Amanda Gailey
The mid‐nineteenth century witnessed radical changes in the American literary marketplace and American national literary identity. During this period, both periodicals and anthologies rose as complementary media forms that helped develop and sustain a national literary identity, the former by identifying new voices and maintaining poetry as an urgent, timely, public form; the latter by selecting, preserving and standardizing a canon of national literature. Periodical poetry was part of what Jürgen Habermas calls “the public sphere,” the public exchange of ideas among private citizens that kept the modern state attuned to the concerns of the people (Habermas 1989: 30). This poetry was often political and appeared alongside news and argument in newspapers and magazines. Anthologies often drew their contents from periodicals, but editorial selection principles, marketing objectives, and the medium of the book so radically changed the context of the poems that they presented a distilled, seemingly apolitical, and stable worldview. Periodicals implied a nation in flux, grappling with how to change; anthologies implied an established nation, proud of its identity. In periodicals, poets published a range of conventional and polemical work; anthologies preserved poems that seemed timeless and enduring, thereby affirming conventional views of morality and social relations.
The importance of these media can be seen vividly in the career of Walt Whitman, with whom this chapter will begin and conclude. Whitman’s poetic reputation relied on both periodicals and anthologies. When he was born in 1819, only one anthology of American poetry had ever been published: Elihu Hubbard Smith’s American Poems, Selected and Original, in 1793. When Whitman died 72 years later, however, anthologies had become such ubiquitous and powerful tastemakers that he actually felt plagued by them, mostly because they aggrandized his rivals and failed to note much value in his poems except for the most conventional ones. Toward the end of his life, Whitman received a request from Harper Brothers to reprint “O Captain! My Captain!” – a poem about the death of President Lincoln he originally published in a periodical – in a school anthology. Whitman complained to his friend Horace Traubel:
It’s My Captain again: always My Captain: the school readers have got along as far as that! My God! when will they listen to me for whole and good? When John Swinton was here he said: “Walt, I’m sorry you ever wrote that damn poem!” I said to him: “I am, too, John, but there’s no help for it now: let’s resign ourselves to the inevitable!”
(Traubel 1915: 392–393)
This poem was certainly the most popular of Whitman’s to nineteenth‐century readers, and unlike most of his other poems, it had a conventional rhyme scheme and meter. Whitman was frustrated that the public had largely failed to appreciate his larger, more complex and idiosyncratic oeuvre and had instead fixated on one of his most conventional and uncharacteristic verses. “O Captain!” was a particularly successful example of a nineteenth‐century American literary phenomenon: conventional poems that were born in the pages of American periodicals and migrated to anthologies where they helped define an American national literature.
Like many anthology poems, “O Captain!” offered American readers a comforting picture of their national history. Through the metaphor of a ship’s captain dying just as the ship was sailing victoriously into port, just as Lincoln was assassinated as the Civil War was drawing to a close, “O Captain!” frames a raw, highly political national catastrophe as timeless tragedy, set in a non‐specific time and place, and thereby drawing out the presumptively universal qualities of both Lincoln’s death and national shock and mourning. Through its atemporal and indeterminate geographical setting, the poem elevated the national disaster from outrage to universal tragedy, asking readers to generalize, to think of the assassination as an instance of a kind of recurring human suffering, rather than as a specific historical and political event. This made it ripe for preservation in anthologies of American poetry.
Throughout the early nineteenth century, periodicals and anthologies worked in tandem to create a national poetry. Both periodicals and anthologies published popular poetry, and the strengths of the two mediums complemented each other. Periodicals could often print and reprint materials quickly, allowing local poets to find audiences and providing space for poems that spoke to particular occasions and debates. When American book publishing was still struggling to overcome the hurdles of poor distribution networks and a copyright system that rewarded pirating British texts over investing in American literature, periodicals offered an environment that was more hospitable to American poetry. As Susan Belasco has noted, periodicals published unknown poets but were also crucial to developing audiences for established writers (2008: 182–183). Newspapers in particular published credited and anonymous contributions from members of the community, including women, for whom other avenues of publication were often difficult, and reprinted poems from books and other American newspapers, which helped make the pages of many early nineteenth‐century newspapers places where obscure and established poets comingled to assert the importance of poetry as a popular art form and offer creative perspectives on current events or community mores. Newspaper poems were often short and worked well for filling out periodical pages – this was before advances in printing that would eventually lead to illustrations and advertising more easily performing that function. Sometimes poems in periodicals seemed like filler; other times they were spotlighted by the publication. At times, they seemed to summon a ritualized voice from the community, offering a perspective in a tone that was more profound and solemn than the prose of the journalism that cohabited the page. For example, during the War of 1812 Francis Scott Key’s poem “Defence of Fort M’Henry” was circulated in periodicals such as The American, The Baltimore Patriot, and Analectic Magazine before it was renamed “The Star‐Spangled Banner” and eventually made the official national anthem of the United States.
In general, periodicals were timely and disposable, and contrasted with the more enduring, expensive medium of the book. Periodicals provided an opportunity for publication and time‐sensitive commentary, but they were not adequate on their own to develop and sustain a canon of American literature, which critics believed was necessary for the cultural maturation of the new nation. In a piece for the North American Review in 1815, Walter Channing decried the underdevelopment of literature in the United States, arguing that American readers had become too complacent about consuming British literature and were not adequately supporting American cultural products. He pointed to newspapers as one of the exceptions – in their pages American writers were active. However, this medium was inadequate to develop a robust national literature. He explained that
our best writers have been unfortunate in the vehicles they have chosen as depositories of their intellectual productions. These depositories have been chiefly newspapers and pamphlets of various kinds. Now there is something ephemeral and temporary about the very nature of these publications. Hence their contents are not safe. A man who writes in them does not think of writing for immortality. […] If it turns out that his communication pleases, it excites but a momentary emotion of pleasure. […] The literature, farther, of newspapers and pamphlets, is almost always controversial literature; and in controversy we are always more interested for the champions of party, than for their writings.
(Channing 1815: 41)
Channing’s complaints about periodicals as the primary medium for a national literature – that they are ephemeral and political and therefore do not lend themselves to writings meant to endure – made a case for anthologies. “Would not a collection for all that has been done for poetry among us, which is worthy of the name, be an honorable labour for a vigorous mind?” he asked (Channing 1815: 42). Anthologies would select the best American efforts and put them into a medium that would both preserve and elevate them.
Implicit in Channing’s call for anthologies over periodicals was a view that poetry should appear to be apolitical and timeless: rather than speak to partisan interests or comment on current events, as periodical poetry did, enduring poetry should avoid controversy and touch on universal themes. What counted as timeless, universal, and consequently the “best” was culturally and politically determined, though, so such a call had a conservative influence on literature. Poetry that avoided controversy affirmed the status quo, and what white, middle‐class readers viewed as timeless tended to reflect their own ideas about how the world was and ought to be. Broadly, anthology poetry tended to serve as an affirmation of non‐controversial – and therefore white and middle‐class – conceptions of ideal social relationships. What poetry would gain in durability and national coherence by migrating to anthologies, it would lose in provocativeness and political urgency.
The first anthologies of American poetry were attempts to create a national literary identity by cataloguing the poetic efforts of the new nation. Elihu Hubbard Smith’s American Poems, Selected and Original stood alone for decades as the only anthology of American poems after its publication in 1793. Smith was a young physician from Connecticut who sought to support the development of belles‐lettres in the US public sphere in the years following the Revolution, when public attention was more focused on building a political identity than a cultural one (Kaplan 2008: 6, 66–73). Smith’s collection was not expansive. It included 14 poets discovered in the pages of periodicals (including John Trumbull, William Dunlap, and Philip Freneau) and three more who offered original contributions, as well as some anonymous selections. Only one contributor – “Philenia, a Lady of Boston” – is identified as a woman.
In his introduction, Smith clarifies the need for an anthology to preserve poems originally published in periodicals. He laments that “the frail security of an obscure newspaper” was all that was available “for some of the handsomest specimens of American Poetry” (Smith 1793, vol. 1: iv). Many poems, he writes, “of very great merit, have appeared in the different Periodical publications of the United States,” but such poems, “falling from the pens of persons not intent on literary fame […] especially as many of them are adapted to particular and local occasions; notwithstanding their desert, are constantly liable to be forgotten and lost” (Smith 1793, vol. 1: iii–iv). In addition to the value of an anthology as a means of preservation, Smith notes the function of anthologies as tastemakers. Some American poets, he asserts, decline to publish their poems because they value them too highly to be published in periodicals, where they can be “known to every body,” preferring an anthology, which would “secure them a certain conveyance to the attention of the scientific and refined” (Smith 1793, vol. 1: iv). This function of anthologies would become more pronounced over the course of the nineteenth century, as their editors were seen as arbiters of taste who selected poetic gems from the chaos of the larger public sphere and ensconced them in selective, tasteful collections to be read by various bourgeois markets, such as the emerging public schoolhouse.
Smith, who died at a young age only a few years after the publication of his collection, was ahead of his time in pushing for a survey of American poetry, and his collection remained an anomaly until Samuel Kettell’s Specimens of American Poetry was published in 1829. While the anthology was published under Kettell’s name, it had actually been conceived of and designed by the publisher, Samuel Griswold Goodrich, who edited The Token, an annual that gave early boosts to the careers of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lydia Maria Child (Goodrich 1856: 287–290).
The dearth of anthologies in the first decades of the nineteenth century can be partially attributed to a pervasive belief in the United States and England – from where Americans took their cultural cues – that Americans had no literature. As late as 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America, “The inhabitants of the United States have then at present, properly speaking, no literature” (111–112), which he attributed in part to an overreliance on British cultural imports and an imitation of the poetry of aristocracy. Layne Neeper has argued that the early American anthologists had to convince their readers that there was, in fact, an American literature to anthologize, and that they made their case for the extent of that literature by considering almost any kind of written or oral communication as potential “literature” for the collection (1994: 7). Construed this broadly, the literature of America became so plentiful that anthologists engaged in hyperbolic descriptions of its quantity and quality in an effort to silence claims that the country was barren of literature. This expansiveness was a difficult balance for an anthology, as one of the major rationales for their existence is their selectivity. In the case of the Goodrich/Kettell effort, which included numerous selections from favorites, such as Freneau and Sigourney, but also included single poems from many obscure authors, the anthology’s apparent lack of discrimination would be a source of its failure.
Specimens argues that the literary history of the United States was long and venerable. “The literary productions of our fathers have been held in unwarrantable disesteem by their descendants, who have reason to pride themselves upon the monuments of genius and learning left them by preceding generations,” Kettell writes (1829: iii–iv). His aim, he explains, is “to rescue from oblivion the efforts of native genius” and, apparently unaware of Smith’s earlier anthology, he notes that “an undertaking of the kind has not sooner been entered upon.” Kettell’s phrase “native genius” is noteworthy in that an entire class of native genius – Native Americans – were systematically excluded from the book, and some of the poets he includes, such as Samuel Sewell and John Rogers, were immigrants from England. Kettell claims that the anthology will evidence “the genius of our people” (vi); and indeed his collection, like many single‐author collected editions of the time, frames the texts in terms of individual and national genius in an effort to prove to the United States and Europe that the American people were intellectually capable of fine cultural production. This argument seemed particularly important at a time when many Europeans and Americans believed that different nations had different characters, and that their inhabitants tended to inherit that character. When the cultural traditions of nations seemed bound to their national histories and characters, it was unclear what to make of the cultural production of the United States, which lacked a long history and where citizens of different national backgrounds comingled. Early anthologies asserted that the United States, despite its relatively short history of European settlement and national heterogeneity, held a people capable of producing literary genius. Kettell thus compiled selections by 188 American poets (14 of which were women), which he organized as a history of American poetry. The chronological approach suggested a narrative of American literary maturation.
Kettell’s efforts were intellectually but not financially profitable – the three‐volume anthology struck readers as an indulgent overreach. Goodrich later described it as a “most disastrous failure” because critics and readers saw it as “the height of folly” for Americans to “pretend to have any literature.” The volume was so comprehensive that readers could easily find examples that strained contemporaneous definitions of poetry. Goodrich specifically mentioned Phillis Wheatley, who was the only black woman to be included in the anthology, as a contributor readers scoffed at. Anthologies not only make assertions about quality of writing – that these contents are good enough to be selected and preserved – but also about what kinds of people can lay claim to being part of the voice of a nation. The inclusion of Wheatley asserted that a black woman who was born in Africa and forcibly brought to America as a slave was part of a selective, enduring American poetic voice, an assertion that readers in a nation still decades away from the abolition of slavery found “a great offense” (Goodrich 1856: 289). Nonetheless, although Specimens failed commercially, it performed crucial bibliographic legwork for the next generation of anthologies.
Rufus Griswold, who is today best known as Edgar Allan Poe’s nemesis and first posthumous editor, was better known in his own time as America’s first major anthologist. Griswold took the considerable work Kettell and Goodrich had performed in surveying and chronicling US poetic development, considerably abbreviated their selections, and added some of his own. His Poets and Poetry of America, first published in 1842, was in continuous publication until his death in 1857. The first edition included selections by 86 poets – a much more selective number than Kettell’s – of which 12 were women. All poets in the anthology were represented by multiple selections, but Charles Fenno Hoffman, Philip Freneau, Lydia Sigourney, William Cullen Bryant, and John G. C. Brainard were among the most heavily represented. Griswold judiciously selected poems suited to contemporaneous American literary tastes and religious values, developed strategies for keeping the contributions of women poets at arm’s length, and largely ignored the work of southern writers, asserting a certain picture of American poetic development that Alan C. Golding has described as “suggest[ing] that American poetry had no tolerance of eccentric philosophies, that it was primarily written by men, and that it was created solely in New York and New England” (1995: 15).
Griswold was a magazine editor, and his anthology, along with companion volumes he published later, considerably extended his influence as a tastemaker, establishing patterns that would dominate American literature anthologies for years to come (Belasco 2008: 187). In his introduction, he exclaims upon the history of the Americas, which provide ample fodder for poetry. “There are, in connection with this country, no lack of subjects for poetry and romance,” Griswold writes. Among the subjects he suggests are “the sublime heroism of Columbus, his triumphs and his sufferings”; “the fall of the Peruvian and Mexican empires”; “the vast ruins indicating where annihilated nations once had their capitals”; and “the extinction of the great confederacy of the five nations.” Griswold views the colonial history of conquest and genocide as heroic yet explains that the one defining characteristic of American poetry is that it is “harmless, if not elevating, in its tendencies.” He concludes his introduction, “Thus far the chief distinguishing characteristic of American poetry is its moral purity. May it remain so forever” (Griswold 1842b: v–vi). His perspective on poetry, history, and morality was shared by many anthologists of the nineteenth century. Poetry ought to be beautiful and moral, and by giving beautiful expression to a hegemonic national history, it would affirm the moral legitimacy of the nation. Throughout the century, anthologies would avoid the partisan and overtly political – which seemed topical and transient and therefore unworthy of preservation as enduring art – in favor of poems that focused on domesticity or transmuted disquieting historical events into the non‐controversial and comforting. This practice would peak in the era of the Fireside Poets later in the century, but Griswold affirmed similar ideals in 1842.
Five months after the appearance of The Poets and Poetry of America, Griswold published a second anthology that would introduce a gender segregation that continues to be an issue facing American analogies to this day. Gems from American Female Poets included selections by 40 women, more than three times the number he included in Poets and Poetry of America. Griswold assured readers that the poems were, like all American poetry, of “purest moral character,” and that no father should be reluctant to give them to his daughter (1842a: x). By segregating women into their own volume, Griswold could praise the accomplishments of American women and hold them up as evidence of the culturally healthy nation that produced them; but by distinguishing them as female poets, he ran no risk of feminizing the national voice presented by a general anthology of American poetry.
By 1849 Griswold had beefed up Gems from American Female Poets, renaming it Female Poets of America, and excised all women from the continuously reprinted Poets and Poetry of America. In the introduction to a later edition of Poets and Poetry of America, he explained that the scheme was intentional: “By the publication of ‘The Female Poets of America,’ in 1849, this survey of American Poetry was divided into two parts. From ‘The Poets and Poetry of America’ were omitted all reviewals of our female poets, and their places were supplied with notices of other authors” (1855: 3). Griswold’s Female Poets of America was one of three anthologies of American women’s poetry published in 1849, a fact that caused Griswold consternation. In his introduction he explained the differences between male and female genius (women often seem to be geniuses when really their feelings and affections are merely adrift), asserted that American women were among the finest contributors to poetry of any women of any nation, and then accused the other two anthologists, Thomas Read and Caroline May, of stealing his idea for an anthology of women’s poetry and plagiarizing his earlier Gems.
Karen L. Kilcup has argued that nineteenth‐century anthologies of American women poets predominantly featured poems about domestic or personal concerns, in contrast to the number of poems on current issues and political controversies that women were publishing in American periodicals (2009: 301–302). Paula Bernat Bennett explains that early American women’s poetry that was published in periodicals was frequently political, and that such work tended to “originate in complaint,” producing a body of public poetry that reflected on American women’s willingness to engage the messy issues of their time. This poetry of the public sphere sharply contrasted with the picture of American female creativity that anthologies such as Griswold’s projected, where the selections instead implied that modest women poets were concerned with matters of home and hearth. For example, Griswold includes poems by Phillis Wheatley, a slave, and Lucy Larcom, a textile worker, addressing their backgrounds in his biographical introductions; but his selections are mostly on domestic themes and avoid their more political writings (Bennett 2003: 17–19). Here again, the anthologies’ desideratum of universal, timeless themes had a starkly conservative influence on the subsequent representation of American voices and values: the cultural work of women most worthy of preservation, they assert, are the poems that depict American women as domestic, reflective, private, and moral.
Of the three anthologies of women’s poetry that appeared in 1849, the one compiled by a woman – Caroline May’s American Female Poets – most strenuously asserts apolitical domestic life as the subject most suited to women’s writing. After acknowledging an “utmost profusion” of public poetry published in periodicals, May claims that women tend to focus on domestic life in their poetry because it is what they know best, and that that is as it should be: “home, with its quiet joys, its deep pure sympathies, and its secret sorrows, with which a stranger must not intermeddle, is a sphere by no means limited for woman, whose inspiration lies more in her heart than her head” (vi). May emphasizes modesty as a feminine virtue, explaining that the biographical sketches in her volume are scant because the contributors are so virtuously modest that some of them “declared their fancies to be their only facts; others that they had done nothing all their lives; and some, – with a modesty most extreme – that they had not lived at all.” May’s extreme emphasis on feminine modesty and domesticity strongly asserted the provisional and paradoxical role that women were allowed to play in the pages of national anthologies for years to come: as Americans, women poets were a national pride, but as women their biographies should be kept mostly private; their works can speak to a national identity but are in general limited to private, not public matters; they are worthy of recognition and acclaim but should remain modest. These forces together tethered the American woman poet included in nineteenth‐century anthologies to her home, far from the podium.
Women poets were frequently squeezed into the image of domestic feminine creativity that was reproduced in such nineteenth‐century anthologies. Elizabeth Oakes Smith was an activist and feminist who is best known today for Woman and Her Needs, a series of essays first published in Horace Greeley’s New‐York Tribune in 1851–1852. Married under pressure to Seba Smith at age 16, Oakes Smith gave birth to five sons, to whom she and her husband gave a hybrid last name: Oaksmith. Yet when Oakes Smith was included in Gems from American Female Poets, she appears in the table of contents under her husband’s first and last names: Seba Smith. Later in the volume she is introduced as “Mrs. Seba Smith,” but the table of contents lacks even the “Mrs.,” totally subsuming her identity into her husband’s. The poems included are apolitical, giving no hint of her activism: “The Drowned Mariner,” about a seaman who joins the ranks of preserved dead in the bottom of the sea; “Night,” a reflection on the power of night‐time to elicit meditation and insight; and “The April Shower,” about the rejuvenation of spring rain.
Lydia Sigourney was the most famous American woman poet of the nineteenth century, who, like Elizabeth Oakes Smith and other American poets of the era, relied on publication in periodicals to build a reputation. By 1830 she was regularly publishing in 20 periodicals – strong evidence of her ambition to have a public voice (Belasco 2004: 249). Sigourney was interested in history, and was appalled by the way European colonists had treated Native Americans – while she strongly supported the Christianization of Indians and their assimilation into Euro‐American culture, she believed that the genocide against Indigenous peoples was an indelible sin in American history. She wrote about this in several places, including a book‐length free verse poem called Traits of the Aborigines (1822). In anthologies, however, Sigourney is usually presented as a formal poet of elegies and domestic life, and when her poems about Indians are included they tend to be short and apolitical when taken alone. Caroline May included 18 of Sigourney’s poems in American Female Poets, none of which touch on her views about Indians. Griswold included 19 in The Female Poets of America, one of which, “Indian Names,” speaks to Sigourney’s concerns, describing landscapes that preserve Indian identity even though the people themselves have passed away: “Your mountains build their monument, / Though ye destroy their dust.” Nina Baym has argued that the anthological presentation of Sigourney caused her to develop into “an epitome of the phenomenon of female authorship in its range of allowed achievements and required inadequacies,” becoming “a mildly comical figure who exemplifies the worst aspects of domestic sentimentalism” (1990: 387).
In 1855, George and Evert Duyckinck, brothers from New York City who edited the magazine Literary World, published The Cyclopedia of American Literature. The Cyclopedia was less an anthology than a who’s who of American letters, since it was composed more of biographical and evaluative remarks than literary selections. But it was nonetheless significant to the rise of American literature anthologies for its expansiveness, which pushed the influential and notoriously jealous Griswold to expand and hone his own anthologies. The year 1855 was crucial in the history of American literature anthologies, because the market was becoming truly competitive – so competitive that Griswold and the Duyckincks went so far as to employ spies to inform on each other’s projects (Cutting 1975: 230). It was at this time of nationalist literary fervor, when the market could bear collections making competing assertions about the scope and nature of American literary history, that Walt Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s masterwork, centrally interested in celebrating American democracy, exhibited a new confidence in the nation’s literary identity that was also brimming in the anthologies of the 1850s.
Charles A. Dana’s 1858 Household Book of Poetry marked a subtle but important shift in the representation of American literature in anthologies. The volume is significant to a history of American literature anthologies because it intermingled 43 American poets with poets from many nationalities – mostly British – from antiquity to the present. Previous efforts had sought to demonstrate that an American national literature existed – proven through abundance – and that its chief merits were moral. Dana, the managing editor of the New‐York Tribune who would go on to serve as Assistant Secretary of War during the Civil War, explained in the introduction that the book was meant to compile the best of the world’s poetry, selected “by its poetical merit solely, without regard to the name, nationality, or epoch of its author.” Alongside canonical giants such as Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Dana positioned dozens of American poets. He arranged them according to theme, arguing that the poems are best read as “immortal productions of genius according to their own ideas and motives, rather than according to their chronology, the nativity and sex of their authors” (Dana 1858: n.p.). By avoiding chronology or nationality, his organizational scheme integrated American contributions into a timeless and universal landscape of poetry, confidently asserting as no previous anthology had the merits of American letters.
Many of the 43 American poets Dana selected for the volume, such as Poe and Freneau, contributed one or only a few poems, but several poets enjoyed hefty representation, emerging in these pages as the canonical giants of the United States. William Cullen Bryant was represented by 12 poems, including his famous meditation on death, “Thanatopsis,” and “To a Waterfowl,” an extended metaphor likening the divinely guided flight of a migratory bird to the speaker’s own journey through life. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s eight poems, including “Threnody” and “The Snow Storm,” focus on nature. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow enjoyed the most representation with 17 poems, including narrative pieces such as “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and an antislavery poem, “The Slave Singing at Midnight.” Dana chose 10 of James Russell Lowell’s poems and eight of John Greenleaf Whittier’s, yet none of the poems of these two abolitionists dealt directly with slavery. Four of these five heavily represented poets – all but Emerson – along with Oliver Wendell Holmes (who had three poems in Dana’s collection), would become widely known as the “Fireside Poets,” or sometimes the household or schoolroom poets, and would remain more or less constantly at the center of the canon of American poetry for generations.
Dana’s anthology is also noteworthy for its title – the Household Book of Poetry positioned itself as a book to be used by the family, in the home. Joan Shelley Rubin has observed that “the cultural power of titles linking poems and the home derived from, capitalized on, and further entrenched a vision of domestic order with a moral and a psychological dimension” (2007: 249). This positioning was a crucial component of the canon constructed by nineteenth‐century American poetry anthologies, asserting both an aesthetic and an ethos that were bound to mainstream middle‐class domestic morality. The notion of the middle‐class household as an operation that needed to be semi‐professionally managed was born out of nineteenth‐century investment in republican motherhood, the widespread belief that women’s domestic duties were noble and vital to the production of good citizens. Like a gender‐segregated anthology, republican motherhood offered women a separate sphere in which they could excel and earn esteem. Republican motherhood demanded that women receive education and respect in order to run efficient and comforting households. A variety of texts, from women’s periodicals to home economics books, arose in the nineteenth century for a newly empowered market of domestic female consumers. Books with “household” in the title frequently indicated that the contents could serve as a kind of reference manual for family improvement, such as books on “household sanitation” or “household taste.”
Quite a few “household” books were literary, and suggested that the contents had morally curative or therapeutic properties. For instance, T.S. Arthur’s Trial and Triumph; or, Firmness in the Household (1855), published in Philadelphia three years before Dana’s anthology, billed itself on its cover as having “a high moral, and useful tone” that would “improve the character and the conduct,” and “a copy of it should be in every family and household in the land.” The term “household” in a title indicated that the contents were curative, that they could be used by a parent to steer the family straight. So, when Dana chose to organize his anthology not by nationality or chronology but by broad subjects – “Poems of Nature,” “Poems of Childhood,” “Poems of Comedy,” “Poems of Tragedy and Sorrow,” and so on – he was positioning the book less as a literary history than as a cookbook, a book of household recipes, with contents to be looked up and administered within the home. The effect was to suggest an ahistorical, immaterial view of poetry as a timeless art or science that worked on human soul and character – a theme that could be found in American poetry anthologies as late as 1925, when Robert Haven Schauffler published the anthology The Poetry Cure: A Pocket Medicine Chest of Verse. Poems pushing factional politics, marginalized religious views, or subversive challenges to the status quo had no place in a household anthology because they were historically bound, inflammatory, or ideologically alien. For the most part, only poems that had at their core a comforting familiarity, that complemented the middle‐class domestic ideal, could offer such anodynes. Even staunch abolitionists such as Whittier were transformed into apolitical voices in the pages of most nineteenth‐century poetry anthologies.
Not many national anthologies were published during the Civil War, but after the war Dana’s underlying principle of taste and timelessness became the standard basis for selecting poems for anthologies. By this point the United States had already done the work of preserving poetry published in more ephemeral venues and asserting that it had a national literature, and the work of anthologies was broadly focused on arguing the timeless value of American poets. As Golding has argued, after the political, cultural, and economic changes of the mid‐ and late nineteenth century and the cataclysmic disruption of the Civil War, “the postbellum reading public wanted a stable, ordered art” (1995: 18). Anthologists provided just such an art in the form of the genteel lyric, a structured, conventional poem giving pleasant and predictable voice to conventional morals and observations. The genteel lyric became the primary vision of American poetry and the staple of anthologies of the later nineteenth century.
These anthologies galvanized the reputations of the Fireside Poets. Masters of the genteel lyric, Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes, Lowell, and Whittier formed the core of the American poetry canon of the era, writing accessible, conventional verse that often expressed socially acceptable perspectives and mores. The Fireside Poets were particularly significant as the first wave of American poets (three of them were born within two years of each other between 1807 and 1809) whose skill and celebrity rivaled that of British poets, securing an international respectability for American poetry. Their celebrity was unprecedented in American letters and is reflected in the number of schools and other public places bearing their names. The name “Fireside Poets” affirmed the domestic function of poetry, which in turn shaped the content of the poems. Early anthologies did not reflect a consensus about which poems by the Fireside Poets should be reproduced. Any two early anthologies might select entirely different rosters of poems by one of the Fireside Poets, indicating that popular favorites were not firmly established at midcentury. Griswold included 21 poems by Whittier, none of which was among those selected by Dana or Kettell. Griswold’s selections by Whittier touched on a range of topics, including reflections on nature and religious themes; an address to abolitionist John Pierpont, though the poem made no overt reference to abolition; and narratives of shameful episodes in American history, such as “The Prisoner for Debt,” about a Revolutionary War veteran imprisoned for a small debt; and “The Ballad of Cassandra Southwick,” about the religious persecution of a Quaker family by Puritans in Salem, Massachusetts. Griswold and Dana included many poems by Longfellow. His popular ballad “The Village Blacksmith” and affirmative lyrics such as his “Psalm of Life,” “The Light of Stars,” “Footsteps of Angels,” and “Excelsior” appeared in both volumes, but none of these were among Kettell’s selections. Although William Cullen Bryant was an energetic champion of abolition and human rights, his most anthologized poems only hinted at that sensibility – while early anthologies typically included several of his poems, two remained particular favorites of early anthologists and continue to be staples of anthologies today: the ever‐popular “Thanatopsis” and his celebrated lyric “To a Waterfowl.”
Walt Whitman’s relationship to late nineteenth‐century anthologies is instructive in showing how homogeneous was their view of American poetry. Certainly, he was not among this core group of genteel national poets. In fact, late in his life Whitman reflected on the differences between himself and some of the Fireside Poets, remarking to his friend Horace Traubel on the differences between himself and Bryant: “Do you think this could ever be tinkered into that? – that this loafer, this lubber, could ever be transmuted into that gentleman? All I’ve got to say is, that I wouldn’t like to undertake the contract” (Traubel 1915: 3). Whitman, who generally admired Bryant, had come to believe that his own roughness (“this lubber”) and unconventionality (“this loafer”) made him fundamentally an outsider to the refined and conventional view of American poetry projected by the Fireside Poets. He believed that his radical poetic voice had shut him out of the literary establishment, that he was undervalued because of his departure from popular poetic taste. However, as Ed Folsom has argued, Whitman’s relationship to the emergent American literary canon was more complex – some of the Fireside Poets, including Bryant, were themselves politically if not poetically radical, and Whitman had a personal stake in seeing himself as an excluded voice, because it contributed to his image as a martyred prophet (Folsom 1991a: 346).
In fact, the literary establishment did eventually embrace Whitman, though only part of his corpus, the parts that most conformed to orthodox tastes. As Folsom explains, in the 1870s some textbook editors and anthologists were enthusiastic about the poet’s work, sometimes selecting free verse poems such as “Come Up from the Fields, Father” – in which parents learn of the death of their son in battle during the Civil War – to position Whitman as an unconventional poet who nevertheless gave compelling expression to conventional emotion. But by the 1880s, the earlier enthusiasm for Whitman had waned, and only his most orthodox work was circulated in anthologies: specifically, “O Captain! My Captain!” which became ubiquitous, and eventually led Whitman to complain about the neglect of the rest of his work (Folsom 1991a: 351). However, while he seemed irritated by the poem’s ongoing appeal, manuscript evidence suggests that he may have composed this poem in the hope of gaining exactly such popular success. Whitman wrote the poem shortly after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, when the nation was reeling from both the war and the murder of the President. An early draft of the poem at the Library of Congress shows that he initially wrote it unrhymed but later went back over it, adjusting the lines and changing their endings to conform to a rhyme scheme. He published it shortly thereafter, first in the New‐York Saturday Press and then in the Sequel to Drum‐Taps, which would later be folded into Leaves of Grass. As part of the mid‐nineteenth‐century reading public himself, Whitman seems to have known that disorienting public tragedy called for soothing, structured verse. When such verse became the guiding aesthetic of later anthologies, this poem would be Whitman’s best‐known accomplishment, a testament to the power of anthologies to present a homogeneous view of American poetry in the later decades of the nineteenth century (Gailey 2006: 420–421).
Even as the Fireside Poets were at the height of their popularity, an alternative canon of American poetry was beginning to emerge, largely through the efforts of its strongest advocate, the poet, critic, banker, and anthologist Edmund Clarence Stedman. Golding argues that Stedman was the first American anthologist who saw the most important poets as those who “did not define or confirm their culture’s dominant values but revolted against them,” a view that would eventually culminate in high modernism (1995: 20). The revisionist canon suggested by Stedman, which put independent individual vision above popular sentiment, would exalt Poe, Emerson, and Whitman, and be the first to introduce Emily Dickinson to readers of American anthologies. His American Anthology, 1787–1900 (1900) included over 1700 selections by nearly 600 poets. Twenty poems by Dickinson were included, perhaps helping to buoy her reputation until modernists and New Critics would embrace her decades later.
Stedman held a special place for Whitman in his representations of American poetry. He wrote to the poet in 1875 to ask for an autograph, explaining that he had encountered his poems as a schoolboy and long admired him. In his 1885 study Poets of America Stedman wrote, “The time has gone by when it was possible to ignore him,” before filling about a tenth of the book’s pages with a discussion of Whitman. In 1888 Stedman edited Library of American Literature with pioneering female journalist Ellen MacKay Hutchinson, devoting 13 pages to Whitman, more than any other poet (Folsom 1991b: 649). The anthology, an impressive 11 volumes, and the only anthology to be co‐edited by a man and a woman for the next century, was too extensive to be intended for classroom use (Hooks 2013: 369). Instead it was one of the large, multi‐volume sets of American literature – many others were collected editions of an individual author’s works – that began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century to conspicuously fill home library space and mark the discriminating owner as a reader interested in his or her own nation’s literature. Of the 17 poems by Whitman included by Stedman and Hutchinson, two were conventional: “O Captain! My Captain!” and “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” both expressions of national pain or reconciliation. The other 15 poems were less conventional selections from Leaves of Grass, some of which would become frequent selections in twentieth‐century anthologies.
Whitman had mixed feelings about Stedman’s work at the end of his life, on the one hand enjoying the overdue attention, but on the other hand resenting Stedman’s editing of his poems, the idea that people would read him only in pieces, and what he viewed as Stedman’s measured tone in describing Whitman’s accomplishments (Folsom 1991b: 649). When Stedman released An American Anthology in 1900, Whitman had been dead eight years and his closest followers were concerned about his legacy. Would the poet of Leaves of Grass only be known through extracts, or would America know his work “for whole and for good,” as Whitman had hoped upon seeing another school reader reprinting “O Captain”? His literary executors published a multi‐volume Complete Writings of Walt Whitman in 1902 to assert the value of his entire oeuvre. As with so many of his contemporaries, though, the appearance of individual poems, first in periodicals and then in anthologies, had been crucial to securing his literary reputation.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 1 (THE TRANSFORMATION OF LITERARY PRODUCTION, 1820–1865); CHAPTER 10 (WALT WHITMAN AND THE NEW YORK LITERARY WORLD); CHAPTER 11 (EMILY DICKINSON AND THE TRADITION OF WOMEN POETS).