During the Arctic weather I re-read that finest of winter pastorals, ‘Snowbound’ by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92). It gripped me, as it always does, by its combination of intense realism about the present and its imaginative sympathy for the past. Whittier describes heavy snow sealing off a household in the early 19th century, about the time Wordsworth first moved to Rydal Mount. He uses the situation to bring back to life the faces and characters of all his family and friends, now dead, who once sat around the blazing log fire in the snowbound wooden house. It is a powerful work, by no means short — around 770 lines — and many would rank it the most perfect poem ever produced by an American.
Oddly enough, in all the tributes recently paid to Robert Burns, on the 200th anniversary of his death, none I saw mentioned his influence in the emerging literature of America, which was profound. Whittier, in particular, was his grateful follower, in his strong attachment to rural life and patterns of thought, his rough, uncomplicated emotions and his decent simplicity. Whittier was very much a committed poet, devoting much of his life to anti-slavery campaigning, sitting in the Massachusetts legislature, editing newspapers and founding the Liberty party. I like editor-poets. When the head-printer tells them there is a ‘hole’ in the editorial copy, they can write a poem to fill it, as Kipling was to do, regularly, a few decades later in the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. Not that I particularly like Whittier’s political verse, except of course ‘Ichabod’, his denunciation of Daniel Webster’s decision to support the 1850 compromise on slavery:
Revile him not, the Tempter hath
A snare for all;
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,
Befit his fall!
This poem is almost the exact American equivalent of Browning’s attack on Words-worth, ‘The Lost Leader’, and probably just as unfair. I prefer Whittier on snowscapes.
I sometimes wonder whether he or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is my favourite American poet. They were exact contemporaries, and curiously two of Longfellow’s finest short poems, ‘Snow-flakes’ and ‘The Cross of Snow’ are about winter, though the tone of both is deeply sad. The second records his devastating loss when his wife was burned to death, an event so debilitating that he was un-able to write at all for many years. He also had a full-time teaching job at Harvard for nearly 20 years which, he said, was ‘a great hand laid on all the strings of my lyre, stopping their vibration’. It is surprising he wrote so many good poems (I don’t count ‘Hiawatha’, which I dislike), including the quintessential American song of joy, ‘The Building of the Ship’:
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
More true and vital today, those words are, than when he wrote them, with violence, intolerance and cruelty everywhere, the world economy in ruins, and only the solitary, strong arm of America’s freedom-cherishing democracy to hold back the forces of evil. And of course I love too ‘A Psalm of Life’, every word of which is memorable and worth quoting, from ‘Life is real! Life is earnest!’ and ‘Art is long, and Time is fleeting’, to the valedictory
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints in the sands of time.
Apart from a handful of great men — Shakespeare, Pope, Kipling and one or two others — Longfellow minted more memorable phrases than anyone else, ‘Ships that pass in the night’, ‘The lady with the lamp’, ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree’, ‘It was the schooner Hesperus’, ‘The shades of night were falling fast’, ‘Tell me not in mournful numbers’ and that consoling triolet from ‘The Day is Done’:
The cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.
Longfellow was also the only poet, apart from Gray, to write a masterpiece about a graveyard, ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport’. Some Jews do not like this poem because it was written before the rise of Zionism, and ends:
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore
And the dead nations never rise again.
But as I read it, the image of the resurrection hovers over every burial place, and modern Israel is the perfect example of the process. If only the Arabs would fold their tents and silently steal away, instead of hurling rockets, paid for by Persian oil money, at the Hebrew resurrection-men.
There are those, it is almost needless to say, who push both Whittier and Longfellow aside, and choose Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman as America’s finest poets. I have some sympathy with this view. If I could only have one American poet on my desert island I would surely pick Emerald Emily, as I call her, because she shines so brightly and greenly. See, for instance, her beautiful 17-liner, ‘There Came a Wind like a Bugle’, which says the last word on the myth of global warming — and much else. I can’t imagine why Dickinson is not taught more in English schools, and our children encouraged to memorise her enchanting golden ditties. But then, they are discouraged from memorising any verse, as ‘too mechanical’ and ‘Victorian’.
As for Whitman, there is no resisting the sacred monster, in certain moods. He is the Victor Hugo of the States — Hugo the poet, I mean, not the novelist. I admire Whitman’s behaviour in the Civil War, when he visited the wounded soldiers and prevented many limbs from being amputated. To anti-Americans, who often quote him, meanly, out of context, I point out that he declared, almost as a personal manifesto, ‘The Americans, of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the great poem.’ Whitman was in some ways a typical American — noisy, big-minded, self-promoting, a genius at advertising himself. He had courage and self-confidence, and never minded saying different things to suit different purposes: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).’
American poetry as a whole is often contradictory. It is patriotic, at times, but also highly critical of what America is, and does. Whitman himself wrote:
Stifled, O days! O lands! In every public and private corruption!
Smothered in thievery, impotence, shamelessly, mountain-high.
The rotten side of America was also a theme of Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), who ought to be better known on this side of the Atlantic. He was a pantheist who loved the rocky coast of California, where he lived in Carmel, warning people to beware of cities:
shine, perishing Republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.
Good advice, perhaps, as a Chicago regime takes over in Washington, and Mafia types rub their hands.
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