Cranch, Christopher Pearse - Shelly Armitage (essay date 1987)

Shelly Armitage (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: Armitage, Shelly. “Christopher Pearse Cranch: The Wit as Poet.” American Transcendental Quarterly n.s. 1, no. 1 (March 1987): 33-47.

[In the following essay, Armitage discusses the role of wit, as defined by Emerson, in Cranch's poetry.]

You were not born to hide such gifts as yours
'Neath dreary law-books, nor amid the dust
And dry routine of desks to sit and rust
Where clerks plod through their tasks on office-floors.
Let duller laborers drudge through daily chores,
And do what fate for them makes fit and just.
You bravely do your work because you must;
And when released, your genius sings and soars.
Such humor your pen hath ever run
In pictures or in letters all unforced,
As Hogarth, Lamb, or Dickens might have done;
Finer than any noted wit, who, horsed
Upon the public's favor, waves his blade
Like Harlequin, and makes his jests his trade.

Ariel and Caliban, 1886

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