SOURCE: DeFalco, Joseph M. Introduction to Collected Poems of Christopher Pearse Cranch, pp. vii-xx. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971.

[In the following excerpt, DeFalco discusses Cranch's writing career and the critical response to his work by his contemporaries.]

By any estimate Christopher Pearse Cranch must be ranked as one of the five major American Transcendentalist poets. Although he lacked the profundity and originality of Emerson, and although he never achieved the brilliant insights of Thoreau, at his best he approaches their more significant productions in poetry; in his ordinary efforts he is at least equal to Channing and Very. Most histories of American literature give Cranch only brief attention, and many assign him the pejorative label of “dilettante.” Certainly Cranch was a lover of the arts, and certainly he had diverse talents. One of the few transcendentalists who possessed a keen sense of humor, he brilliantly caricatured some of Emerson's ludicrous expressions. Perhaps this aspect of his character has affected later judgments of his work, but it is a gross misrepresentation to consider him a mere dabbler because of his lighter moods. The profession of art was a serious matter for Cranch; for almost a half century he labored to achieve success in poetry and painting. Public accolades were few, but he lived to see three collections of his poetry published and his paintings placed in some of the better galleries and exhibitions in New York and Paris.

The youngest son of thirteen children, Cranch was born on March 8, 1813, in what is now Alexandria, Virginia. His family came from New England, and his father, William, was a lay Unitarian preacher and a Harvard classmate of John Quincy Adams. Appointed in 1805 by Thomas Jefferson as Chief Justice of the United States Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, the elder Cranch served in that post for over fifty years. Cranch's mother, Anna Greenleaf, was a niece to Abigail Adams, and his aunt Rebecca Greenleaf was married to Noah Webster. A complete genealogy of the Cranch family would yield the names of some of the leading lights of the spiritual and intellectual life of New England and the nation in the nineteenth century. Perhaps the outstanding issue from this lineage in the twentieth century is T. S. Eliot, a grandnephew of Christopher Cranch.

Cranch entered Columbian College (now George Washington University) in 1829, and three years later at age nineteen was graduated. The following year he entered the strongly Unitarian-oriented Harvard Divinity School. Among his classmates and friends who later achieved prominence in various fields were Theodore Parker, Samuel Osgood, and John Sullivan Dwight. Cranch spent the first years after graduation from the Divinity School traveling from place to place as a substitute for established Unitarian ministers and as an organizer for the American Unitarian Association. He preached in various New England communities; in Richmond, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and in 1836 he went west to St. Louis, Cincinnati, Peoria, and Louisville. In Louisville he occupied the pulpit of James Freeman Clarke and assumed the temporary editorship of The Western Messenger. Under Clarke the Messenger had become the voice of liberal Unitarianism in the West. Cranch's own views harmonized with those of Clarke; over the next three years he was called upon several times to guide the Messenger in place of Clarke. During his association with the Messenger Cranch contributed a variety of prose pieces and several dozen poems. Even after he returned to the East and Channing became the editor of the Messenger, Cranch continued to submit items for publication. He was writing other kinds of poetry at the time, but most of his Messenger poems are conventionally religious in character. Few of them reveal the imaginative range that he displays in his better transcendental poetry, and none of them suggests that he was turning away from orthodox Unitarianism. In the January, 1841, issue, however, he published an essay in defense of transcendentalism; this public expression fairly marks his private turn away from Unitarianism.

Cranch's credentials as a transcendental poet were validated by no less an authority than Emerson. He sent two of Cranch's poems to Margaret Fuller for publication in the first issue of The Dial (July, 1840), and later that summer he entertained Cranch at Concord. In the fall he sent several more poems by Cranch to The Dial. With this auspicious beginning Cranch became an acknowledged member of the transcendental fraternity. He was the chief contributor of poetry in the first two volumes of The Dial, outstripping many of his better-known colleagues in number of contributions.

Cranch's transcendental education began some time before his initial appearance in The Dial. He had already read and avidly assimilated the ideas he found in Emerson's Nature (1836), and he attended a course of lectures given by Emerson in Boston. He was equally impressed with the views he found in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. In a letter written to a correspondent early in 1840 he ranks Emerson along with Carlyle and “other stars of the age.” At the same time he was no naive follower of such “stars.” He notes in the same letter that Emerson's views were not popular and were considered “heretical by most persons, and by as many, downright atheism, mysticism, or perhaps nonsense.” Cranch was too deeply committed to allow public opinion to sway him from his idealistic course; eventually his persistence cost him his pulpit and his confidence in his ability to find a suitable profession.

The transition from liberal Unitarian to transcendentalist was not an easy one for Cranch; there is evidence that he underwent a personal crisis before he effected the change. In a letter written to his father around the time that his poems were to appear in the first issue of The Dial, Cranch is decidedly defensive in his response to his father's concern that he had succumbed to the blandishments of the “Transcendental sentiments of the German Theologists.” He reassures his conservative parent that the views of the “New School” are not far removed from the true spirit of Unitarian Christianity, and he goes on to divorce Emerson's doctrines from those of Kant and Fichte. Whether Emerson would have concurred with this line of defense is open to question, but there is no inconsistency with sound Emersonian doctrine in Cranch's plea for a break from the “old theology of the early Unitarians” and for adherence to a strong individualism. His summary is worthy of the master himself: “What my intellect receives must accord with the blessed revelation to my heart and conscience.” His father's response is not recorded; he would have been a most obtuse jurist not to have detected the advance stages of a new idealism that was to lead his youngest son far from his own orthodox views of Unitarianism.

By early 1841, when he was preaching at the church of Frederic Henry Hedge, the founder of the Transcendental Club, Cranch began to suffer from some sort of mental depression. He characterized his difficulty as “trouble in my head and brain,” and it lasted for several years. It seems beyond coincidence that his “trouble” arose when he began to see that he could not espouse Emersonian views and at the same time preach from a Unitarian pulpit. The news that John Sullivan Dwight, his close friend, had been forced to resign from his church because of his liberal views must have confirmed many of his own fears and underlined the need to seek a profession in which he could make a living and not compromise his ideals. Although he was a steady contributor to The Dial, poetry offered little hope in terms of compensation. His only alternative was painting. He had enjoyed painting and drawing since childhood; his talent delighted his friends on many occasions. His decision to become a serious painter terminates his commitment to the ministry and begins a search for recognition in the arts that lasted to the end of his life.

Much of Cranch's gloom and anxiety over his future was dispelled in the fall of 1841, when he met Elizabeth DeWindt, the woman he married. She was a cousin of Cranch's and the great-granddaughter of John Adams. Her family home was at Fishkill Landing on the Hudson River, where during the courtship and for many years after their marriage Cranch painted and sketched. Some of Cranch's better landscapes in the manner of the Hudson River School of painting derive from the subjects he found there. By the time he married in 1843, Cranch already was devoting most of his energy to painting. His career as a poet continued; he published in a few well-known magazines and in several gift annuals during these years.

The major event of Cranch's career as poet after leaving the ministry occurred in 1842, when Rufus Griswold selected his work for inclusion in The Poets and Poetry of America. Cranch had not yet published his first volume of poetry, but his inclusion in the anthology placed him among the established poets of his day. The young Cranch must have been elated over his appearance in the famous anthology; if the event seemed to foretoken a wide reputation as a major poet, it misfired. Years later the older and sometimes melancholy Cranch of The Bird and the Bell looked back upon the anthology somewhat ruefully in “The American Pantheon.” Thinking of his own fate, no doubt, he labels those whom fame has passed by as “Dii minores of a voiceless past.”

Poems, Cranch's first volume of collected poems, appeared in May, 1844, two years after Griswold's anthology. He dedicated the work to Emerson, but the poems within the volume better attest his regard. With the exception of “The True in Dreams,” all of the Dial poems are included. Most of the other pieces are of the same order: strong lyrical expressions of the transcendental spirit. The highly Emersonian “Enosis” appears, and so does “Correspondences,” an almost direct poetical translation of Emerson's doctrine of that name. The brilliance of the transcendental pieces made little impression on the public; the volume failed to advance Cranch's reputation as a poet. There is no question that the poems are of mixed quality, for they range from the Dial poems to the juvenile “College Lyfe.” A reviewer for Graham's, who treated Cranch rather gently, summarized his view of the weakness of the volume as “lack of nerve, the absence of that power and knowledge which are conferred by the rough discipline of the world, the want of true depth and intensity.”

The Graham's reviewer was writing about the productions of a youthful Cranch; by the time another collection appeared, the tone and content had shifted considerably. The occasion of the change is not difficult to surmise. Two years after Poems appeared, Cranch decided to move to Europe to further his career as a painter. He well knew that the idiosyncracies of the artistic marketplace were such that an American artist painting in Europe increased his opportunities for sales and enhanced his possibilities of gaining recognition. Practical necessity thus dictated the move, but Cranch derived a maturity from the European experience that evidences itself quite unexpectedly in the poems of this period. Freed from the rather narrow provincialism of New England transcendental influences, Cranch's poetry exhibits a wider range of creativity and maturity than would seem possible from his earlier efforts.

Cranch's “expatriate” years on this first trip to Europe were spent mainly in Italy. The first years were passed in Rome; the last year was broken up into shorter stays in Naples, Sorrento, and Florence. These years reflect a diminished production of poetry and a commensurate increase in painting. One cannot examine the poetry written during the Italian years without concluding that the effort expended for the one profited the other. Whatever else it did for him, the experience Cranch gained in Italy gave him some of that worldly discipline recommended by the Graham's reviewer. His focus and subject matter in poetry shifted to a broader, more comprehensive and humanistic emphasis upon man and the subjection of mankind to social and political forces. He had given some attention to these matters in America, as evidenced in his “Sonnet on the Mexican War,” published in The Harbinger not long before he sailed for Europe, but Italy, with its Roman Church and the political oppression of its people, gave him an objective context in which to view the suppression of the human spirit. As the later “The Bird and the Bell” demonstrates, his response was at once critical and direct.

During the three years that Cranch lived in Italy, he furthered his artistic education by touring all of the major galleries, meeting and talking with the many practicing painters and sculptors who lived there, and by generally absorbing the aesthetic atmosphere of the country. Many enduring personal and professional relationships were established on this trip. George William Curtis accompanied the Cranch family on the voyage to Europe, and a friendship that began at Brook Farm crystalized into an association that lasted until Cranch's death. After Curtis became a distinguished essayist and editor of Harper's Weekly and Harper's Magazine, he was able to assist Cranch professionally on a number of occasions. Cranch's friend, William Wetmore Story, was already in Europe, and they maintained their close relationship. Among those with whom Cranch associated were Hiram Powers and Horatio Greenough, both noted American sculptors of their day. Margaret Fuller visited, and through her the Cranches met the Robert Brownings. While living in Florence, the Cranches visited at Casa Guidi several times; Browning dropped in at Cranch's studio at times. Browning and Cranch shared mutual interests in music and painting; Cranch was impressed with Browning's poetical accomplishments. Some of Cranch's later poetry reflects the Browning influence; from letters we know that the Brownings read and offered advice on revision of Cranch's “The Bird and the Bell.” Cranch recorded many of his feelings about Browning in his “Memorial to Robert Browning” (1890).

In the spring of 1849, the Cranches returned to America. They remained until 1853, when once again practical necessity drove them back to Europe. Cranch had sold some paintings while living in Italy, and he sold a few more during this American interlude. His sales were always disappointing; they rarely provided him and his family with more than a marginal existence. Some financial assistance was provided by his family and that of his wife, but this was never enough to give the Cranches a sense of financial security. Cranch's publication of poetry during this interval was slight; all but a few of those pieces that he did place were published by his friend, John Sullivan Dwight, in Dwight's Journal of Music. Cranch seems to have had little regard for these poems, for he did not collect them in his later volumes. Longfellow, however, felt that several of the Italian pieces were of sufficient merit to include them in his Poems of Places (1877).

When the Cranches returned to Europe, they established themselves in Paris. This time they remained for ten years. Once again Cranch set about painting and sketching in earnest, touring galleries, and making new acquaintances and renewing old ones. He saw Browning again, but that relationship was never to prove any more rewarding than it already had. Of more lasting importance was the friendship that began in these years with James Russell Lowell. On one memorable occasion Cranch, Lowell, and Story were invited to dine with William Makepeace Thackeray at the Garrick Club in London. After dinner Thackeray read to them from the last installment of “The Newcomes.” The incident left a lasting impression on Cranch, who recorded it in some detail in his “Autobiography.”

The London excursion was one of several that took Cranch away from Paris. Visits to Barbizon, Switzerland, and to Rome were undertaken in order to seek out fresh subjects for his painting. But even the Forest of Fontainbleu, where the Barbizon School of painting was being spawned, failed to provide him with that elusive ingredient that would have made him an important landscape painter of his time. Many of the scenes that he painted provided him with subjects for his poetical compositions. The poems in the later collections recall some of these experiences in terms as vivid as any painting he might have composed.

When Cranch returned to America in 1863, the country was in the midst of the Civil War. A staunch supporter of the Northern cause, Cranch registered in his poetry his intense reaction to the war and to Lincoln's death. Some of his war poems were published in contemporary periodicals; these and others were brought together under the title “Poems of the War” in The Bird and the Bell. Cranch continued to paint in the years after the war, but by the mid-seventies he had all but given over serious painting in favor of poetry and prose writing.

In 1872 Cranch published his highly successful translation in blank verse of Virgil's Aeneid. The work appeared in the prestigious series of translations published by James R. Osgood. Included in the series were such landmarks of American scholarship as Longfellow's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy and Bryant's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Cranch was an adept translator; in addition to Latin he translated a number of poems from German and French. Some of his translations remain unpublished. As successful as his Aeneid was, publishers still remained tuned to the contemporary market. Included in the unpublished material are translations of Virgil's Georgics and his Eclogues.

One of Cranch's more remarkable poems, Satan: A Libretto, appeared in 1874 as a separate work. Although it failed to attract much notice, Cranch thought so highly of it that he revised it and included it under the new title of “Ormuzd and Ahriman” in his final collection, Ariel and Caliban. Taken from the Zoroastrian designations of the contending forces in the universe, the new title is a better indicator of the major premise of the work. Both versions announce the old Emersonian doctrine of the essentially privative nature of evil. Cranch's reconstruction of the transcendental non-dual universe this late in the century seems anachronistic, but much of the charm of Cranch's poetry is his perennial optimism. Although his impatience with social inequities and his bitterness in the war poems offset the optimism to a degree, his belief in a final transcendental reconcilement never wavered.

Some of the poems that Cranch included in The Bird and the Bell (1875) had appeared as early as 1852; the majority represent the work published and written in the years just prior to 1875. Many of these later pieces appeared in The Atlantic, The Independent, and Dwight's Journal of Music. The critical reception of Cranch's work in these years could not be called enthusiastic, but he did enjoy a reputation of sufficient stature to allow him to place his work with relative ease.

In 1880 Cranch left his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, where he had lived since 1873, and set out on what was to be his final visit to Europe. This time he toured for two years in England, France, and Italy. The primary purpose of the trip was to give his daughter Caroline an opportunity to study the paintings of the European masters. Because she was well on her way to becoming a first-rate portrait artist, Cranch felt that she needed to free herself from purely American and contemporary influences in order to complete her art education. For the sixty-seven year old Cranch, though, Europe held few surprises. His letters suggest that he retained his enthusiasm for continental life and that his appreciation of art remained keen; still, unlike his earlier visits this time there were no new views to gain and no fresh subjects to stimulate his imagination.

Ariel and Caliban (1887), the last collection of Cranch's career, brought together many of the poems that Cranch published in various periodicals over the twelve years since The Bird and the Bell. Although the poems are the products of his later years, in many ways the subjects and moods are reminiscent of his youthful first collection. The craftsman has matured considerably; if this last collection contains no brilliant or imaginative outbursts, it nonetheless reveals some of the best examples of Cranch's mastery of the techniques of poetry. The overall temper of the collection is philosophical, exhibiting in the individual pieces an air of objectivity acquired from long experience. The vigorous social criticism of The Bird and the Bell is here melioristic, and, as the title poem and the concluding “Orhmuzd and Ahriman” reveal, Cranch's final views are conciliatory and optimistic.

Cranch died on January 20, 1892. His career was decidedly uneven, although he never gave up the quest for recognition in the arts. George William Curtis, who paid his friend a final tribute in his “Easy Chair” column of Harper's Magazine, in his summation of Cranch's career suggests the irony implicit in the life of a man who was near-brilliant and many-talented but who remained, essentially, a failed artist: “He was, indeed, an artist in various kinds. The diamond which the good genius brought to his cradle, it broke in many parts.” …