmes, seemed unsalvageable.

I turned to Lowell’s ode, then, in the spirit of Cary Nelson’s conviction that texts “widely read or influential need to retain an active place in our sense of literary history, whether or not we happen, at present, to judge them of high quality.” There is provincialism of time as well as of place: “Our tendency to regard the taste of the past as quaint merely establishes our own time-bound position” (Repression, 51). Only after study have I come to grasp and appreciate Lowell’s strenuous wisdom. Review of critical opinion is quickly dispensed with: no journal article about the Lowell’s ode has appeared since 1943. The tenor of passing references is typified by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore: “It is a gauge of the mediocre level of the poetry of the Civil War that Lowell’s Ode should have been thought to have been one of its summits. One can understand Swinburne’s saying that, in contrast to Whitman, it did not leave in his ear ‘the echo of a single note of song’” (474). Even Lowell’s most recent editor – in what must be the most abject preamble to a poet’s work ever penned – declares, “there is nothing for us in such lines of the magnificence we find in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’; Lowell’s ode has importance as an historical document, but its pulse has faded” (M. Kaufman, in Lowell, Poetical Works, xxvi).

That Lowell’s poem may be experiencing a revival is signalled by Martin Griffin’s Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900, which appeared after this chapter had already been drafted. Griffin recognizes not only the pivotal importance of the poem but the demand that, in reading such a text – informed by “neither the lyric intensity of Romanticism nor the mythic intentions of modernism” – we must “make a more sustained effort to grasp [its] emotional and intellectual arguments” (23). Lowell’s mode is discursive and metaphorical. Griffin’s analysis focuses on the elegiac substance of the poem and its implications for the subsequent shaping of war memory in American culture. From the moment Lowell stepped forward to read his poem, “he was conscious of the fragility of memory and of the necessity of inventing it … From the earliest moment, the literature of Civil War memory was entwined with the politics of Civil War commemoration” (15–16). My focus is on that moment itself, its sense of accomplished nationalism (however distorted it soon became), and the nature of the patriotic passion it articulates.

For in its time, the poem embodied powerful feeling – an assurance that the terrible bloodletting had accomplished something positive. Edward Everett Hale declared: “There are passages in it that boys of generation upon generation will speak in school – and that will be remembered and repeated when people do not know whether Bull Run was a victory or a defeat” (Bail, “Commemoration Ode,” 182). Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote Lowell, “It is in my poor judgement not only your chef d’oeuvre – helping to reconcile your friends to your long silences – but also the first of American poems thus far” (Bail, 184). Edmund Clarence Stedman made an editorial exception in his monumental 1900 anthology American Poetry: “The reader will find but a few extended Odes other than Lowell’s Commemoration Ode or Stoddard’s majestic monody on Lincoln, either of which it would be criminal to truncate” (xvii). And Henry James affirmed: “No poet has ever placed the concrete idea of his country in a more romantic light than Mr. Lowell; no one, certainly, speaking as an American to Americans, has found on its behalf accents more eloquently tender, more beguiling to the imagination … [E]ach time I read over the Harvard Commemoration Ode, the more full and strong, the more august and pathetic, does it appear.”1

Lowell’s poem addresses a formative moment in American history with as much wisdom as any American poet has ever brought to bear on the tensions within national feeling. Yet it remains glaringly, stubbornly unfashionable. Having tried it in the classroom, I can attest that it is a hard sell not just because of its nineteenth-century language but even more because of its suspect nationalism and patriotism – topics that threaten to fill the air with platitudes. Can such a poem be approached in the twenty-first century with any sympathy at all? Necessary first is to interrogate the prejudices, both literary and political, that stand in the way; second, to grasp the issues in Lowell’s immediate context. The result will be not only a deepened understanding of Lowell’s poem and the taste that created it but also insight into the present state of American Studies (which has turned a blind eye to it) and into the larger social and political functions of poetry.

The prejudices run deep. They fall into three categories, ad hominem, ad ordinem, and ad genum – that is, against Lowell himself, against his social class, and against the kind of poem his ode represents.

The ad hominem arguments, which somehow cast Lowell’s lifelong campaign against slavery in an unflattering light, were established by two seminal figures in the creation of American Studies. Vernon Parrington’s savaging of Lowell as vacillating, inconsistent, without political principle – a youthful radical who grew conservative, a Federalist in sheep’s clothing – is patently excessive. Van Wyck Brooks a few years later went even further, accusing Lowell’s abolitionism of intellectual dishonesty: “Cambridge boys are Cambridge boys even when they marry Maria Whites. The radical note in Lowell’s work was a kind of inverse ventriloquism, in which the voice appeared to come from the poet, while the actual speaker was his wife” (330).2 Both critics, however, are driven by ulterior motives: Lowell’s Hamiltonian sympathy with the industrial northeast is an affront to the Jeffersonian Parrington, while his insistence on cultural and literary continuities with England is an affront to Brooks’s Seven Arts nativism. Both Parrington and Brooks wrote at a time when Lowell’s criticism was still a live presence. But even now his Hamiltonian position remains offensive to agrarian New Critics, populists, neo-Emersonian romanticists, Poundians, Beats, Marxists, eco-critics, and so on. Both Parrington and Brooks, in badmouthing Lowell for betraying the pure abolitionism of his youth, leave the impression that he drifted thoughtlessly into complacent conservatism, and this impression has become an idée reçue echoed by every subsequent commentator.

Yet the record reveals that, however centrist his political stance became – after the Civil War, when the punitive radical position against Confederate “traitors” had become counter-productive – Lowell never wavered in his abhorrence of slavery. A vocal supporter of the Republican Party from its inception in 1856, he encouraged Fremont’s campaign, and then in 1860 he was first a supporter of Seward; but Seward was too radical for his party, which, instead, turned to the more moderate dark horse Lincoln. Lowell embraced Lincoln’s candidacy, later taking pride that he had: “I did divine him earlier than most men of the Brahmin caste” (Letters, 2:342). Nonetheless, C. David Heymann cites Lowell’s 1861 essay “E Pluribus Unum” to argue that Lowell’s “respect for tradition and permanence” had softened his stand against racial injustice: “Slavery is no longer the matter in debate,” he quotes, “we must beware of being led off upon that side issue” (American Aristocracy, 118). But Lowell, as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, published that essay in the lame duck period after Lincoln’s election but before his inauguration, even as the Fort Sumter crisis was unfolding, knowing, as Lincoln did, that if Northern men had to march into battle, they would not do so merely to better the domestic arrangements of the African population. Heymann does not observe that, just before the election, Lowell had argued that “it is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican party lies,”3 or that three years later, during the presidential campaign of 1864, Lowell pronounced that “the single question of policy on which General McLellan differs from Mr Lincoln, stripped of the conventional phrases in which he drapes it, is Slavery” (Political Essays, 6:203). “It is Slavery, and not the Southern people, that is our enemy” (6:214). In all, Lowell’s statements throughout the Civil War, like Lincoln’s, are responsive to the Realpolitik of the times. They balance preservation of the Union – and by extension the American experiment in democratic governance – with the eradication of slavery. In fact, they equate the two. It makes no sense to diminish his commitment to both of these causes.

Unlike some other abolitionists, in fact, Lowell is refreshingly free of covert racism. In one review, for example, he concedes a point to a Southern apologist because “he writes no nonsense about difference of races” (Political Essays, 6:164). Earlier, in 1849, he had been deeply distressed when he sponsored Frederick Douglass for membership in the “Town and Country Club,” offering to pay his entrance fee. But Douglass was blackballed by none other than Emerson – or so Lowell believed – who could not overcome his instinctive “colorphobia.”4

To take another small point: Daniel Aaron, whose brief assessment of Lowell is relatively balanced, remarks that “the times made him prudent, and the man who ‘swore fealty’ to abolitionism in 1839 was ‘editorially’ twenty years later ‘a little afraid of John Brown.’” One might reply that six days after Harper’s Ferry, such fear was reasonable enough. Furthermore, his fear may have been more partisan than personal – the shock of Brown’s violence was for the moment a political liability to the radical Republicans. The context of the remark, however, reveals that Lowell not only claims to be less fearful than his publisher, Ticknor, but that he is writing to his long-time friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the most radical of the “Secret Six” Boston supporters of John Brown – the only one who openly refused to flee prosecution – inviting him to contribute something for Atlantic Monthly.5

The issue of Lowell’s unwavering stance on slavery is vital to a reading of his ode, if only because it is never directly mentioned in the 426 lines of the poem. Yet it underlies Lowell’s position in every word. For Lowell, the fulfilment of American nationhood arrived with the eradication of the slave system. Ultimately, the reasons for Lowell’s silence on the subject are as interesting as is the argument he advances in the ode; but there can be no ambivalence in his feelings about slavery.6

Much of the animus against Lowell can ultimately be traced to suspicion of his social class – a glaring form of reverse snobbism. Van Wyck Brooks’s sneer about “Cambridge boys” is plain enough. Parrington, in one of his milder pronouncements, says it directly: “his impulses were liberal and his mind generous, but he was never strong enough to overcome the handicap [sic] of the Lowell ancestry” (Main Currents, 2:452). True, he had acquired a classical education and became a well-connected Harvard professor. An elitist to be sure. But the antebellum Brahmins, as any scholar of the period knows, were not the idle rich icons of entitlement that they have been portrayed. The Gilded Age had not yet dawned. Antebellum entrepreneurs had scarcely imagined the financial stratagems soon to be invented by the American corporation. As Martin Duberman writes, the intellectual heritage of Puritan Cambridge instilled an “injunction of simplicity,” which bred “self-discipline and … a sense of responsibility to God and one’s fellow man” (James Russell Lowell, 4). Lowell the Brahmin was ironically self-conscious about the accident of his birth. More to the point, Lowell, as a knowing inheritor of the best Puritan tradition, was intellectually and morally committed to the equality of every human soul and to the betterment of society. Jefferson’s absolute that “all men are created equal” lies at the heart of his beliefs, in both the abolition of slavery and the institutions of American democracy.7 The two are inextricable. This Brahmin was a philosophical leveller.

Nonetheless, Heymann heads his biographical sketch of Lowell with the title “Natural Aristocrat” and suffuses his entire narrative with the air of quasi-feudal family responsibility. Even Daniel Aaron writes that Lowell had come to see “a new beauty in slow evolutionary progress” (Unwritten War, 32), implying a position of habitual gradualism. Yet Lowell in 1865, as the victorious Union began to agonize over its policies for Reconstruction, argued against gradualism and demanded immediate full citizenship and franchise for the emancipated slaves. Lowell neither waffled in his position against slavery, as Parrington charges, nor traded in a phony brand of radical chic, as Brooks implies.8

Turning to Lowell’s literary criticism, the state of affairs is little different. Scholars of American poetry typically categorize their subject into vast binaries – from Roy Harvey Pearce’s division of “Adamic” from “mythic” poets, to Harold Bloom’s declaration that American authors are either in Emerson’s tradition “or in a countertradition originating in opposition to him” (“Mr America”). Lowell, however, escapes these binaries. Like his friend Longfellow, he represents a crucial third alternative that one might describe as traditionalist, but which I will call internationalist. His effort to find an aesthetic via media offers a less stimulating discussion point for students of American exceptionalism than either Poe or Emerson; but Lowell’s criticism remains the most articulate statement for his own time of this internationalist view.

On one hand, Lowell was sympathetic to Poe’s formalism – he once despaired of ever making Emerson understand the importance of metre. “Few men are less sensible” than Emerson, he remarked, “of what makes a poem” (Criticism, 210). But he did not, like Poe, insist that the poet seek out originality in form, nor was his Puritan-derived moralism in any way akin to Poe’s privileging of aesthetic Beauty.

More important, although Lowell and Emerson were close friends and neighbours, Lowell decried “that exaggeration of the individual, and the depreciation of the social man, which has become the cant of modern literature” (Criticism, 148). Furthermore, he resisted nationalistic calls for an American literature. We are in “too great a hurry to have a literature of our own,” he wrote (103); it is an “unhealthy hankering” (104); there is “no fear but we shall have a national literature soon enough” (111). Lowell was keenly aware of America as a European provincial colony; American society, he believed, was not yet mature enough to produce a great literature: “We are yet too full of hurry and bustle [111] … We love concentration, epigrammatic brevity, antithesis … Under such circumstances, we need hardly expect a new crop of epics” (113). Lowell emphasized not a break from English tradition but continuity, critiquing nationalists for writing “as if Shakespeare, sprung from the race and the class which colonized New England, had not been also ours!” (122). If, like Poe, he was a committed formalist, he was strong minded enough to breathe the heady Emersonian air and maintain a critical distance.9

Lowell’s awareness of American provincialism presages the more Eurocentric attitudes of later expatriates – James, Pound, and Eliot. Lowell was deeply read in English literature, knew several continental languages, and had a cosmopolitan experience of Europe. Thus his literary vision was to a degree transnational, even foreseeing a future literature as “a vast commonwealth, with no dividing lines of nationality” (Lowell, Criticism, 144). I emphasize Lowell’s transnational vision because it has a direct bearing on the subject of his “Harvard Commemoration Ode” – its expression of American nationalism and American patriotism. In Lowell’s poem these are not facile sentiments. They are better understood, in the context of Lowell’s thought, as considered philosophical positions.

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Antebellum America, in the words of Henry James, possessed “no State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name” (Hawthorne, 43). And Edward Everett Hale, in a popular wartime fiction, explored what it might be like to be “A Man without a Country.” The typical American looked not to the federal but to the state government for authority. Thus in the epilogue to his magisterial history of the Civil War, James M. McPherson devotes one paragraph to a revealing analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s prose. “Before 1861,” he remarks, “the two words ‘United States’ were generally rendered as a plural noun … The war marked a transition of the United States to a singular noun.” Likewise, the “Union” also became the “Nation”:

Lincoln’s wartime speeches betokened this transition. In his first inaugural address he used the word “Union” twenty times and the word “nation” not once. In his first message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, he used “Union” thirty-two times and “nation” three times. In his letters to Horace Greeley of August 22, 1862, on the relationship of slavery to the war, Lincoln spoke of the Union eight times and of the nation not at all. Little more than a year later, in his address at Gettysburg, the president did not refer to the “Union” at all but used the word “nation” five times to invoke the new birth of freedom and nationalism for the United States. And in his second inaugural address, looking back over the events of the past four years, Lincoln spoke of one side seeking to dissolve the Union in 1861 and the other accepting the challenge of war to preserve the nation. (Battle Cry, 859)

Similar analysis underscores my major point about Lowell’s ode. In it, the word “union” fails to appear; but the word “nation” appears three times, at emphatic positions in the final sections of the poem. The central section – the stanza on Lincoln sometimes singled out for praise at the expense of the rest – describes Lincoln not as the “greatest” American but as the “first” American. Lincoln’s act of emancipation had finally brought Jefferson’s ideal of human equality to fulfillment (or seemed to) and had answered Dr Johnson’s pointed question, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negros?” (McPherson, Battle Cry, 876).10 Lowell’s poem, in a self-conscious way, enacts the sacramental moment when “Union” became “Nation.”

The moment was, of course, extraordinary. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on 9 April 1865. Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday, 15 April. The Harvard Commemoration took place barely three months later on 21 July. Every person present was aware of those who were absent, the young collegians who had died in the terrible war – some ninety-nine in number, including Lowell’s three beloved nephews, and Robert Gould Shaw, married to Lowell’s sister. Daniel Aaron, reading the Harvard biographies of these men, underscores “the idealism of the young patricians. Some were inculcated with the abolitionism of their families; the majority were not abolitionists at all. Most of them enlisted in order to put down ‘horrid Rebellion,’ and although war violated the religious convictions of many, the peril to the Union overcame their scruples” (Unwritten War, 160).11 Because of the war, the status of American nationhood, in the North at least, had become less provisional, less qualified by the narrow states’ rights arguments of the slaveholders (who nonetheless expected Northern states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law). The Great Experiment in representative democracy was in less danger of being judged a failure, now that the resistance of the South to the results of the 1860 election had been put down by military force.12 American nationhood, and the patriotic feelings engendered by these events, thus became the topos of Lowell’s address.

In such circumstances, it is no wonder that Lowell confessed to writer’s block when he sat to write his poem. But his political writings before and during the Civil War reveal that he had thought deeply about the idea of American nationhood. When the block released, the poem, he said, came in a great flood.

For Lowell, the greatest achievement of the American imagination was its democratic system of government, a system that Old World observers expected to collapse under any pressure. If America has not yet produced a great literature, he argued more than once, it has produced a “great epic … whose books are States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California” (Criticism, 18). “If we have been to blame for the Columbiad,” he said, “we have also given form, life, and the opportunity of entire development to social ideas ever reacting with more and more force upon the thought and the literature of the Old World” (123).13 The United States is “not a mere partnership, dissolvable whether by mutual consent or on the demand of one or more of its members, but a Nation” (Lowell, Political Essays, 6:78). We are “a nation, and not a mass-meeting” (65). Conscious of contemporary struggles for national unification in Italy and Germany, Lowell saw in the American secessionist conflict not only the gravest test of democratic government but also the instrument that would bring American nationhood into being. As the Minutemen “began a conflict which gave us independence,” he wrote, so the present struggle “began another which is to give us nationality” (107–8).14 “What was at first a struggle to maintain the outward form of our government has become a contest to preserve the life and assert the supreme will of the nation … It was not against the Constitution that the Rebels declared war, but against free institutions” (205). In the end he was able to confound the teachers of political philosophy, who “had always taught us that democracies were incapable of the sentiment of loyalty” (223). “Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so searching a strain as ours during the last three years; never has any shown itself stronger” (225).

Nowadays, many readers view patriotic sentiments like these with deepest suspicion. Naturally enough. Patriotism is often merely an excuse for a long weekend, Fourth of July fireworks and brass bands, symbols of conspicuous consumption. Even worse, it has been co-opted by right-wing political groups, under the banners of hawkish militarism and America-first nationalism. “My country right or wrong.” Foreign visitors are struck by the excesses of American patriotism. Against this, there is widespread feeling that America has failed to realize its social promise, that the equality of every man (and woman) remains a fiction, and, internationally, that military enterprises in Iraq, Latin America, Vietnam, and elsewhere have been morally indefensible. We are ready to agree with Dr Johnson that patriotism is “the last refuge of a scoundrel” (Boswell, Johnson, 615).

Patriotism too is a communitarian attitude deeply at odds with Emersonian self-reliance and the mythos of the frontier. Tocqueville famously discussed this contradiction, and Walt Whitman was troubled by it, tucking his remarks away in a footnote to Democratic Vistas: “Must not the virtue of modern Individualism, continually enlarging, usurping all, seriously affect, perhaps keep down entirely, in America, the like of the ancient virtue of Patriotism, the fervid and absorbing love of general country? I have no doubt myself that the two will merge, and will mutually profit and brace each other, and that from them a greater product, a third, will arise. But I feel that at present they and their oppositions form a serious problem and paradox in the United States.”15 It is doubtful whether Whitman’s quasi-Hegelian synthesis has yet occurred, given that the most fervent patriotism so often cohabits the same brain with a profound suspicion of government.

Until recently, political philosophers have ignored the question; but the past few decades have seen a spate of philosophical argument about the ethics of patriotism – whether it is a virtue, or a vice, or something in between, nuanced by qualifications or by the particulars of circumstance. I find this debate directly relevant to Lowell’s position in his ode. My purpose here is not to rehearse the philosophers’ arguments but to borrow certain distinctions to illuminate Lowell’s position. At a moment when feelings of every kind were running high, one of the virtues of Lowell’s poem is that he does not inflame them, nor merely express them, but instead holds them up to examination.

First, Lowell’s patriotism is critical, neither naively emotional nor ethnocentric. It is not a worldly Machiavellianism. Nor does it appeal, somewhat surprisingly, to a common topos of contemporary sermons, that the Civil War was God’s punishment for the sin of slavery.16 As Lowell’s abolitionist prose reveals, his patriotism does not rule out sharp critiques of the status quo. The ode sets aside lesser personal motives for going to war – romantic adventure, masculinity, honour, group instinct. It minimizes sectional identification with the North and ignores regimental associations with particular states. The word “treason” (346) appears in stanza 10, which dismisses the Cavalier Theory of the Confederacy, but it does not otherwise dwell on “traitor” and “rebel,” nor does it vilify the South, nor even Lincoln’s assassin. Lowell is indeed fully aware that, in practice, “the masses of any people, however intelligent, are very little moved by abstract principles of humanity and justice, until … some infringement upon their own rights” (Political Essays, 6:250–1). Yet his ode focuses on the idealism that Daniel Aaron discovered in those biographies of the dead students.

Second, Lowell’s patriotism is founded on the Enlightenment proposition “that all men are created equal.” It is thus both limited and conditional on the maintenance of a particular social contract. He recognized that he was living in “one of those periods of excitement … giving to the mere words country, human rights, democracy, a meaning and force beyond that of sober argument”; but he had absorbed the lesson of the French Revolution “that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work” (Political Essays, 6:229). The just political system can rise only out of the corporate ethical acceptance of “the rights of man,” in contradistinction to “feudal” and “Oriental” caste systems: America must decide “whether the Occidental or the Oriental theory of society is to mould our future” (29). In an operative community, the African slave is an equal person, not three-fifths of a person, and so is every present and future immigrant to the nation.

Third, Lowell’s patriotism assumes a qualified American exceptionalism that verges, at times, on an oxymoronic transnational patriotism. America is exceptional in having been the first nation to attempt democracy on a large scale and in having invented its particular democratic form of government. But patriotic devotion is owed not so much to a particular nation as to an abstract principle that can be adopted by other sovereign nations. In one utopian moment, Lowell envisions “a single empire embracing the whole world … one language, one law, one citizenship over thousands of miles, and a government on the whole so good that we seem to have forgotten what government means” (Political Essays, 6:81). This is, of course, the familiar secularized version of Puritan America as a “city on a hill” and a “light to all nations.” It receives expression elsewhere in the remarkable last book of Barlow’s Columbiad and in Whitman’s “Passage to India”; and, depending on one’s understanding of “empire,” it has ominous as well as benevolent implications. American dominance outside its borders had not yet been imagined, nor had the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, been abandoned. America’s subsequent drift towards foreign imperialism and corporate oligarchy is not ruled out by Lowell’s language. But his ideal is a transnational patriotism that envisions the American nation as one part of a larger global whole.

Finally, Lowell’s patriotism is not a “constitutional” but a “covenanted” patriotism, a distinction pointed out by Igor Primoratz: constitutional patriotism is a concept developed by German thinkers Dolf Sternberger and Jürgen Habermas in the wake of the Nazi catastrophe. Attempting to sidestep the pull of ethnic and cultural bonds, Habermas proposes a purely political patriotism on the model of Switzerland and the United States. These nations, he claims, offer proof that a political culture in which constitutional principles can take root need by no means depend on all citizens sharing the same language or the same ethnic and cultural origins. A liberal political culture is only the common denominator for a constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus) that heightens an awareness of both the diversity and the integrity of the different forms of life coexisting in a multicultural society (Primoratz, Patriotism, 20).

But such a patriotism is too legalistic. More to the point, in antebellum America the Constitution itself was fatally flawed. Lincoln once compared the American Constitution to an “apple of silver,” as opposed to the Declaration of Independence, an “apple of gold” (Primoratz, Patriotism, 240). Lowell likewise saw the American Constitution as a document damaged by its expedient compromises with slavery. “What do they mean by the Constitution?” he asks of Lincoln’s opponents in 1859. “Property?” They mean “that Labor has no rights which Capital is bound to respect.” (This comment is particularly pointed coming from a scion of northeastern industry, but it reflects Republican “free labor” policy.17) The other parties argue, he says, “not merely the narrow principles of a section, but the still narrower and more selfish ones of caste” (Political Essays, 6:31). They defend dogmas “which would serve equally well to justify the enslavement of every white man unable to protect himself” (51–2). The Republicans, on the other hand, are united by “a common faith in the principles and practice of the Republic” (43). These, he says, appeal “to conscience as well as reason … bringing the theories of the Declaration of Independence to the test of experience” (45). A covenant, that is, involves not just divine blessings but obligations of faith in return. When the Southern states drew up their own document, Lowell scoffed at the Confederate parody of a Declaration of Independence “that hangs the franchise of human nature on the kink of a hair, and substitutes for the visionary right of all men to the pursuit of happiness the more practical privilege of some men to pursue their own negro” (70). “Their quarrel is not with the Republican party, but with the theory of Democracy” (71).18

Lowell’s position is very close to that expounded by John H. Schaar in his essay “The Case for Covenanted Patriotism.” The similarity is hardly surprising since Schaar’s primary spokesman for covenanted patriotism is Lincoln. Schaar sees his formulation as suitable to nations like the United States, whose ethnic and cultural diversity discourages a natural patriotism. In the United States, he argues, citizens, “a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the walls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments … Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic” (238–9). Schaar’s notion of “covenant” is greater than a political contract like a constitution: it is invested with the emotional commitment of a religious bond, like the Yahwist covenants of Hebrew scripture or the Puritan “covenant of grace.”19 As Schaar notes, the chief task of political life, Lincoln said, was to inculcate the values of a “political religion.” The survival of the covenant depends on “an informed citizenry, and the first task of leadership is the formation of such a citizenry” (240). As time passed, Schaar notes, America opened its doors to the stranger: “Only one restriction remained: the strangers had to become republicans” (242).20

Schaar’s advocacy of a “covenanted patriotism” is both more complex and more passionate than I can suggest here. And, as Margaret Canovan suggests, it is open to the charge of covert imperialism: “Although Schaar takes pains to stress that this kind of patriotism does not involve an imperialistic urge to impose one’s principles on others,” she observes, his concept of America’s “‘teaching mission’ does rather give the game away, at any rate to those on the receiving end of the instruction” (“Breathes,” 186). Nonetheless, Schaar’s purpose is analogous to Lowell’s in the 1860s – to generate “a revitalized radical politics in this country,” a politics founded on the proposition that all men, white and black, are created equal.21

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Highly conscious of the genre of the public ode, Lowell was constrained from speaking with personal involvement, like Whitman in Drum Taps, or from the post-facto analysis that allows Melville his characteristic ironies in Battle Pieces. Elegiac feelings were admissible but could not be allowed to dominate. Instead, Lowell was obliged to speak with a public voice, using epideictic rhetoric, adopting the firstperson plural. And if he was aware of his own weakness for moralizing,22 he was aware too that the occasion called for acute moral analysis, and sentiments that would resonate with the public that listened to him, requiring an Augustan grandeur of generalization. These sentiments include some highly non-romantic, non-Emersonian attitudes, including the subordination of the individual to moral and religious forces “Outside of Self” (line 211), the inadequacy of poetic expression, and the superiority of action over word or thought. None of these attitudes is likely to win admirers in the persistent romanticism of the present day, but they are essential to his discourse.

The goal of Lowell’s discourse is to affirm American nationhood, but the first half of his poem defines the power of the individual – defines, that is, in the sense of recognizing not only the claims of the individual but also the limitations. He begins with a common humility topos, offering only a “trivial song” (7) to the returning soldiers, underscoring the disparity with an ironic catachresis of “squadronstrophes” and “battle-odes” (9–10). Lowell’s poet is no liberating god but a mere mortal non-combatant. And turning first to the ceremonial occasion, he addresses Harvard as “Reverend Mother” (15) whose care is “Veritas” (37) – the motto of the college. However conventional, this opening gambit establishes several fundamental ideas: the relationship of the person to the scholastic institution and the heritage of human learning; and, with the metaphor of “Reverend Mother” (15), the relationship of the male person to family, to religious authority, and to the female; and, finally, the relationship of all of these to the ultimate reality of “Death’s idle gulf” (23): “No lore of Greece or Rome, / No science peddling with the names of things, / Or reading stars to find inglorious fates” – that is, no humanities, material sciences, or even religious prophecy – is sufficient in itself. Veritas as knowledge without application, as faith without works, is dead.

Many in sad faith sought for her,

Many with crossed hands sighed for her;

But these, our brothers, fought for her,

At life’s dear peril wrought for her,

So loved her that they died for her,

Tasting the raptured fleetness

Of her divine completeness. (46–52)

The gendering of Veritas, with the emphatic epanalepsis “for her,” metaphorically endows this action with male sexual drive, the fulfilment of Self in the Other.

Stanzas 4 and 5 set these assertions in the context of two inexorable realities: the passage of time and the opposition of hostile forces. “What is there that abides / To make the next age better for the last?” If faith is worthless without action, however, individual human action is subject to doubt, the whims of Fortune, the discovery that “what men call treasure” is without value. The individual life unsupported by higher allegiances is no more than

A long account of nothings paid with loss,

Where we, poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,

 After our little hour of strut and rave,

With all our pasteboard passions and desires,

Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,

 Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. (82–7)

Lowell’s puppet metaphor here raises the spectre of materialist determinism and, with its echo of Macbeth’s poor player “that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,” teeters on the brink of despair. Lowell is only playing devil’s advocate for cynicism, however. He draws back, making the turn to affirm the individual’s freedom of choice – “For in our likeness still we shape our fate” (90).

The vision of bodies “tossed pell-mell together in the grave” (87) can only call to mind the death of Robert Gould Shaw, one of the ninety-nine collegians whose absence was so deeply felt, though he remains unnamed. Shaw, whose family members were close to the Lowells, had of course died heroically leading his regiment of black soldiers in a futile charge on Fort Wagner in Charleston. Shaw was an abolitionist martyr. The story was and is well known, as was the story of his burial – denied an officer’s honours by contemptuous Southern soldiers and tossed recklessly into a common grave with his black company. Thus Shaw had shaped his fate through his own free will, so joining his “feeble light” (93) with that heavenly light “from fountains elder than the Day” (100).

Decisive action will inevitably meet opposition; and although “Peace hath her not ignoble wreath” (118), the individual is bound to confront “the shock of hostile creeds” (114) – a creed like slavery, which finds support in a narrow literalist reading of the Bible. “Some day,” he declares,

  the live coal behind the thought,

 Whether from Baal’s stone obscene,

 Or from the shrine serene

 Of God’s pure altar brought,

Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen

Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught,

And, helpless in the fiery passion caught,

Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men. (123–9)

Lowell figures this war of creeds in the struggle between Elijah and the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel, the association of Baal worship with child sacrifice making the allusion all the more appropriate. Curiously, in what I can only understand as unintentional ambivalence, Lowell seems uncertain whether the flame bursts from Baal’s altar or from God’s – the confusion probably arising because the South began the hostilities (see 1 Kings 18). The outcome “shakes all the pillared state,” and this phrase points to the transition to the less conventional argumentation of the ode.

Lowell here introduces his eulogy of Lincoln as the one who found his individual fulfilment in service to the nation – the pivotal point of the poem, which then turns to explore the implications of nationhood. That Lowell depicts Lincoln, the “Martyr-Chief” (150) and “shepherd of mankind” (167), as a type of Christ is obvious. Lowell’s Unitarian Christ, however, is not a transcendent Person of the Trinity, but a Perfect Man, one of the people, the prime moral teacher and example. Furthermore, Nature, “choosing sweet clay from the breast / Of the unexhausted West,” has created this “first American” as a second Adam (see Genesis 2:7), with “nothing of Europe here” (185). Untouched by any feudal “names of Serf and Peer” (187), Lincoln is thus the type of the democratic Common Man:

 His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind.

 Thrusting to thin air o’er our cloudy bars,

 A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;

 Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,

 Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,

Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. (178–83)

Lowell’s lines may be contrasted with those of Richard Henry Stoddard, whose Horatian ode praises Lincoln in similar terms, but in a very different tone:

And this he was, who most unfit

(So hard the sense of God to hit!)

 Did seem to fill his Place.

 With such a homely face, –

Such rustic manners, – speech uncouth, –

(That somehow blundered out the Truth!)

 Untried, untrained to bear

 The more than kingly Care?

Ay! And his genius put to scorn

The proudest in the purple born,

 Whose wisdom never grew

 To what, untaught, he knew –

The People, of whom he was one.

No gentleman like Washington, –

 (Whose bones, methinks, make room,

 To have him in their tomb!) …

Common his mind (it seemed so then),

His thoughts the thoughts of other men:

 Plain were his words, and poor –

 But now they will endure! …

No hero, this, of Roman mould;

Nor like our stately sires of old:

 Perhaps he was not Great –

 But he preserved the State!23

Stoddard’s condescension to this untaught, uncouth rustic – no “gentleman” like Washington – is thick with class consciousness, an attitude one might carelessly impute to the Brahmin Lowell. But if Stoddard’s Lincoln is not “of Roman mould” (presumably because he lacked a classical education), Lowell’s is “one of Plutarch’s men” (190):

Great captains, with their guns and drums,

 Disturb our judgment for the hour,

  But at last silence comes;

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,

Our children shall behold his fame.

 The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man.

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,

 New birth of our new soil, the first American. (201–8)

Only at this point can Lowell avow that America is indeed a “Promised Land / That flows with Freedom’s honey and milk” (232–3), evoking – almost in passing – the familiar Puritan typology. This typology, however, forms the underlying template of the entire ode: the poem enacts a conversion moment, in Puritan terms, in which the entire nation has shed its egregious sin of slavery and has been reborn. The Union has embraced its new Covenant, which ensures liberty to every individual regardless of race, in return for the obligation to live out one’s life in consonance with the ethos of the nation as a whole.24

The remainder of stanza 8 memorializes the war dead, finding consolation in the biblical story: “’Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay, / But the high faith that failed not by the way” (253–4). Behind these casual allusions stands the weighty mythology detailed by Sacvan Bercovitch: at the beginning of the war, Lowell, as one of “the Jeremiahs of the industrialized Northern states,” had little doubt of God’s divine plan; and now at the happy ending, America has become “the realization of the kingdom of God” (Jeremiad, 173–4). The dead – all too smoothly – are figured as angelic guardians of the nation’s consciousness:

I see them muster in a gleaming row,

With ever-youthful brows that nobler show;

We find in our dull road their shining track;

 In every nobler mood

We feel the orient of their spirit glow,

Part of our life’s unalterable good. (261–6)

Stanza 9, parallel to stanza 4, then sets this consciousness of nationhood in the context of cosmic time, where even “the deep-bolted stars still shift and range.” If the past, he muses, is littered with “poor ghosts of kings, / Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust,” what shall become of this new nation? Lowell is no doubt mindful not only of mutability in general but also of the thinking that found democracies unstable. He promises no end to change, and his rhetoric in fact rises to a climactic affirmation of “a new imperial race” – the adjective disturbing in context. But his argument is otherwise consistent: “Yea, Manhood hath a wider span / And larger privilege of life than man” (310–11). The individual is subsumed into “Manhood,” and if the individual sacrifice is forgotten, it is compensated in “that high privilege that makes all men peers, / That leap of heart whereby a people rise” – not an empire but “a people,” a people in which all, white and black, are equals (216–17).

Stanza 9 dismisses the alternative Southern interpretation of American origins with contempt:

  Who now shall sneer?

 Who dare again to say we trace

Our lines to a plebeian race?

 Roundhead and Cavalier! (329–32)

The Cavalier Theory, with all its class consciousness, has been proved wrong not by syllogism but by Northern victory; its feudal attitudes belong to the European past, a small affair by comparison: “Tell us not of Plantagenets, / Hapsburgs, and Guelfs, whose thin bloods crawl / Down from some victor in a border-brawl!” (339–41). The “sullen ears” of present-day Europe – the Old World that looked on expecting and hoping for a Southern victory – have been set tingling “with vain resentments and more vain regrets.” The Civil War was much larger than a mere family dispute, as it has often been figured. The outcome of the war allows Lowell to pronounce his blessing upon “a rescued Nation” (345).

Stanza 11, shifting into ceremonious trochaics, is the summation of the ode: “The strain should close that consecrates our brave” (355), both living and dead:

 ’Tis no Man we celebrate,

 By his country’s victories great,

 A hero half, and half the whim of Fate,

 But the pith and marrow of a Nation

 Drawing force from all her men,

 Highest, humblest, weakest, all,

For her time of need, and then

 Pulsing it again through them,

 Till the basest can no longer cower,

 Feeling his soul spring up divinely tall,

 Touched but in passing by her mantle-hem. (365–75)

The empowering of nationhood, like religious faith, is reciprocal. Lowell’s superb biblical allusion is powerful and apt: if the nation draws strength from every one of its people, patriotic fidelity to the nation in turn blesses each individual with strength beyond the one, like the woman who was cured by the touching of Jesus’s garment (Luke 8). The poet bids the celebrations begin – cannons, bells, banners, beacon-fires “across a kindling continent” (389): The nation “is saved, and all have helped to save her” (391).

But, looking to the future, the poet has yet one more affirmation:

She that lifts up the manhood of the poor,

 She of the open soul and open door,

 With room about her hearth for all mankind!

 The fire is dreadful in her eyes no more …

 No challenge sends she to the elder world,

That looked askance and hated; a light scorn

 Plays o’er her mouth, as round her mighty knees

She calls her children back, and waits the morn

 Of nobler day, enthroned between her subject seas. (392–405)

Lowell’s internationalism proclaims itself as he inserts the nation into a global context. Less interesting than the “I told you so” taunt to Old World sceptics is Lowell’s vision of the “open door.” This unexpected turn at the end of the poem instantly broadens the definition of American nationhood that Lowell has been forming. Having looked to the injustices of the past and having fought a bloody war to correct them, Lowell now looks to the future, with hope for “all mankind.”

Immigration patterns had been diluting the largely British Protestant population of the seaboard states since 1830, spurring the growth of xenophobic nativism. Lowell himself lived in Boston, a community that had been favoured by Irish immigrants in the wake of the 1840s Potato Famine – a population alien enough, Catholic enough, to give rise to a hostile political party, the Know-Nothings, a party led by a former president who was successful in several important elections, particularly in Massachusetts in the 1850s. Furthermore, many former Know-Nothings had joined Lowell’s own party, becoming free-soil Republicans. More recently, in 1863, violent and bloody antidraft riots in the Irish ghettos of New York City, partly stirred by opposition Democrats, had threatened the federal government’s ability to recruit manpower for the Northern army.25 In this context, Lowell’s enlightened welcome is particularly refreshing.

If Lowell’s lines now bring to mind, anachronistically, Frédéric Bartholdi’s icon of Liberty erected in New York harbour in 1886, the association is more than coincidental. When, in 1883, Emma Lazarus published her now famous poem “The New Colossus” in a fundraising effort, Lowell wrote to the young Jewish poet: “I liked your sonnet about the Statue,” he said, “much better than I like the Statue itself … [your poem] gives its subject a raison d’être which it wanted before quite as much as it wanted a pedestal” (Lehmann, “Colossal Ode,” 120–2). When Lowell’s ode includes in its closing prayer the belief that “No poorest in thy borders but may now / Lift to the juster skies a man’s enfranchised brow,” his notion of franchise embraces the future immigrant as well as the emancipated slave.

The final stanza of the ode is indeed a prayer of gratitude for the survival of the nation “bright beyond compare”:

 What were our lives without thee?

 What all our lives to save thee?

 We reck not what we gave thee;

 We will not dare to doubt thee,

But ask whatever else, and we will dare! (422–6)26

Lowell’s poem affirms what he considered to be the consensual cohesiveness of the nation – if only the slave-holding South could be reconciled to the Union victory and the full citizenship of its former slaves. That reconciliation, alas, has yet to take place.

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This reading of Lowell’s poem ignores, of course, most of the complaints about its language – that the nineteenth-century high style is bookish, stilted, verbose; that the syntax is sometimes gnarled; that the expression sometimes approaches Arnoldian awfulness (see lines 108–9). And, in advocating the poem, I ignore the problematics of Lowell’s idealism, his underestimation of the persistence of Southern sentiments, his 1865 sense of accomplishment that fails to foresee the negations of Reconstruction, the rise of American imperialism, the unleashing of rampant industrialization and corporationism. But the “Harvard Commemoration Ode” is clearly an important poem, difficult enough, rich enough in its achievement. “To recover the poem for ourselves is,” in Martin Griffin’s words, also to restore “a lost memory of American literature” (Ashes of the Mind, 32).

That such restoration is needed is surely a comment on the present state of American Studies. Literary scholars continue to do well with central figures of the current canon, and they have been assiduous in resurrecting any number of more or less worthy forgotten writers. But for those who were once widely read, respected, memorized, and quoted in their day, there seems to be a blind spot. While musicians revalue the likes of MacDowell and Amy Beach, and the art market heats up for the Hudson River painters – artists once thought derivative of European models and thus beneath notice – Lowell and the other “schoolroom poets” remain in their shrouds. As Cary Nelson has advised, scholars need to know who these writers were, and why they were powerful enough for subsequent generations to need to assassinate and bury them.

The designation “fireside poets” reminds us that these writers were owned and read in literate homes, just as “schoolroom poets” reminds us that these were the writers promoted by educators. Poetry was a keeper of the national conscience, and its cultural work was valued. Edward Everett Hale, we have noticed, predicted that Lowell’s ode contains passages “that boys of generation upon generation will speak in school” – and so they did. Angela Sorby, for one, has recently noted that “schoolroom poetry can never be merely private; it is always intersubjective, involving cultural transmissions or exchanges” (Schoolroom Poets, xiii). There seems to be a revival afoot. Christoph Irmscher has recently advanced a similar case for Longfellow, who “pretty much invented poetry as a public idiom in the United States” and saw the writing of poetry as a civic virtue (3). And, in Songs of Ourselves, Joan Shelley Rubin treats Lowell and the schoolroom poets prominently in her study of poetry’s role in the articulation of American cultural values. Such poetry is not merely private, not merely “overheard.” It is populist and accessible, a public poetry intended to become part of the shared culture of an imagined community. Yet as Michael C. Cohen laments, Lowell’s ode in its time not only set a moral standard that “no temporal government,” certainly not the administrations of Andrew Johnson or Ulysses S. Grant could attain, but it also “commemorates the passing of the kind of public verse” that Lowell and his generation had championed. Such poetry, “which once shaped the social order” would have “a much less important place in the new, postbellum world” (“Whittier,” 279).