SOURCE: Evans, Oliver H. “The Late Plays and Poems.” In George Henry Boker, pp. 89-125. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

KöNIGSMARK, NYDIA, AND GLAUCUS

Written in 1853, Francesca da Rimini was not produced until 1855, a year before the publication of the Plays and Poems. Following the production of Francesca da Rimini and the publication of Plays and Poems, Boker's career changed direction as he gave up trying to achieve literary fame. The causes of that change—the relative failure of his published works, the Girard Bank lawsuit, which began in 1858, and the Civil War—have been discussed. The effects of these causes on Boker's later plays were not fortunate, since instead of continuing to develop his talent, he failed even to match the level he had achieved in Anne Boleyn, Leonor de Guzman, and Francesca da Rimini. In his early plays he had treated the heroic individual in conflict with society, and as early as Calaynos had not been content with portraying a simple conflict. Each successive tragedy had become increasingly complex until, with the character of Lanciotto, Boker had attempted more than he could manage. Beginning with Königsmark and continuing through Nydia and Glaucus, however, he simplified the issues his dramas treat. In these plays the characters have little to recommend them dramatically. And thematically the plays themselves have no depth.

Boker was working on Königsmark by February of 1855 and finished it in 1857. The play, which was never produced, remained unpublished until 1869, when it appeared as part of a book of poems. In addition to the play, this book included such poems as “Ad Criticum,” “Countess Laura,” and “The Legend of the Hounds,” a sentimental retelling of a legend in which a drunken squire drives his hounds, including one who once saved his life, to their deaths. Thereupon, the squire is haunted by the hounds and eventually driven to his death. The poem treats a Pennsylvania legend, but Boker, who was never comfortable with America as a setting, changed the locale to England. The book also signalled a change from Ticknor and Fields to J. B. Lippincott as Boker's publisher.

Based on a lecture Thackeray delivered in the United States in 1855, Königsmark is set in the Hanoverian court of 1699 and is the story of Countess Von Platten's attempt to destroy the lives of Count Philip Königsmark—with whom she has had an affair and whom she hates for having left her—and of Sophia, wife of the future George I of England. The countess's plan, which involves a forged letter and a midnight rendezvous, is to make George think that Sophia and Philip are lovers when in fact the two are close friends whose affection, thanks to Sophia's having reformed Philip's youthful rakishness, transcends the carnal. George, however, has a suspicious nature, and to escape her husband's suspicions Sophia plans to leave the court. Using the forged letter, the countess arranges to have Sophia and Philip meet at midnight. When Philip arrives, the countess's henchman kills him. At the same moment that Sophia arrives and finds Philip dying, George arrives as well. He thinks Philip and Sophia were planning to elope, and Philip's assertion of Sophia's innocence is useless. The play ends with Philip's death and Sophia's imprisonment.

Dramatically, the play fails on two counts. First, Boker does not adequately motivate much of the action, a failure that stems from his handling of the historical material. In his earlier plays Boker often altered his sources in order to make his plays either more dramatic or complex. In Königsmark he takes more liberties than usual with his material, but his liberties simplify, rather than complicate, the historical material. Historically, for example, Philip and Sophia were not innocent victims, but lovers. By making them innocent, Boker has to rely on machinery to make them appear guilty, and no one, including George, should be misled by the countess's devices. Moreover, Philip does not die, as do Boker's other heroes and heroines, because he is caught up in a complex and deceitful world; instead, he is simply murdered by the countess's henchman. He is, in other words, a victim of the play's machinery, and neither his death nor Sophia's being taken to prison can be said to be tragic.

Second, the ending is, to say the least, dramatically inept. When the play ends, the audience's attention shifts from Philip to Sophia. Suddenly, she makes the chief claim on both an audience's sympathy and its curiosity. Yet Boker makes no attempt to indicate what will happen to her after her imprisonment; nor has he done much to develop her character earlier. Like Lady Alda, Sophia has little to recommend her as a dramatic character. She is innocent without, like Anne, being perceptive, and for most of the play she has nothing to do except be innocent. Lacking plausibility, the play lacks thematic interest. The good characters here are nothing other than good; the evil characters nothing other than evil; and Boker depends on his play's machinery, rather than on his characters, to direct the action.

A period of almost thirty years separates Königsmark from Nydia and Glaucus, and Boker's having written these last two plays was something of an accident brought about by the successful revival of Francesca da Rimini in 1882. Nydia and Glaucus are two versions of material from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii (1835), and as their titles suggest, the plays differ primarily in terms of which character dominates the action. They differ as well in their endings, for Nydia, who dies at the end of her play, is alive at the end of Glaucus. But essentially, both treat central characters, Nydia and Glaucus, whose merit is unrecognized by the world, but who reveal that merit by triumphing over evil.

In both plays evil is represented by Arbaces, an Egyptian priest of Isis and the guardian of Ione, a beautiful and rich heiress. Ione and Glaucus, whom the world thinks a rich and foppish gentleman, are in love, but that love is threatened by Arbaces, who wishes to secure control over Ione's fortune. In addition, Ione's brother Apaecides, a neophyte priest of Isis, has discovered that Arbaces is a fraud and that the idol of Isis, a mechanical contraption worked by Arbaces' servant, is designed to bilk the faithful. Once having made that discovery, Apaecides is murdered, and Arbaces, having made it appear that Glaucus is responsible for the death, imprisons Ione in a house complete with secret passages. Although blind, Nydia knows her way through Arbaces' house, and leads Glaucus to Ione. He rescues her and, at least in Glaucus, all ends happily.

In Nydia the plot is complicated because of Nydia's love for Glaucus, which, since she is a slave, Nydia realizes can never be fulfilled. Throughout the play she suffers in silence because of her passion and reveals it only as the play is ending. By then, she herself is dying, and her death, which is meant to be tragic and moving, is merely expedient. Glaucus and Ione, both beautiful and rich members of the nobility, belong together. Were Nydia to survive, her passion for Glaucus would be excess baggage the play could never adequately incorporate. The only way for Boker to resolve the problem of Nydia is for her to die, and her death scene, which is overdrawn and sentimental, includes a sudden moment at which she can see, at least in a spiritual sense. One thing she “sees” is that it is better for her to die since there is no happiness for her in this world. But her death, unlike those of Boker's earlier heroines, is not a triumph over a complex and ambiguous world. It is instead a gratuitous resolution of an otherwise uncomfortable situation.

According to one of his notes to Nydia, Boker would have had Glaucus die at the play's end also, except that the plot would not allow it.¹ Thus Glaucus survives in both plays, and in Glaucus itself Nydia's love for him has been so weakened that she has no difficulty surviving the play's conclusion. Boker's most radical change in Glaucus is his development of the character of Glaucus, which is accomplished by emphasizing his apparent foppishness while at the same time indicating that Glaucus's high ideals and gentlemanly behavior make him superior to the world around him. He is not, then, like Calaynos, a multifaceted and ambiguous character, any more than is Nydia; nor is the evil the two confront anything other than deceit motivated by greed. In neither play does Boker explore his characters or his themes, and both plays are spectacle rather than drama, melodrama rather than tragedy. The weaknesses of Königsmark dominate Nydia and Glaucus as well, and all three late plays are a disappointing conclusion to Boker's playwrighting career.

THE LATER POETRY: THE BOOK OF THE DEAD AND POEMS OF THE WAR

With the exception of his love sonnets, and to a lesser extent The Book of the Dead, Boker's poetry, whether written before or after 1856, is also disappointing. Of the poems written before 1856, the most significant are those that define his theory of poetry or enhance some of the themes of his plays (these poems have been discussed already). The other early poems are insignificant. Technically, such a poem as “The Song of the Earth,” a long poem in various meters, reflects Boker's interest in prosody. But for all his concern with, and knowledge of, poetic technique, Boker was not a gifted technician. His blank verse and his sonnets, his most successful forms, are competent, but not inspired. Philosophically, such poems as “The Song of the Earth,” “The Vision of the Goblet”—an ode in praise of Dionysus—and “Ode to a Mountain Oak” are trivial. For all his talk of infusing lifeless material with the fire of the imagination, Boker failed to infuse his own poetry.

Of the two books that followed the writing of Königsmark, The Book of the Dead is the more interesting. Written during the early years of the Girard Bank lawsuit (1858-60), it is an anomaly among Boker's works. For one thing, it does not treat his usual themes. Although Boker's portrayal of his father and himself as two noble individuals pitted against corruption recalls the situations in his plays, Boker's interest here is to defend his father's reputation, not to examine the relationship between the individual and society. In addition, the work is more intensely personal than are the plays or even the love sonnets. While Boker was not the sort ever entirely to drop what Leland described as the “nil admirari air” he does not disguise the profound effect the lawsuit had on him. In one poem Boker imagines that his father, viewing these events from the vantage point of heaven, regards such matters as the lawsuit as “but illusions vain.”² For Boker himself, however, “this scene is all in all,” and the emotions he expresses are real, not assumed. “I am,” he tells his father, “the thing I seem to be” (19). Thus the work is a sometimes-moving account of the effects the lawsuit had on the poet.

The most obvious of these effects is outrage. Ostensibly, The Book of the Dead is designed to defend and restore Charles Boker's reputation. The 107 numbered poems, as well as the unnumbered prefatory poem, are meant to present an accurate account of the events surrounding the lawsuit. Yet rather than simply one document among many that will come out of the lawsuit, Boker's book, like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is to be the sole document on which posterity will base its judgment:

Beside the spreading Nile of old,
          They buried with their worthy dead
A scrolled papyrus, to unfold
          His virtues and the life he led.
And all the gods, in council grave,
          Asked nothing but this written scroll,
As evidence, to doom or save
          The bearer's arbitrated soul.

(5)

Boker's outrage results not only from what he regards as the inaccuracy of the charges against his father, but also from what he sees as the betrayal those charges symbolize. By saving the Girard Bank, Charles Boker had saved more than an institution. He had made it possible also for others to salvage their personal and financial fortunes. Instead of loyalty, these people repaid Boker with envy and deceit:

The knaves who found safe shelter there,
          Who owed him more than they could pay,
Were eaten up with envious care
          Because their chief was more than they.
But cowards shrewd, they hid their thought,
          And fetched and carried at his nod,
Until his soul was upward caught
          By the dread, sudden hand of God.
In life they played their cunning parts,
          They lauded everything he did;
In death they—bold, heroic hearts—
          Stabbed at him through the coffin-lid!

(8)

Moreover, ignorant of banking themselves, these enemies based their charges on that ignorance and added slander and “hints of guilt” until at last:

          The murmur grew a general roar;
And, in the very house he built,
          They drove his children from the door.

(9)

In addition to the outrage he directs at all the parties to the lawsuit, Boker is particularly embittered toward those who have betrayed a man who trusted and took a personal interest in them. Feeling that one such man incorporates the betrayals of both Peter and Judas, Boker devotes the eleventh poem, which is typical of the poems that express rage, to excoriating him:

Peter and Judas merged in one!
          Two traitors, matchless till thy time,
It needs to show the deed thou hast done,
          And fill the measure of thy crime.
Him thou deniedst, and sold to men,
          Was more to thee than aught on earth;
He raised thy narrow fortunes when
          The world was cold before thy worth.
Change places with that noble heart;
          If thou wert dead and wronged, would he,
I ask thee, act so vile a part
          In dealing with thy memory?
Oh, fie! conceal thy dirty gold,
          Thy secret comfort, open shame!
For thirty pieces thou hast sold
          The treasure of an honest name.
Or else let Judas' story yield
          Its fullest fruit: Take up thy pelf,
Seek out the Potter, buy his field,
          And in some corner hang thyself!

(28-29)

But the poems do more than vent the poet's rage; they also celebrate his relationship with his father. From them it is clear that while Boker loved his father, the two did not understand each other, and one strength of the poems is that Boker does not sentimentalize the relationship. Charles Boker did not approve of his son's desire to be a poet; and George Boker did not approve of his father's single-minded dedication to business. But nothing in the record suggests that the relationship was especially stormy or acrimonious. The two simply held differing assumptions about life, and the poet seems to have understood and to have accepted that difference. In the nineteenth poem, for example, he remembers how he would try to lure his father away from the cares of business:

Oft when thy duties bound thee down
          To wearying labor, I, more free,
Fled from the stagnant heat of town,
          And sought to lure thee after me.
In vain I tried the oriole's call,
          In vain the robin's tender note,
In vain the woodland songsters all
          Made music in my swelling throat.

(40)

When nature's joys failed to entice the banker, the poet tried suggesting that working “Amidst the press and throng of men” leads to nothing but death:

I pointed to the o'erworked dust
          That swells the church-yard mounds: you said,
“‘Twere better to wear out than rust:
          There is rest enough amongst the dead.”

(41)

Having established the two viewpoints, the poem concludes not with the poet's arguing the superiority of his view nor with an admission that the banker's view was correct. Instead, it ends with the simple recognition that father and son differed:

Poor soul, I mourn thy labor lost;
          Thy self-denying purpose gained,
But gained at a prodigious cost—
          Thy work denied, thy memory stained.
I may misjudge. Thy life to thee,
          Perhaps, was filled with joyous hours,
And seemed as fair an empery
          As that o'er which the poet towers.
'Tis for omniscient God alone
          To know who grovels, who ascends:
We work His purpose, one by one,
          In divers ways, to divers ends.

(42)

But while they had different ambitions, father and son agreed on the importance of achievement. At times, Boker considers giving over the writing of this book, particularly when he considers how little anything seems to matter in a world “That seeks no heaven and shuns no hell” (44). These feelings leave him, however, when he senses his father's presence. Curiously, then, a man who seems to have cared nothing for poetry becomes the force that impels Boker to write, and The Book of the Dead is motivated not only by outrage, but also by love:

I know who stands beside my chair,
          Who sternly motions to my pen;
I grasp it, in foredoomed despair,
          And ply my fearful task again.
Once more the pinions are unfurled,
          They beat the air, they mount on high,
And from this low, sin-bounded world,
          Go fanning gently up the sky.

(45)

As the twenty-third poem shows, Boker's love for his father was based on an admiration for his father's way of meeting the world. Father and son were joined by their conception of how a person should behave even while they disagreed on the specific ambitions a person should hold:

I loved thee for thy honest scorn
          Of fraud and wrong, thy tender ruth,
That touched the lowest thing forlorn,
          Thy eagle grasp on right and truth.
I never knew thy tongue to hang,
          Before rich wrong, in selfish fright;
But I have heard it when it rang,
          A clarion, on the side of right.

(50)

Because he did love his father, Boker naturally felt a deep sense of loss when his father died, and that sense of loss was compounded by the lawsuit. As a result, writing these poems became an outlet for Boker's grief. “I can but sing,” he says in the fourth poem, “For thus one half my grief is drowned” (15). Later, in the eighty-first poem, Boker indicates the extent to which his grief required such an outlet:

For, lacking utterance to my woe,
          I must have writhed as one possessed,
And tossed my wild arms to and fro,
          And rent my hair, and beat my breast.
Therefore thank God that in mild song
          He still permits my pain to shroud;
And when I thunder o'er the throng,
          'Tis only from a golden cloud!

(166-167)

In addition to his grief, Boker's poems were an outlet for the frustration he could not express publicly. Given the lawsuit itself, as well as the usual way life works, Boker often met his father's enemies in the ordinary course of a day. Like Anne or Leonor, he sometimes found himself confronting enemies whom he could not destroy, and he was in the frustrating position of being certain of his future victory and yet of having to endure his enemies' present gloating. What was worse, social convention required he feign, if not cordiality, at least forbearance.

In the fifty-second poem Boker describes one such incident, and having characterized most of his father's enemies as “The common herd” (114), singles out four whose actions he found most repulsive:

One fool, lob-sided and bare-browed,
          Mindless of home, in spiteful glee,
Of gibbeting my name talked loud,
          As though he shared the hangman's fee.
One blustered, swaggered, stamped, and swore,
          Till conscience was by rage beguiled;
And one, whose hair was silvered o'er,
          Babbled, unnoticed, like a child.
But all the while the subtler cur,
          Whose bark had harried on the pack,
Was out of sight; such things prefer
          To stab one's honor in the back.

(115)

As the poem's concluding lines indicate, writing poetry was more than merely a way to revile such enemies. Concentrating on his poetry was also the key to his ability to retain his self-control in such situations:

And I, amidst this reptile throng,—
          Giants in fraud, but dwarfs in wit,—
Stood calmly, and composed a song,
          Like Ragner in the serpents' pit.

(116)

The Book of the Dead ranges, then, across a spectrum of emotions. Considered as a sequence, it works its way from outrage and grief to a sense of victory and closes with Boker's wish that his father, whose reputation is now secure, will have a quiet rest:

The curs that brayed at thee are dumb,
          The liars strangled with their lies;
A thousand honest voices hum
          Thy praise, and not a foe replies.
No sound shall come to vex thy ears;
          Thy small domain of flowery sod
Is hallowed, Sleep, without a fear,
          And wake but at the voice of God!

(214)

Historically, The Book of the Dead is interesting for the light it sheds on the Girard lawsuit as well as on Boker's life, for it is his most autobiographical work. Like all his works, this one is uneven, and its observations on life sometimes banal:

I do not say our journey goes
          Without some roses, there and here;
Although short seasons has the rose,
          The thorns are growing all the year.

(15)

Yet these poems have more power and appeal than does much of Boker's poetry and certainly have a greater sense of immediacy than does Poems of the War.

Poems of the War does not include every war poem Boker wrote, since in selecting the poetry for the volume he omitted such satiric poems as “The Copperhead,” “Tardy George”—a satire on General George McClellan—and “The Queen Must Dance”—a satire on Mrs. Lincoln that Boker published anonymously in 1862. The poems Boker included are “serious” and “lofty.” Many were based on newspaper accounts of battles; others celebrate the “cause” that justified the war; most were originally written and published as quickly as Boker could manage and appeared in newspapers or as broadsides, often shortly after the battles they recounted. When Boker was readying the volume for publication, he asked Oliver Wendell Holmes to write a prefatory piece, but Holmes, who claimed to admire Boker's poetry, declined, and Boker himself wrote an “Invocation” that stands as the first poem. He then filled out the book by adding a section of “Miscellaneous Poems.”

While many American poets wrote poems inspired by the Civil War, only Whitman's and Melville's poetry continues to attract attention. For those two poets the Civil War was a national tragedy that called into question the nature of the United States. For Boker, and for most of the war poets, the war was also an event of great moment, and Boker was deeply concerned that the Union prevail. But whereas the war inspired Whitman and Melville to write significant and probing poetry, it prompted Boker to write patriotic verse that had the immediate purpose of arousing patriotism. Taking accounts of battles from newspapers, Boker versified the events of the war in the hope that those events would thereby become more real to his readers. In a sense, then, his literary method was what it had always been: to take historical material and to make it literature.

But whenever Boker wished to transform something into literature, he removed that thing from the present and forced it to fit his conception of what literature should be. Such transformation meant not only that the events had to be set to verse, but also that the diction and details had to be literary. As a result, Boker's war poems have little contact with the war they are meant to describe. They suffer from the general flaw of “popular” war poetry: namely, what they celebrate is unreal. Although Boker often makes soldiers the narrators of his poems and places the soldiers within the action, his poems fail to achieve immediacy.

For one thing, Boker's diction mars his war poems. His soldier-poets do not sing, they “troll a stave” and speak of their art as “minstrelsy.”³ For another, the words Boker uses to describe battles are often more medieval than nineteenth-century. “Pennons” are “blown out,” and “Spears” slant over the soldiers (140). And finally, Boker sentimentalizes his subjects. “Before Vicksburg” describes how a young, wounded soldier struggles to reach General Sherman to ask that more ammunition be sent the troops. In the poem the young soldier is not simply young; he is “The merest child, the youngest face / Man ever saw in such a fearful place” (104). And the child is not merely wounded, but “Weeping and sorely lame” (104). “Stifling his tears” and limping to General Sherman, the child ignores the “pool” his “bright, young blood” makes “Around the circle of his little feet” until he can ask for the ammunition. Sherman, who in this poem is obtuse, will not pay attention to the lad's request, but keeps asking if the boy is not wounded. This gives the boy an opportunity to say again and again that his wounds are unimportant, but that the troops need more bullets:

… the boy, toiling towards the hill's hard top,
          Turned around, and with his shrill child's cry
          Shouted, 'O, don't forget!
          We'll win the battle yet!
          But let our soldiers have some more,
More cartridges, sir,—calibre fifty-four!”

(106)

Such poetry belongs to the cult of sentiment and is meant to produce a tear, and in the poem itself Sherman is so moved he sheds a “drop” that “Angels might envy” (105).

The success with which Boker moved his readers is suggested both by the sales of Poems of the War and by the adulation heaped upon him.⁴ Today, if Boker's war poems are thought to be no worse than similar popular poems, they cannot be considered much better. That they were based on actual events makes them no more real than if Boker had created the events. The war Boker portrays is an idealized war in which wounds, blood, and death are little more than stage properties. Far from being the real Civil War, Boker's war is the one in which Stephen Crane's Henry Fleming hoped to fight when he enlisted. To find the Civil War and an examination of its essential meaning, one must look to poets other than Boker.

THE LATER POETRY: BOKER'S LOVE SONNETS

THE BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND.

While Boker's involvement in the Girard lawsuit resulted in a minor work and his personal concern with the Civil War in insignificant verse, his love affairs, particularly his affair with Angie King Hicks, resulted in a major work. During his career Boker wrote more than four hundred sonnets. It is not surprising that a poet devoted to established poetic forms should have been attracted to the sonnet. Yet Boker's commitment to established forms does not entirely explain the number of sonnets he wrote. Following the Plays and Poems and the start of the Girard lawsuit, his writing of sonnets, like his writing of The Book of the Dead, became a private outlet. Thus while he wrote and published sonnets on nature, a sonnet on “The Awakening of the Poetic Faculty,” sonnets in memory of such people as John Sargeant, occasional sonnets addressed to Andrew Jackson and Louis Napoleon, and seven sonnets on the Crimean War, Boker devoted most of his sonnets, 371 of them, to love. Of these, however, only sixty were published in his lifetime. Although Boker at times thought of publishing the other love sonnets, they remained poems written for his “private solace, to blow off the steam of love” (“LS” [“Letter from George Henry Boker to Richard Henry Stoddard”], May 2, 1865).

The 371 love sonnets may be divided into two groups: fifty-eight published in Plays and Poems and 313 that form the Sonnets: A Sequence on Profane Love, a work which, except for two sonnets published in Leigh Hunt's The Book of the Sonnet, remained unpublished and unknown until 1929. Moreover, the sonnets in Plays and Poems and those of the Sequence may be further grouped on the bases of when and to whom they were written. Of the fifty-eight sonnets in Plays and Poems the first seven were reprinted from The Podesta's Daughter (1852), and two of these had appeared in Sartain's Magazine. The remaining fifty-one, those that first appeared in Plays and Poems, were written between 1852 and 1856, and some, perhaps all, were no doubt the “long string of sonnets” Boker said he wrote during the winter of 1852 (“LS,” May 6, 1852).

The 313 sonnets of the Sequence on Profane Love span thirty years (1858-87) and address three women. Of these 281 were written at fairly regular intervals between 1857 and 1871, at which later date Boker left the United States to become minister to Turkey. The Sequence then breaks off until June and July 1877, when Boker wrote fourteen sonnets that treat a brief affair. Finally, eighteen sonnets written between 1881 and 1887 record a third affair.

Only two of the women Boker's love sonnets address can be identified with certainty: Julia Boker and Angie King Hicks. From both external and internal evidence Boker seems to have addressed the seven sonnets in The Podesta's Daughter to Julia, his wife. The external evidence is simply that one of the sonnets originally published in Sartain's was titled “To Julia.” Internally, the evidence is negative rather than positive: these sonnets do not treat themes found in the clearly adulterous sonnets.

In the seven Podesta's Daughter sonnets Boker protests his devotion, admires the woman's beauty, and speaks of the ennobling effects of her love. While all these themes appear in later sonnets, themes are added to the sonnets first published in Plays and Poems that are not found in the earlier seven. The second of the new sonnets, “Thou who dost smile,” is a seduction poem;⁵ in the sonnet “O! would that Fortune might bestow on me,” the fifth of the new sonnets, the speaker wishes for a place “secluded from the prying world” where he, loving “beyond the prudent line,” might be alone with nature and his mistress (404); similarly, the sonnet “Your love to me appears in doubtful signs,” the sixth of the new sonnets, speaks of the woman's “cautious action” in order to disguise her love (405) while the next sonnet, “No gentle touches of your timid hand,” describes the lovers' “acting [their] parts, at the harsh world's command” (406). In these sonnets Boker treats a love that is unmistakenly illicit, while the seven earlier sonnets contain no hint that the lovers must hide from the world.

If the seven earlier sonnets were written to Boker's wife, clearly the fifty-one later sonnets were not, although the identity of the women to whom they are addressed, or even that they address only one woman, cannot be fully determined. In December 1851 Boker, responding to Stoddard's announcement that he was involved with a woman, wrote, “I am forever tumbling into such things, and enjoy them as only a poet can,” and he promised to tell Stoddard of all his future affairs (“LS,” December 23, 1851). In January 1852, again writing to Stoddard, Boker mentions a quarrel with his mistress, “a pretty little actress” (“LS,” January 14, 1852); and in May he told Stoddard of the “string of sonnets.” Thus the woman of these sonnets may have been an actress, perhaps one who played in his The World a Mask.

By October 1852, however, Boker was involved in a new affair (“LS,” October 12, 1852) that was still continuing in December (“LS,” December 26, 1852). But in his letters to Stoddard, Boker does not mention another affair until February 1856. At that time he was involved with a married woman who “thought that she could play with edged tools, and so she picked me up and began, but I finished the matter, as mother Nature directs; and now the lady howls in my ears, night and day, about her ruin, and her remorse, and her poor husband, and Christ knows what” (“LS,” February 11, 1856). It is likely that this woman was Angie King Hicks. If so, the affair with her lasted at least until June 1864, and perhaps until December 1871. In any event, the first 281 sonnets of the Sequence, those dated 1857-71, appear to address one woman, and that eighty-six of them do address Mrs. Hicks was established by the discovery of an album in which she kept the sonnets Boker sent her.⁶

The wife of the American portrait painter Thomas Hicks, whom she married in 1855, Angie Hicks was born and lived in New York City, and Boker no doubt saw her there as well as in Philadelphia, where she often came to visit the Lelands. Following the last sonnet in her album, dated June 21, 1864, the sonnets in the Sequence itself treat a separation; but whether the affair itself ended in 1864 is not known. Since the sonnets in the Sequence that precede and follow those in Mrs. Hicks's album appear to address the same woman and since they bear dates close to those on Mrs. Hicks's copies, the conclusion follows that the entire set of 281 sonnets chronicles Boker's affair with her and that while the affair underwent a change in 1864, it lasted until 1871.

Finally, it is clear that each of the later two sets of sonnets in the Sequence addresses different women and that, although Mrs. Hicks was still alive when these sonnets were written, neither set addresses her. Each of the three sets of sonnets in the Sequence contains birthday poems—in fact, the third set of eighteen sonnets consists of little else. But the dates of the birthday sonnets do not match. In the second set the birthdate is June 28; in the third, February 26. In the first set of sonnets the birthday poems are undated, but two fall between sonnets dated October 6 and November 2; in Mrs. Hicks's album these birthday sonnets are dated October 14. Presumably this was Mrs. Hicks's birthday, but as Bradley notes, the records that would establish the date of her birth no longer exist.⁷

In short, Boker had several love affairs after he married in 1844, and he no doubt had more affairs than those for which some record exists. As he told Stoddard, he was “forever tumbling into such things,” and his reputation among those who knew him is indicated by Elizabeth Stoddard's comment that Boker “could weep with his victims, but he was the sort of man that would have taken the Virgin Mary from the Ass, before Joseph, and helped her kindly into an adjoining hedge.”⁸ Yet, as the preceding discussion reveals, the love sonnets' usefulness as a record of the facts of Boker's life is limited.

The biographical basis of his love sonnets, particularly of the Sequence on Profane Love, does explain in part their lack of unity and design. At the time of the first sonnets Boker had a plan for a work whose subject would be “sexual love” and in which he would “ring all the changes upon it, in a series of poems … the whole thing to be strictly subjective, with mere glimpses of the story here and there.” When he originally told Elizabeth Stoddard of this plan, however, he did not intend to use the sonnet as his form. But “I shall,” he said, “draw largely from my own experience” (“LES” [“Letter from George Henry Boker to Elizabeth Stoddard”], May 10, 1857).

Boker's letter to Elizabeth Stoddard further indicates that he had not yet started the work, and apparently he never did. To the extent he realized his intention of treating sexual love, he did so through his sonnets. Since they were from the start a private outlet, they were written more as the mood struck him and less as elements in a unified work. While the exigencies of his life presumably proved interesting to Boker himself, they gave rise not to a structured treatment of love, but to an uneven work that fails to sustain a reader's interest through the first 282—let alone the entire 371—sonnets.⁹ Thus the sequence to Angie King Hicks neither merits, nor will it repay, being treated as a sustained literary work. Instead, its interest lies, first, in its place in the history of American poetry and, second, in its treatment of sexual love.

THE SONNETS' PLACE IN AMERICAN POETRY.

Historically, Boker's sequence is the first attempt by an American poet to write a love sequence modeled at least in part on the Elizabethan sequences. Since Boker's work was unknown until 1929 and not widely read even when it was published, there can be no possibility of its having influenced such later poets as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Conrad Aiken, Karl Shapiro, or John Berryman. But like the Elizabethans, who faced the problem of adapting Petrarchanism, these American poets had to adapt the love sequence, and Boker's love sonnets should be examined in terms of how he adapted the Elizabethan tradition.

To revive a tradition such as the sonnet sequence requires poets conscious of their art and equal to the twofold problem of renewing both the sonnet form and the sonnet's content, which includes the imagery and conventions associated with love sequences. Like Boker, Millay, Wylie, Aiken, Shapiro, and Berryman each brought an individual approach to the sonnet sequence. All possessed the necessary technical competence to work in the sonnet form, but only Shapiro and Berryman experimented with the form itself. All developed a particular tone in the sonnet, notably Millay who managed several tones ranging from intensity to a flippant, sophisticated world-weariness. In addition, Millay, Shapiro, and Berryman renewed the sonnet through their diction, writing poems that were often colloquial and idiomatic, while Berryman played with language—using adjectives as nouns, nouns as verbs—in the manner of E. E. Cummings.

Moreover, all these poets brought distinctive content to the sonnet. At one extreme, Wylie's “One Person” (1929) grew out of her obsession with Shelley, and her sonnets, marked by necrophilia and preoccupied with Shelley's decomposed body, belong to the tradition of the grotesque in American literature. Millay, especially in Fatal Interview, gave her sonnets thematic depth through her exploration of the inescapability, as well as the emotional cost, of love. For both Aiken—whose sonnets, like Millay's, owe much to John Donne, and whose imagery recalls that of W. B. Yeats—and Shapiro, love was a meaningful human experience that could be carried out in the face of the modern world's cynicism and sterility. And finally, Berryman's sequence focused on a violent and destructive love.

While a competent sonneteer, Boker was not an innovator in the form; nor does his technique, competent though it is, dazzle like Millay's. His career does show, however, some development in his handling of the sonnet form. Although by 1862 most of his sonnets adhere to the Italian form, his earlier ones are surprisingly flexible. Of the seven sonnets addressed to his wife, for example, only the fifth follows the strict Italian rhyme scheme and division of content into an octave and sestet. Three of the remaining six sonnets use the scheme a b a b a b a b in the octave, and one of these follows the Miltonic division of content; the remaining three adopt the conventional scheme for the octave, but place the turn unconventionally and are, like the sonnets first collected in Plays and Poems, more flexible in their division of content than are Boker's later sonnets. In the later sonnets Boker adopts the conventional scheme for the octave and limits his liberties to the placement of the turn.

In one way, Boker early adopted what became for him a standard practice in the sestet. Commenting on Robert Davidson's “Hope—A Sonnet,” one of the poems Boker examined while Hart was editor of Sartain's, Boker criticized the sonnet for concluding with a couplet, which, he told Hart, “gives too epigrammatic a turn to the last lines” (“LH” [“Letter from George Henry Boker to John Seely Hart”], March n.d., 1849). In addition to avoiding a final couplet in his own sonnets, Boker avoided a sestet rhymed c d c d c d, preferring instead c d d c c d, his most common scheme, or the closely related c d d c d c.

Noting a poet's rhyme schemes is useful only as a means of measuring his awareness of a given form's possibilities, and Boker's adoption of these schemes does reveal something of his understanding of the sonnet's possibilities, since their chief value is the range of uses they opened for him. Aside from dividing the sestet into three two-line groups (c d, d c, c d or c d, d c, d c), the schemes invite a division either into two tercets (c d d c c d or c d d c d c) or into a quatrain and two final lines which, since they do not rhyme, avoid the “epigrammatic” quality of a final couplet. As the sestets of two of Boker's finest sonnets show, the scheme c d d c c d allowed him to handle the sestet's sounds in a variety of ways:

I cannot storm or fondle as a boy;
Thought shakes his finger when my passions start
To play the antics of a hero's part.
I cannot make thee goddess now, now toy;
I can but touch thee with a solemn joy,
And fold thee gravely to my quiet heart.

(“CXXIII”)¹⁰

I grant myself no fitting mate for thee,
Thou radiant creature, gilding my dim clay
With morning sunlight, and I cannot say
What wrought thy miracle of love for me:
But loving thee is nothing but to see,
To touch, to taste, and bear the sense away.

(“CXXIV”)

Boker opens the first sestet with a clause that occupies an entire line and then allows the couplet to stop the reflection. Line 12 again stands syntactically alone, and in line 13 Boker allows the repetition of the c rhyme to stop the poem slightly before the cadence of the final line. In the second sestet he plays the c and d rhymes against the onward movement of syntax, stopping the poem syntactically at the end of line 12 and then stopping it again, this time by rhyme, at the end of line 13. Noteworthy as well is Boker's manipulation of sound and cadence in these sestets through his use of parallelism, caesurae, and alliteration. As these sestets show, he was capable of managing the sonnet's resources with subtlety and skill.

Similarly, Boker could handle the sound in his octaves to good effect. His competence in the sonnet is indicated particularly by his avoiding the pauses invited by the rhymes. Ideally, an Italian octave should be unbroken, a difficult feat to manage in English with its limited rhymes. Yet at times Boker does create an unbroken octave and achieves a good effect by playing the sounds of his rhymes against the poem's syntax:

My darling, now the slumber of the night
Lies on thy eyelids, and thy guiltless heart
Rocks, like an empty pinnace moored apart
From the rough storms through which it took its flight
To this calm haven, where the billow's might
Dies in the swimming lily, and no start
From life's rude outer sea breaks in to dart
Its mortal anguish on thy sealed sight.

(“XXVII”)

Their competence notwithstanding, Boker's sonnets, including the one just quoted, lack fire. At their worst, they are stodgy and pedestrian. Their octaves fail to catch the reader up in a complex and intense experience, and one indication of this weakness is their failure to open with memorable lines. At first glance, this might seem a trivial criticism until one considers such lines as “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, / I summon up remembrance of things past” or “Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry”; or, not to compare Boker only with Shakespeare, such lines as Millay's “Thou are not lovelier than lilacs,—no, / Nor honeysuckle” and “I know I am but summer to your heart, / And not the full four seasons of the year.” These lines impress themselves upon a reader and compel attention in ways that Boker could not in such lines as “I have thy love, and were I drunk with joy / That were enough” (“XXIII”); “The leaden eyelids of wan twilight close / Upon the sun” (“XXV”); and “Roll the grand harmonies which finite mind / Can neither reason of nor understand” (“LXIV”).

On the whole, Boker's sonnets also lack the excitement and complexity found in sonnets by a poet fully able to exploit the resources of language and imagery. In Sonnet II, which treats the problem of the poet's sincerity, Boker writes:

To say I love thee, is but uttering
A worn-out phrase. The opal-breasted dove
Coos the same story to his feathered love,
The hills, the meadows, and the forests ring
With various changes on the self-same string.
In vain my fancy labors to improve
That common utterance; for the heart will rove
From the more complex to the simpler thing.

The problem in this octave is not so much whether the imagery is fresh—Boker no doubt borrowed the dove from Spenser—but whether the images have any particular appropriateness to the subject and lend depth to his theme. In the sestet Boker contrasts “straitened Nature” with “ostentatious Art,” but the imagery drawn from nature is never directly related to the content; nor does he try to explore the implications of his images. He believed, as noted before, that thought and expression were separable in poetry, and this mistaken idea did not serve him well. While it is no doubt unfair to compare one of Boker's sonnets with Sir Philip Sidney's “Loving in truth” or Shakespeare's “As an unperfect actor”—two sonnets concerned with what Shakespeare calls “The perfect ceremony of love's rite”—one has but to recall both the wit and uses of imagery of these two poets to see the distance between what Boker attempts and what other poets accomplish.

Thus, although competent, Boker's sonnets to Angie Hicks make little claim on a reader through their uses of the resources of poetry. Their interest lies instead in his handling of his themes. In part, these themes continue those found in the plays, especially the theme of the individual's relationship with society. To this theme, however, Boker adds the theme of sexual love, and he casts the theme of the individual and society in terms of the poet's relationship with society. Furthermore, unlike the plays, the sonnets do not treat characters removed from nineteenth-century America. Boker's art now becomes inextricably linked with his life. The interest in the sonnets proves, then, to be biographical—not, to be sure, as a record of Boker's external life, but as a record of the “complex case” (Sonnet I) of his internal life; and an assessment of the sonnets requires they be placed within the context of that internal life. Once that is done, it is possible to argue that, despite its inadequacies, the sequence to Angie Hicks is a radical and subtle examination of “profane love.”

THE THEME OF LOVE AND BOKER'S NEED FOR FAME.

Throughout his plays Boker focuses on two kinds of characters: those who seek to escape the world around them by creating an ideal world, and those who remain in the world but whose true and superior nature the world fails to see. At times, one character such as Calaynos incorporates both themes; at times, as with the characters of Lanciotto and Glaucus, one theme dominates. But whether embodied in one character or not, these two concerns permeate Boker's plays and reflect tensions he experienced in his life. For a variety of reasons, Boker was not at home in nineteenth-century America, and art was for him an Edenic world. His desire to be a poet was motivated in part by his wish to escape the world around him and in part by his wish to prove himself superior to that world. Yet to call himself an artist and to publish works of literature were not enough to confirm his sense of his superiority. While he disliked the contemporary world, Boker looked to that world for some confirmation of his genius and some encouragement of his ambitions. He needed fame, and he failed to achieve it.

His search for fame was foredoomed since he could have taken seriously neither of the sources from which fame might have come. The first, recognition by contemporary critics, was closed to him since America had little genuine literary criticism, if by criticism one means the informed and disinterested consideration of literature. As Stoddard realized, the critical, as well as the popular, acclaim that greeted a writer like Nathaniel Park Willis was due in large part to the lack of any rigorous critical standards, and Stoddard felt that even Longfellow had achieved his immense reputation because he had written during “the glimmering twilight of American literature in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century, when Bryant was the only poet and Irving the only prose writer who had attained distinction.”¹¹ In their haste to prove America at least the cultural equal of England, American reviewers seized on anyone who could churn out something that remotely resembled literature and elevated poets like Willis and Thomas Buchanan Reed to a prominence, albeit in most cases brief, to which they could lay little genuine claim.

Like Stoddard, Boker was aware of the quality of criticism in America, and he had fewer illusions about its purpose than did Stoddard. When he reviewed other authors, Boker praised their works in the hope that such praise would help the works sell. He expected that the authors in their turn would praise his work and help it to sell. Stoddard, in his criticism, tried to apply some standards, and Boker admired Stoddard's “way of judging of even a friend's work in the abstract” (“LS,” October 22, 1864). But Boker felt such a course ultimately unwise. For one thing, when Stoddard criticized Taylor, Taylor was hurt; and in addition to hurting a friend, Stoddard was too ready to make literary enemies, something Boker felt would not help Stoddard's career (“LS,” October 12, 1860). Cynical, or perceptive, enough to see that “fault-finding strengthens the praise,” Boker claimed he often included some negative criticisms in an otherwise positive review (“LS,” January 25, 1857). But he made no attempt to be objective in his reviews; nor did they reflect his actual judgment of other authors' works. “I hold the book-selling part of literature to be a trade—an everlasting effort to gull the public” (“LS,” December 26, 1852). Regarding American criticism as “a better sort of advertising—a more conspicuous sort—and that is all,” Boker cared for reviews “only as they may affect the public” (“LS,” January 25, 1857). In Pierre (1852) Melville, calling the kinds of reviews that appeared in America “panegyrics,” said they had a “general practical vagueness … without anything analytical about them.” Whether or not Boker would have welcomed “analytical” criticism had he received it, he, unlike Melville, could not believe that the favorable notices he received made him “the idol of the critics.”¹²

Lacking an informed criticism, America lacked as well what James Fenimore Cooper called “an intelligent public.” While Cooper argued that this public “is the best judge” of literature, he also saw that the substitution of a mass audience for an informed public resulted in “a tendency … to gravitate towards the common center; … lending value and estimation to mediocrity that are not elsewhere given.”¹³ Boker's attitude toward the popular success of his plays has been discussed before; given his attitude that the reading public existed in order to be gulled, popular success there, had it come, could have meant nothing. Like his attitude toward the critics, Boker's attitude toward the reading public landed him in a dilemma: the failure to recognize his greatness was proof that the public was thickheaded; but had his books sold, Boker would have had to assume either that the public had undergone a profound elevation in taste or that the public had been successfully gulled.

Inherent in the attitude of such poets as Boker, Taylor, and Stoddard toward poetry and the public lay a contradiction. Since poetry, and hence the poet, occupied a realm so far above the common herd, any attention the herd might pay poetry was proof the poet had failed to scale the heights of Parnassus. What these poets wished when they thought of recognition was that the public would acknowledge the poet's greatness and applaud him for being extraordinary while at the same time admitting its own inferiority. In his “Fitz-Greene Halleck” (1869) Taylor describes the neglect that originally greeted his subject's work and points to the recognition Halleck, who was dead at the time of the essay, was then receiving. Taylor's hope, however, is that society will change and that no longer will a poet be denied veneration in his own time. In a revealing passage Taylor speaks of a time when the public, recognizing its own limitations, will tell the poet to climb “Higher, still higher! though we may not reach you, yet in following we shall rise!”¹⁴

The tension between Boker's desire for fame and his disgust over striving for it is a symptom of this contradiction. Yet the number of times he returns to the subject of fame indicates the extent of his need to have his genius confirmed. To seek popularity was “to have no higher motive than vanity in the exercise of the highest function” (“LS,” April 26, 1851). The poet must pay no attention to his generation, but “will flourish when his generation shall have passed away forever” (“LS,” March 23, 1854). Boker thought Longfellow's fame proof of the age's shallowness, that no poet should “expect to be popular in an age in which Longfellow is a great poet” (“LS,” March 2, 1864). Nonetheless, Plays and Poems was “a last dash at the laurel” and when that “dash” failed, Boker complained of both the critics' and the public's having ignored him.

Unable to find confirmation of his genius through either critical or popular acceptance, Boker relied on the support of his friends. He was not the only American artist to seek such support. Throughout the letters of nineteenth-century American writers the intensity with which many of them clung to those with whom they corresponded about their art is striking. Artists, of course, work for the most part alone, but given the absence of a literary tradition and an informed audience, the American artist was not so much alone as isolated. How could an artist know if he or she in fact had ability if there were no one to confirm it? Emily Dickinson, whose isolation was far more terrible than Boker's, continued to write Thomas Wentworth Higginson (although she knew he was incapable of understanding her poetry) because she needed to ask someone if her poems were genuine and because, quite simply, Higginson was the only person she could ask.

During the years when Boker's hopes for a literary career were highest and were to suffer their greatest disappointment, his letters are notable for the increasing intensity with which he sought support and encouragement from Stoddard and, even more, from Taylor. “To tell you the truth,” he wrote Stoddard in 1854, “I am fast losing all faith in my own genius. … I never had sufficient external inducement to account for the vast pile of literary lumber which I have erected, but I was kept at work by a certain dim faith in myself” (“LS,” September 4, 1854). Now, however, that faith was fading, and Boker told Stoddard that more than anything else he required “companionship” to achieve “a full development of [his] intellectual powers,” going so far as to wish he could spend his life with both Stoddard and Taylor, whose families did share a house for a time (“LS,” June 11, 1855).

But Boker's letters to Stoddard never achieve the intensity of those to Taylor. Boker met Taylor in 1848 and began writing him in 1849. The relationship deepened in 1850, shortly after the death of Mary Agnew Taylor, Taylor's first wife, whom he had known since childhood and whom he had married when it was clear her death was imminent. When Mary died two months after the marriage, Boker wrote:

Dear Bayard, I wish to see you. I am unhappy about you. I have a thousand things to say to you, which I dare not write. I cannot fill the place of Mary, but, before God, I will love you, serve you, cling to you, until I rest—where she may now be sleeping. Bayard, this is no vain proffer of friendship. I never offered such feelings as these to man before—I never felt them. You are the only one to whom the secrets of my heart shall be entirely open. Will you receive me with the same confidence as I commit myself to you?

(“LT” [“Letter from George Henry Boker to Bayard Taylor”], December 28, 1850)

Throughout Taylor's grief, Boker continued the correspondence, discovering that he needed to share his feelings with Taylor and that a bond was being established between them:

We have both one quality of mind which smooths all things—an almost feminine tenderness for those we love. … Who would think this of me? who but your poor friend has discovered it in you? Is this sentiment? and are you laughing at me for making love to you, as if you were a green girl? Indeed, I do not mean it for false display. I can cry like a baby, when I think of you, alone, unhappy, companionless; and remember that you have told me how comforting my friendship is to you.

(“LT,” January 14, 1851)

In 1852 Boker invited Stoddard to engage in a fully frank relationship. But when he wrote Stoddard, his frankest confessions were of his sexual exploits, something he did not recount to Taylor. When he wrote Taylor, Boker wrote of his doubts over his literary ability and of his affection for Taylor, and both Boker's doubts and his affection were related, since periodically he owed a rebirth of his literary ambitions to Taylor, who could convince him that he was “a man of genius, in the true sense” (“LT,” October 22, 1855). For Boker, the relationship with Taylor became so important that the next year he wrote, “I have loved women, dearly and tenderly, but I never loved anything human as I love you” (“LT,” June 11, 1856); and when Taylor left for Europe without writing Boker, Boker asked, “Have you grown tired of loving me? Am I become a burden to you?” (“LT,” November 6, 1856).

Boker's fears that Taylor had ceased to love him were ungrounded. Just as Boker drew strength from Taylor, so Taylor drew strength from Boker. “I can find no peace but in the shadow of your personality. You are the rock in the weary land, and thus I throw myself at your feet in all the selfishness of friendship” (LB, December 10, 1854). Each man provided the other with encouragement and emotional support, and in his sonnet dedicating A Book of Romances, Lyrics and Songs (1851) to Boker, Taylor described Boker as “the mate of my poetic spring” and offered him “a love to match [Boker's] own.”¹⁵

The intensity and the terms with which Boker and Taylor expressed their affection for each other may seem curious today and might be explained by saying that men in the nineteenth century wrote one another in a conventional language which, while suspicious to us, was innocent to them. There is some truth in this argument and in the related argument that men in the nineteenth century needed emotionally intense and intimate relationships with each other because such relationships with women were impossible.

At least in part, Boker sought an intense relationship with Taylor because his attitudes toward women's intellectual abilities as well as their abilities to form meaningful relationships kept him from attempting such relationships with them. He thought the poetry written by women inferior, describing that by Alice and Phoebe Cary, two popular poets of the time, as “an uncheckable diarrhoea of filthy rhymes” (“LS,” January 7, 1850). Boker's assessment of the Carys is very likely accurate, yet he never subjected men's poetry, even when he did not like it, to such abuse. Further, while Boker did not think women devoid of sexual desires—“If I were the parish bull,” he once told Stoddard, “I could not satisfy my modern Pasiphae” (“LS,” October 12, 1852)—he also told Stoddard that “the feelings of women are too shallow for my taste; and that perhaps is the reason why I never really fall in love” (“LS,” January 14, 1852).

Since the nineteenth century was as uncomfortable as our own with admitting that a sexual element might be part of such a male relationship, the suggestion of such an element would not only have shocked, but also surprised men like Boker and Taylor who, living before Freud, were not as “sensitive” as we to the homosexual nuances of their relationship. Such an argument, however, incompletely explains such relationships. For one thing, the men themselves often were not as unconscious of the homoerotic element as is sometimes thought. Taylor, who seems both to have been homosexual and to have been interested in understanding his homosexuality,¹⁶ treated the physical element in male relationships in such poems as “Hylas,” such stories as “Twin Love,” and such novels as Joseph and His Friend, in which the two central male characters hold hands, embrace, and kiss. That either Taylor or his readers could find this “innocent” is unthinkable; and when carried to extremes, the argument that the nineteenth century was unaware of, and thus untroubled by, the homosexual implications of such relationships is unconvincing.¹⁷

Further, there is evidence that Boker himself experienced some uneasiness when he considered too deeply his feelings for Taylor and when his letters touched on emotions he was unable to explain. But rather than trying to express these emotions, Boker said he “had better stop here than end in something which neither of us understand [sic] exactly, although we both feel it through and through” (LT, November 25 [?], 1852).

It is none of the present purpose to try either to define Boker's sexuality or to offer a simple psychological explanation for the sonnets to Angie Hicks. There is no evidence that Boker had the same sexual feelings as did Taylor, and there is overwhelming historical evidence that Taylor was not the Dark Lady of Boker's sonnets.¹⁸ Nevertheless, Boker wanted an intense and intimate relationship with Taylor, one requirement of which was that Taylor confirm and strengthen Boker's belief in his genius and one drawback of which was the tension in which Boker found himself. But whether he consciously entertained sexual feelings for Taylor is both impossible to determine and irrelevant.

What is relevant to a reading of the sonnet sequence is the situation that confronted Boker around 1857: the disappointing results of his literary career, his father's death and the onset of the lawsuit, and the complex relationship with Taylor that was strongest between 1850 and 1856. The first two of these forces made Boker an increasingly private poet, and he turned his attention to his love sonnets. But in writing these sonnets, Boker could no longer believe he would enjoy critical or popular success. Nor after 1857 did he look to Taylor for the same encouragement and support he had earlier sought. Instead, that support came from Angie Hicks. Again, except from the sonnets themselves, it is as impossible to determine what Boker “really” thought of his mistress as it is to determine from his letters what he “really” thought of Taylor. But in the sonnets Boker treats a relationship with a woman that took the place of the relationship with Taylor, finding confirmation of his superiority to the world around him in his love for Angie Hicks and in her acceptance of him. Most important, Boker makes his sexual relationship with his mistress an essential element of that superiority.

THE NATURE OF LOVE.

Boker's substitution of his love affair for his earlier search for poetic fame takes place in the sixteenth sonnet. Confronted by “All the world's malice, all the spite of fate,” Boker argues that both of these are powerless against love:

                                                                                Thus to the wind I cast
The poet's laurel, and before their date
Summon the direst terrors of my doom:
For with the myrtle symbol of my love,
I reign exultant, and am fixed above
The petty fates that other joys consume.
As on a flowery path through life I'll move;
As through an arch of triumph pass the tomb.

In making this substitution, however, Boker is not giving up being a poet; rather he is conceding the arena in which his poetic ambitions will be carried out and the terms in which they will be fulfilled. In exchanging the laurel for the myrtle—a line that recalls Wordsworth's description of Dante's sonnets—Boker is choosing the sonnet rather than the drama. But as the seventeenth sonnet shows, the role of poet-lover requires a superior human being willing to risk “These awful joys,” since in risking them the poet chances both society's disapproval and heaven's condemnation. Faced with the option either of denying his “essence” by living conventionally or of releasing that “essence,” Boker asserts that either he “must die, or here become a god.”

As suggested by the play on “die” and on the releasing of one's “essence,” the wit in Boker's sonnets is largely sexual. From one point of view, to die or to become a god means either to live conventionally, and hence to die in a figurative sense by denying one's true identity, or to live unconventionally and hence heroically. From another perspective, however, to die refers, as in some of Donne's poems, to the loss of tumescence following intercourse. Thus in Boker's sonnet to become a god also means to perform sexually; and to release one's essence means both that the poet's true and unconventional nature is freed and that the poet has an orgasm.

Similarly, in sonnet “XLII” Boker returns to this sexual wit. He imagines that were his mistress to “give [him] … / The virgin treasure of her modest love,” the result would be “A rapture” the “gods above” would “Envy.” But Boker also imagines himself unable to be godlike, since exhaustion would inhibit his sexual performance:

Yet at that weakness I would fret and pine
Which makes exhausted nature trip and fall
Just at the point where it becomes divine.

The function of Boker's wit is to show the impossibility of separating spiritual and physical love. At times, Boker portrays an ideal, which is to say a nonsexual, woman and is disgusted by his own corruption, which is to say his sexuality. In sonnet “LXX,” for example, Boker contrasts the woman's “distaste” for sex with his own “brutish thirst.” Although his mistress “calmly puts aside / Her own distaste” (“LXX”), Boker is “ashamed” of “The passion” that makes him “Deface her virgin temple” and “foully roll / In orgies that pollute the sacred bowl” (“LXXI”). Yet as the very next sonnet shows, to escape sexuality is impossible. Trying to imagine himself able to “grow in some remote degree / Nearer to the whiteness of [his] darling's love” and thereby to become able to approach “those lights above” that shine through her eyes, Boker finds that

                                                                                          the vision of those eyes
Awakes the fiery current in [his] veins
With longings wild, mixed thrills of joys and pains;
Remembered kisses, burning with the dyes
That flushed her cheeks, the struggle, sobs and sighs,
Ere her chaste will lay vanquished in my chains.

(“LXXII”)

Placed in the context of the entire sequence, this sonnet's final images are designed not so much to define sexuality's only effect on a relationship as to define a possible effect. While sexual love can lead to the woman's degradation and, conversely, the man's as well, it is also potentially ennobling. Like the lovers in his plays, Boker and his mistress must move in the actual world; and in addition to making them superior to that world, their love creates an ideal world. Risking the disapproval of both society and heaven, the lovers are willing to take such risks since love is “heaven attained” (“XXXI”). If there is a heaven, Boker tells his mistress, and if he ultimately goes there, he will find it “pervaded by a sense of [her]” (“LIV”).

To enjoy a sexual relationship now is “to rob heaven of all its promised charms,” since the woman is herself a heaven. As a result, Boker finds his heaven “within [her] arms” (“LXXXVIII”); and whatever the risk, love is the best guide to heaven, for while engaging in love, one is “gazing in God's greeting face” (“CLXXX”). Moreover, love is “In every giving, / … like Christ's [love], embracing all” (“CCXXXIX”). Through their love, the lovers create an “Eden” (“CCLIV”), a heaven on earth that makes them cling to life (“CIX,” “CCXXXVIII”) because love is an embodiment here and now of a future heaven.

Boker's argument that love is a guide to a higher reality may appear platonic. But rather than an initial element to be given up as one ascends to a higher reality, sexuality remains essential for Boker; indeed, sexual love is the source of that higher reality. This is not to say that sexual love in itself is synonymous with a higher reality; rather, the quality of the sexual love determines whether the lovers are degraded or ennobled by their experience.

In sonnet “XLV” Boker contrasts the sexuality of his present affair with that of his earlier affairs. Portraying himself as Odysseus wandering “With wanton Circe and her bestial kin,” he describes his earlier life as “a wilderness of love” in which he sacrificed “Each proffered heart to suit [his] fickle ways”; and significantly, Boker does not suggest simply that his earlier mistresses made him a beast, but that he in turn was responsible for their degradation. What separates his present affair from his earlier experiences is that rather than “love's toy,” he has now established a relationship with a “mistress of [his] soul” (“LXXIV”); and as already seen, this love of two souls retains, rather than foregoes, sexual love.

Sexual love, then, creates a new Eden, and to divorce the ideal and the sexual is impossible since the two are one. When the woman is physically absent, Boker's love, unlike Donne's, does not enjoy “an expansion.” Instead, when the woman is absent, so too is the love (“LXXVIII”). The two kinds of love are present only when the lovers are together. When the lovers enter the Eden of sexuality, they enter the realm of both the body and the soul. In this realm sexual passion is “holy love,” and “all that follows” the initial desires—“The fervid kiss, the interlocked caress— / Is heavenly pure to love's most dainty sense” (“CCLXIII”).

Such love transforms the poet and leads in the fiftieth sonnet to an almost Whitmanesque discovery of self—soul and body. While Boker does not catalog the parts of his body as completely, explicitly, or with as much abandon as Whitman, he writes of his renewed “self-esteem” and of touching himself “with reverence.” The love has made him “A something set apart from all things near,” something above “the pollution of the common stream”; the woman, “whose gracious breath has blown / This bubble in [his] spirit,” is similarly transformed. Like the poet, she is both a spiritual and a physical being whom Boker describes as such a mixture of “charm” and “religion's fairest grace, / That love and worship struggle endlessly” (“CCLXXI”). Recognizing the impossibility of separating the “charm” and the “grace,” Boker's sequence accepts and celebrates the physical and the spiritual.

For Boker, the ability to arrive at this perception and to risk the “awful joys” of the relationship separates him from the world around him and inspires his literature, specifically these sonnets. Yet he still requires confirmation of his genius—in other words, some kind of an audience who by accepting his work will allow him to believe in his own greatness. In part, his mistress's function is to be that audience.

Of all the love conventions, one of the most common is the poet's assertion of his sincerity. As indicated earlier, Boker did not bring a great deal of wit and skill to his sonnets that treat this convention, but he did make his argument of sincerity thematically important, for the woman's belief in his sincerity is essential to his believing his genius has been confirmed. By accepting the “worn-out phrase” (“II”) and the poet's “prattling,” by accepting his “platitudes … / The same weak things repeated o'er and o'er,” the woman is “gracious” and confirms the poet's worth because “those words again / Each time she hears more kindly than before” (“CCLXXV”).

Feeling that his earlier poetry has been judged “rhymes of common worth” that had “an easy birth, / And scanty night in favor to remain,” Boker admits his earlier ambitions may have been futile:

I grant it may be I have sung in vain,
Scattered my seed about the barren earth,
Sowed for a harvest where I reaped but dearth,
And won for fee man's tolerant disdain.
As I declare it, so the thing has been:
Mild praise, dim glory, these have been my cheer
And best return through many a toilsome year.

Nonetheless, Boker feels that his mistress's acceptance of his poetry insures his having achieved a poetic crown:

Yet when unnoticed I forsake this scene,
Shall I die wholly? Shall no spray of green
Start from my dust beneath thy sacred tear?

(“CXLVIII”)

But while the sonnets met Boker's needs both to transcend his time and simultaneously to find confirmation of his superiority, one problem remained: the lovers' separation. In 1864, when the sonnets indicate that the lovers separated, Boker treats the problem by asserting that the sonnets are a substitute for their being physically together.

Sonnet “CXXXII,” the first of several to treat the theme of separation, argues that being apart is yet another test of the lovers' superiority:

Love has no triumph and no future crown
For feeble hearts, that cannot stand the test
Of adverse fortunes—trials wellnigh blest,
Since through his strength we tread opponents down.
The heart that shudders when a blast is blown,
And beats in wild despair its helpless breast,
The May-day reveller who pants for rest
At sunset, Love forever will disown.

When their love began, they “danced in riot.” At its noon they “worshipped Love with rites that seemed like play.” Now they must become more serious, their love more mature:

But see, our evening is already gone,
And darkness filters downward through the gray!
We must draw closer as our night comes on.

In the next sonnet Boker asserts that although the lovers “in the body … divided stand,” they must “draw closer … in the soul” (“CXXXIII”). That the sonnets are the means by which the lovers can accomplish this becomes clear in sonnet “CXXXIV”:

They cannot part us. With this power of song,
Through every circumstance, and time and place,
I hold communion with thee face to face,
And baffle thus the eyes that round thee throng.

Boker than asserts, in lines that recall Wyatt's speech before Anne's death, that the sonnets will contain hidden meanings inspired by his mistress and comprehensible only to her. Thus the poetry will continue to reveal the poet to his mistress and will connect the lovers spiritually, if not physically:

In every verse of mine that shines among
The printed rubbish of this age, thou'lt trace
Some hint to thee, some line that wears a grace
Which to thee only can by right belong.
Though they encase thee in a tower of steel,
My subtle spirit shall break through the bars,
And in thy presence its old form reveal.
This lute shall tinkle underneath the stars,
While others sleep; and thou shalt hear and feel
Love's voice in sounds that rattle with the wars.

The poem's argument assumes that the mistress will read the poet's published poetry, and Boker, who was not publishing much at this time except for the war poems, was too discreet to consider publishing his love sonnets. Moreover, in the sonnets themselves he had already indicated that to separate love into its spiritual and physical aspects was impossible. Thus two sonnets later he admits that the sonnets cannot take the place of his lover's presence:

Except these flights of song, I nothing have,
As consolation for thy absence, Dear;
Nothing to stop the wanderings of the tear
That still my troubled countenance will lave.
But what device, however strong and brave,
Strings up my soul against besieging fear,
Like thy light laugh, as welcome and as clear
As summer sunlight to the purblind slave?
What line as soft as thy bewildering hand
Touching and fleeing? What imagined good
Can fill the vacant place where thou hast stood?
What fancy reach, and for an instant, stand
Upon that summit where my dizzy blood
Rose to thy kiss, and answered its demand?

(“CXXXVI”)

In 1871 the lovers suffered a serious separation when Boker entered diplomatic service, and there was no longer any way for him to pretend the sonnets could take the place of their being together. The poet cannot pretend the “lute” is his lady “nestling o'er [his] heart” (“CCLXXX”). “Hollow wood and tinkling wire” are powerless to disguise her absence, and the poet cannot find warmth “at a painted fire” since the physical separation marks the end of the stimulus necessary to sustain both the love and the art. “Fancies” must replace actualities, and the sequence to Angie Hicks concludes with the poet's despair over having “To guess from shadows what the substance meant; / To live on shows and seemings,” and to “smile on ills that almost send / Love to the cloister of the penitent” (“CCLXXXII”).

The sonnets to Angie King Hicks reveal the course Boker took when he gave up a public literary career. They were indeed a private outlet that fulfilled several of his emotional needs. The affair became a source of his art because the affair provided him with both a subject and an impetus to write. The sonnets became a means whereby Boker could sustain his belief in his own genius and hence in his own superiority, while his mistress's acceptance of his poetry became a substitute for fame. Most significant, the sonnets became a vehicle through which Boker examined the nature of a sexual and an illicit love. Though the sonnets' style is old-fashioned, and though they do not quite succeed as vibrant poetry, they remain in their own way one of the most radical and interesting works of nineteenth-century American poetry. They also salvage what otherwise would have been an entirely disappointing conclusion to Boker's literary career.

Notes

1. Nydia, ed. E. S. Bradley (Philadelphia, 1929), p. 101.

2. The Book of the Dead (Philadelphia, 1882), p. 18; hereafter page references cited in the text in parentheses.

3. Poems of the War (1864; rpt. New York, 1972), p. 48; hereafter page references cited in the text in parentheses.

4. See Bradley, Boker, pp. 224-29.

5. Plays and Poems, vol. 2, p. 401; hereafter page references to these sonnets cited in the text in parentheses.

6. Edward Sculley Bradley, “George Henry Boker and Angie Hicks,” American Literature 8 (November 1936): 258-65.

7. Ibid., p. 262.

8. Quoted in Tomsich, Genteel Endeavor, p. 160.

9. As noted earlier, 281 sonnets were written to Angie Hicks. The first sequence consists of 282 sonnets because in his manuscript Boker indicated that one of the sonnets from the second sequence should be placed first in a book were the sonnets published. See Sonnets: A Sequence on Profane Love, ed. E. S. Bradley (Philadelphia, 1929), p. 17.

10. A Sequence on Profane Love, p. 78; hereafter the sonnets are cited by number in the text.

11. Stoddard, Recollections, p. 275.

12. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 7, Northwestern-Newberry Edition, ed. H. Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), p. 246.

13. James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, ed. G. Dekker and L. Johnston (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 129.

14. Bayard Taylor, Critical Essays and Literary Notes (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1880), p. 244. Significantly, such poets as Emerson and Whitman resolved the tension of the poet's relationship with the public by democratizing the poetic vision and thus making all people potentially poets.

15. Bayard Taylor, Poetical Works, Household Edition (1880; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1970), p. 68.

16. See Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), pp. 97-109.

17. See e.g., Richmond Beatty, Bayard Taylor: Laureate of the Gilded Age (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936), pp. 288-90, and Paul Wermuth, Bayard Taylor, pp. 94-99. Beatty, imagining what Freudians, “those supremely clever gentlemen” (p. 288), would have made of Taylor's psychology, builds, even as he seeks to demolish, a Freudian portrait of Taylor as a latent homosexual troubled by unresolved Oedipal feelings and disgusted by Swinburne and Whitman, two poets who openly expressed emotions Taylor struggled to repress. Nonetheless, Beatty concludes that suggestions of Taylor's being homosexual—a word, incidentally, Beatty never uses—are “not a little disgusting” and that Taylor “was quite healthy, quite safe, and for his day quite normal” (p. 290). Wermuth, recognizing that “the suggestions of homosexuality [in Joseph and His Friend] can hardly be overlooked,” concludes that while “scenes of [men] embracing and kissing each other make the reader somewhat uncomfortable, … it is by no means certain that the book should be interpreted that way” (p. 97), leaving it unclear whether “that way” refers to the homosexual interpretation or to the reader's discomfort. While less homophobic than Beatty's, Wermuth's argument leads him to claim on one page that “the type of relationship that is depicted in the novel was more normal in the nineteenth century than today” (p. 98) and then to claim a page later that “in the 1970s, such a theme would hardly excite notice, but for 1869 it seems daring” (p. 99). Yet it is a critic in the 1970s who finds Taylor's novel “somewhat uncomfortable,” and how comfortable the nineteenth century was with the book is an open question since, as Wermuth says, the book was Taylor's “most intensely disliked novel” (p. 94). Beatty's argument, to the extent it can be taken seriously, raises the question of what “quite normal” meant in the nineteenth century as opposed to now. In short, then, the argument that male relationships were viewed in an essentially different way in the nineteenth, as opposed to the twentieth, century is ultimately unsatisfactory.

18. A possibility raised by Martin, The Homosexual Tradition, p. 103.

Works Cited

The following abbreviations are used throughout the book: LB, Letter from Bayard Taylor to George Henry Boker, Cornell University Library; LES, Letter from George Henry Boker to Elizabeth Stoddard, Princeton University Library; LH, Letter from George Henry Boker to John Seely Hart, Cornell University Library; LS, Letter from George Henry Boker to Richard Henry Stoddard, Princeton University Library; LT, Letter from George Henry Boker to Bayard Taylor, Cornell University Library.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Source

Plays and Poems. 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856; Reprint. 1857; Reprint. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1869; Reprint 1883; Reprint. 1891; Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1967.

Secondary Sources

Bradley, Edward Sculley. George Henry Boker, Poet and Patriot. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1927; Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1969.

Stoddard, Richard Henry. “Boker and His Letters.” In Recollections, Personal and Literary. Edited by R. Hitchcock. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1903, pp. 180-200.

Tomsich, John. A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971.

Wermuth, Paul C. Bayard Taylor. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973.