SOURCE: “The Fireside Poets: Hearthside Values and the Language of Care,” in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, edited by A. Robert Lee, Vision Press, 1985, pp. 146-65.

[In the following essay, Justus places Longfellow in context with other Fireside Poets such as William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.]

When Robert Frost appeared at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the spectacle of poet and president together on the same platform was an anomaly widely remarked. The poet as public institution was such a rarity in the United States that the occasion stimulated a few expressions of hope that, among all the other good augured by the new administration, the general elevation of the artist might actually usher in a new era in which the republic would sanction the official veneration of the poet. A few years earlier that kind of recognition might have gone to more blatantly national poets—Stephen Vincent Benét or Archibald MacLeish—or to troubadours—Carl Sandburg or Vachel Lindsay; but by 1961 Frost was the logical choice for the honour, which meant that his individual achievement was also that of the American people. That Kennedy's gesture augured nothing but itself is irrelevant; it revived a long-felt if covert need for the nationally sanctioned poet, an institutional figure missing since the late nineteenth century.

In that century that confirmed the success of the new republic; only Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe among American poets were untouched by the ambition to identify in some public way with the aspirations and ideals of the nation. Walt Whitman, though he was never embraced by the popular following he thought he deserved, was considerably more successful in his drive to be the Poet of America in his own lifetime than legend had it a generation ago. If Emerson seemed too high-minded and aloof for such a rôle, an occasional effort by this sometime poet reveals the stirrings of an ambition similar to that of his contemporaries in New England and New York. But it is the achievement, individually and corporately, of those versifiers known as the Fireside Poets that, for the first and only time in American history, made the poet a public treasure.

The oldest, William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), transformed himself from a home-grown Augustan with conservative political leanings to a Wordsworthian Romantic with liberal instincts; he began his career with The Embargo, a Federalist satire directed at Thomas Jefferson, and ended it in the year of his death with ‘Mazzini’, an address dedicating a statue of the Italian hero in New York's Central Park—a gesture that joined the struggle for Italian unity with America's similar struggle during the Civil War. The youngest, James Russell Lowell (1819-91), domesticated political radicalism by both an elevated idealism and a biting sense of humour. The others, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92) and Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94), in varying ways and at varying stages in their long careers, so visibly hectored, coerced, persuaded and prodded their audiences that an envious Mark Twain allied himself to their group as ‘fellow-teachers of our great public.’¹ It is not accidental that a variant title for the Fireside Poets is the Schoolroom Poets. To designate the identity of any writer with a corporate name is necessarily to diminish his achievement, and serious readers can distinguish among the salient characteristics of Bryant and Longfellow or of Whittier and Holmes; yet by the 1880s the great impact of these talents, now relegated in most American literary histories and anthologies to the status of ‘Minor Poets’ or ‘Others’, was corporate rather than individual. Titles might be assigned properly to the names of the poets who wrote them, but school-children who dutifully memorized ‘Thanatopsis’ and ‘A Psalm of Life’ without tonal distinctions would, when they grew up, also be hard-pressed to find substantive distinctions between them. As national poets, their distinctiveness tended to be parcelled out and harmonized, and the famous lines became a scrapbook assemblage in which authorship was decidedly less important than their quotability: ‘The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year’; ‘And what is so rare as a day in June’; ‘Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!’; ‘“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head”’; ‘Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!’

By the time Mark Twain himself died in 1910 all these teachers of the great public had been in their graves for more than fifteen years and their portraits had been enshrined on the walls of schoolrooms from Maine to California. At some point beloved was an encomium bestowed on each of them. Long and productive lives are of course an important factor in the record of reverence these poets left behind: when they died Lowell was 72. Longfellow was 75, Bryant was 84, and Holmes and Whittier were 85. But perhaps more important is the fact that not one was simply a poet. These men led conspicuously public lives—as editor, professor, linguist and translator, diplomat, doctor, novelist, lecturer, essayist—whose careers defined at an upper level the dominant public values of America at mid-century: an ethical idealism that for all its failure in specific instances directed the sense of national mission. The Fireside Poets attained their status as national poets because they embodied the aspirations, needs and values of a free-wheeling, activist, expansionist society to which the most appropriate response was ambition, hard work, patriotism, familial loyalty, plucky independence and a generalized piety that would bear little theological scrutiny. Many of their famous poems celebrate such values overtly: ‘The Village Blacksmith’, ‘Maud Muller’, ‘To a Water-Fowl’, ‘The Chambered Nautilus’, ‘The Vision of Sir Launfal.’ Others—The Song of Hiawatha, Snow-Bound, The Biglow Papers, ‘The Deacon's Masterpiece’, ‘The Prairies’—are indirect.

If we accept the premise that the Fireside Poets were institutionalized as national poets because they articulated the values of their culture, it is necessary to look closely at how they were formulating them. The story that these poets tell is not that of the subordination of private purpose to the constituent values that the larger culture endorsed, but of the convergence of personal and public history, of private prerogative and the public weal. All courted fame, some winning more effortlessly than others. Longfellow, to whom fame came early, achieved his success without having strong ideas about politics, religion, economics, immigration, civic affairs, or (once he was done with his Harvard professorship) education. The multi-talented Holmes made his name by being opinionated about everything. But there is no real evidence that even Lowell or Whittier, who at crucial points in their careers depended upon popular support of their views, trimmed their sails to the prevailing winds of doctrine or sentiment. Like most of their readers, these public poets could be both Christian and democratic without once sacrificing a sense of themselves as natural aristocrats. Lowell and Whittier may have momentarily risked their reputations by their firm stands against slavery and war, but their most popular poems—Snow-Bound, ‘The Courting’, ‘Maud Muller’, ‘The Vision of Sir Launfal’—are not products of zealots.

From our twentieth-century perspective in which the very terms of discourse are inconclusive violence, alienation and loss of community, we tend to view the Fireside Poets as laureates of placidity. To re-read the collected volumes of these men is to confront a world of moral earnestness, even in Holmes's wit, in which devotion to ‘the right thing’ seems to be the common official policy of most Americans. But the play of reasonableness, charity, and respect for the homely virtues that Franklin had cannily Americanized a generation earlier is so emphatic not because those virtues were emphatic in American life but because they were not. The ‘optimistic’ century of the Fireside Poets was not a world of ebullient promise, and their response to it was not the heady Emersonian sense that all things were possible. The truth is that they combine the celebration of both the placid moment and the stirring event that tests human resolve. If Longfellow's and Holmes's concern for the large-scale issues of their society—slavery, secession, war—was somewhat perfunctory, that of Whittier, Bryant and Lowell was conspicuous. And all celebrate the triumph of right when it comes. What is even more evident in their verse, however, is the crucial importance of domestic harmony—not because they think of it as the linchpin of a cultivated society, which they routinely do, but because that harmony seems threatened. They sing both of domestic virtues and extraordinary heroism, of marital bliss and martial necessity, of modesty and ambition, of homely integrity and a faith in general Humanity, general Truth, general Freedom. Significantly, Longfellow's characteristic genius is to be found in his dramatic narratives, for ‘The Skeleton in Armor’, ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’, Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and many of the Tales of a Wayside Inn stake their appeal simultaneously on the domestic and the heroic. The dignity of Lowell's and Holmes's great ceremonial odes is consistently softened by what was once thought to be tonal lapses: familiarizing locutions and anachronisms of landscape and emotion; Holmes's is the kind of sensibility that can refer to ‘an epic as clever as “Paradise Lost”’. Bryant's sweeping subjects at once pose philosophical statements and situate them in contexts that are resolutely personal, even petty; and Whittier's most stirring political poems are assaults against the loss in extraordinary leaders of the common sense, judgement and right instincts that ordinary men still possess.

The moral earnestness conveyed by these poets is, surprisingly, rarely abstract; it emerges from textures that are local and specific, as if the meditative mood is as seemly in granitic Yankees as in cultivated Englishmen. The buoyant cheer of Emerson's early work is notably missing in the Fireside Poets because their vision is not that of Adam in the garden but of Adam east of Eden. Because theirs is a world of grief, pain, tribulation, these poets take all the more seriously their mission to help assuage the received condition of all fallen Adams. Heroic gestures and grand strategies in these public poets are always scaled down, manageably conceived and executed from the perspective of the fireside, which as place is both symbolic and generative. It represents the centrality of the domestic affections in the general ethical idealism of the day, an impulse that historically incorporated the home, the church and the school so effectively that the civic and religious virtues absorbed from the pew and the schoolboy's bench were merely extensions of the homely virtues taught and learned beside the hearth, the mother's knee and the father's chair. But the fireside in the work of these poets also provides genial conditions for an art that would in time become yet another extension of home, church and school. The voice of January in Longfellow's ‘The Poet's Calendar’ says, ‘My fires light up the hearths and hearts of men.’² As the heart of the home, the fireside is a retreat, an escape from the cares of the world outside the home, but because of its conductive stimulation of the imagination, it is an aesthetic source as well.

Edgar Poe may have anticipated the taste of a later day when he railed against the heresy of the didactic, but in his own century he was a rarity among both his fellow artists and the reading audience for whom art meant alternative forms of teaching—and meant it so intensely that to create inapplicable beauty was to slip into the heresy of the undidactic. The question that must be asked of the Fireside Poets is not ‘Should poetry teach?’ but ‘What does Fireside Poetry teach?’ From the first these men became teachers of the great public not by being sectarian or ideological. Behind the Quakerism of Whittier, the lapsed Calvinism of Bryant and the Unitarianism of the Cambridge group is an ethical idealism that blurs distinguishing doctrines, an eclecticism that could function successfully even when the mainstream Christian emphasis became vaguely deistic or pantheistic. It is a doctrine whose only article of obligation is that it serve human need; it allows religion, aesthetics, and politics alike to ratify community, individual dignity, love, patriotism and the aspiration to better the self and others. But contrary to our gradeschool memories, these were popular voices not because they shielded their readers from actuality by issuing easy appeals to idealism, but because their works fully incorporated, prior to those hortatory injunctions, the general experience of what it was like to live in an uncertain world fraught with injustice, anxiety, malaise and deadening routine. What is striking about this poetry, which we tend to see as an undifferentiated collection of monitory images, is a rhetoric of care that pervades and often threatens to overwhelm the very lessons for which the poetry is designed. The popular words in the Fireside lexicon are not do, dare, hope, work, heights or courage but strife, toils, griefs, struggle, dreary and anguish; and their cumulative effect suggests a world in both tone and substance far removed from the vigorously transcendentalized one of Emerson. Both as men and representative spokesmen, these poets devised several strategies for accommodating the discouraging spectacle they observed of lives never quite fulfilled and the very conditions of the despair that resulted.

The conventional urge to escape daily cares by plunging into natural settings is most obvious in Bryant, who of the Fireside Poets was closest to the later eighteenth-century poetry that made such gestures fashionable; it is also Bryant who most readily adopted the Wordsworthian contrast between the holy innocence of childhood and an imprisoning maturity with ‘its sorrows, crimes, and cares.’ But the frequency with which Bryant returns to ‘the eating cares of earth’ suggests an orientation reaching beyond poetic convention into autobiography and the cultural life of his time. At 24 and practising law, he magnifies the dreariness of his professional life by depicting himself ‘forced to drudge for the dregs of men / And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen’, to mingle with the ‘jostling crowd, / Where the sons of strife are subtle and loud’ (‘Green River’). He imagines Nature shrinking from him because of ‘the signet and care on my brow’ (‘I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion’), though he returns again and again for the calming effects of Nature because he is so ‘Worn with the struggle and the strife, / And heart-sick at the wrongs of men’ (‘A Summer Ramble’). But as ‘Thanatopsis’, his most famous poem, attests, human revivification through immersion in Nature is not finally the lesson nineteenth-century readers learned from reading Bryant; they learned instead stoic endurance. Of the group Bryant, who was a Calvinist before becoming a Unitarian, is the least comforting and the most perfunctory in his Christianity. Even the analogy of ‘To a Water-Fowl’, more overt than in most of his poems, is, compared to Longfellow's practice, modest in its assurance that the ‘Power’ that guides the bird in its flight will surely ‘lead my steps aright’.

Though he is often remembered for his focus on specific natural objects—waterfowl, mosquito, gentian, bobolink—the large sweeping subject is more congenial to Bryant's temperament, as we see in ‘The Past’, ‘Mutation’ and ‘The Prairies’. He is the poet who characteristically takes the long view; his dominant themes derive from a persistent meditation on mutability: the theme of the earth as universal tomb and the principle of inevitable succession. As he broods over the earth as both ‘mighty nourisher and burial-place / Of man’, he returns often to the idea of perpetual creation (‘A Forest Hymn’) and its correlative, the rise and fall of all living things (‘The Prairies’). ‘The Rivulet’ suggests a changeless nature presiding over children who sport along its banks, then ‘pass to hoary age and die’; in ‘A Walk at Sunset’ Bryant meditates on the races of men ‘before the red man came’, only to be succeeded by ‘hunter tribes’ and ‘warrior generations’. His most philosophic treatment of the theme, ‘Among the Trees’, explores the notion that consciousness is an attribute of natural objects as well as of humans: ‘There dwells a nature that receives delight / From all the gentle processes of life, / And shrinks from loss of being’. To meditate on inevitable succession is to entertain the human experience of loss, racial and familial. The spectre of ‘loss of being’ haunts most poignantly the personal poems in which stoic endurance is joylessly invoked.

These poems of change are organized around a sentient centre, usually the poet himself, whose inquiring sensibility shapes the poetic structure; the poet projects himself either backward into earlier eras, where he imaginatively catalogues the chronicle of succession, or forward, beyond his own death when he is himself succeeded. Though undeveloped in ‘Thanatopsis’, by 1824 the device is evident in ‘A Walk at Sunset’ and ‘The Rivulet’. It appears in ‘The Prairies’, ‘Earth’, ‘To the Apennines’ and ‘The Fountain’; and in ‘The Planting of the Apple-Tree’, a poem of old age, Bryant domesticates the metaphysics of the theme. In ‘Life’ he projects his death and imagines his grieving child scattering flowers on his grave, but he also foresees her heart healed and her own decline: ‘To younger forms of life must yield / The place thou fill'st with beauty now’.

If a metaphysical vision of succession generates the strength of general stoic endurance, it notably stops short of Christian assurance that one's identity is continuous. In several poems Bryant speculates on his relational continuity after death with daughter, father, sister and wife. Two of them, ‘Life’ and ‘The Future Life’, significantly conclude with unresolved anxieties and unanswerable questions. Bryant's didacticism is cooler than that of any of his peers; indeed, the lessons are so oblique that didactic may be neither useful nor accurate to describe his work. By the time Bryant came to write ‘The Flood of Years’ he had apparently resolved his lifelong uncertainty about immortality, but added that the life to come would be imperfect without recognition there of loved ones; but the final thirty lines of his optimistic vision are rhetorically prefaced by a dramatizing line. ‘Hear what the wise and good have said’, an ambiguity that tonally cannot erase the grim apocalyptic diorama sketched so fully in the body of the poem. If ‘The Flood of Years’ was meant to comfort anxious readers, it came too late to affect the general aura of restraint and tepid assertions of faith that mark most of Bryant's poetry.

In both his reformist verse and his personal lyrics Lowell reflects more accurately than Bryant the general liberal faith of New England Unitarianism, with its commitment to a humanistic religion of duty. But, as in Bryant, there is little verbal evidence that his message is very hopeful. In an early poem, ‘Summer Storm’, Lowell can describe life's deepest ‘emblem’ as a ‘confused noise between two silences’, a naturalistic observation that is buttressed in his mature work by a relentless language of care: lonely, dreary, restless, uneasy, leaden, weary, gloomy, strife, drear, world's blasts, striving, many blights and many tears march across his pages as he describes the general human lot. He also invokes a familiar set of attributes to counter such grief: holy peacefulness, holy calm, calm hope and trust, patience, rest. More than his peers, Lowell directs his readers to honour those abstractions that may make their cares palatable and their strivings meaningful: Humanity, Freedom, Truth.

If his vision of a world hedged, boundaried, limited and threatened, in which ‘Earth's stablest things are shadows’, an early strategy is to posit a principle of spiritual advancement through sorrow. ‘The Heritage’ is structured around a contrast between the ‘cares’ inherited by the rich man's son and the hardy spirit of the poor boy that comes from facing competently ‘every useful toil and art’. In ‘On the Death of a Friend's Child’ Lowell observes that ‘Heaven is not mounted to on wings of dreams’ but ‘sorrow builds the shining ladder up, / Whose golden rounds are our calamities’. Six years later, however, in ‘After the Burial’, on the death of his own child, such hopeful wisdom is rejected:

Your logic, my friend, is perfect,
          Your moral most drearily true;
But, since the earth clashed on her
coffin,
          I keep hearing that, and not you.

A more characteristic strategy to bear up under both ‘everydayness of this work-day world’ and special blows of fate is the contemplation of ideal states, possibilities in which both boredom and cares are dissolved. ‘The Vision of Sir Launfal’—that is, the vision of the heroic and good—comes in response to ‘our fallen and traitor lives’, ‘our faint hearts’, ‘our age's drowsy blood’. One of Lowell's persistent images is that of the green island of peace for wearied men. It appears first in an untitled sonnet of 1841 in which he praises the thought that grows like a coral atoll until it becomes ‘a speck of green’, a ‘pleasant island in the seas’. In ‘To the Past’ Lowell, in the midst of ‘bleak waves of our strife and care’, populates ‘the green Fortunate Isles’ with hero-spirits who share ‘Our martyrdom and toils’. In his maturity, Appledore in the Isles of Shoals geographically literalizes for Lowell the image of the enchanted isle where, away from ‘bores’, ‘fuss and strife’, ‘fools’ and the ‘singular mess we agree to call life’, he can come ‘Face to face with one's Self at last’. And ‘Al Fresco’ is a salute to the nature surrounding his house, an ‘enchanted’ island that serves as a verdant analogy to ‘the spirit's dwelling-place’ apart from ‘our vext world’ in which a perfect life can be ‘Far-shrined from earth's bestaining strife’.

Just as his own house is a kind of temple in which the Self can be not only faced but improved, so the fireplace within it glows as the inspiriting centre. An important poem is Lowell's ‘A Winter-Evening Hymn to My Fire’. Evoking the mythic struggle to tame fire, the poet consciously makes the chimney-place the ritual home of inspiration, wisdom and energy, and unconsciously elevates the New England hearth as the true keeper of the flame. With the power to thaw the ‘Arctic outskirts of the brain’, the fireside dispenses ‘homely faith’ and comfort; it encourages the soul not to aspire but to dwell in Memory and Hope. If in this text a languorous escapism is more emphatic than the energetic process of striving, that proportion suggests the seductive way in which idealism and a belief in human progress could be innocently subverted by patrician comfort. In ‘Ode to Happiness’, a despondent tribute to what Lowell calls ‘Nymph of the unreturning feet’, the poet tries to make the best of her absence. The surrogates of Happiness, her sisters Peace and Tranquillity, provide troubled lives with domesticity and predictability, their ‘still lives’ blessed by a strip of ‘household sky’ and smoke rising from ‘happy hearths’. Aspiration and struggle come to nothing, and increasingly Lowell doubts the substantiality of ‘these shadows / Which we call Life and History’ (‘Gold-Egg’) and broods publicly in the Harvard Commemorative Ode on the cunning years that ‘steal all from us but woe’. In ‘A Familiar Epistle to a Friend’ his sense of ageing is reflected in a Wordsworthian emphasis on unconvincing substitutes: ‘Knowledge instead of scheming hope’, ‘settled scope’ for worldly adventure, judgment for ‘passion's headlong whirls’. And in his memorial ode for Robert Shaw, the Boston patriot killed in the Civil War, Lowell sees a grim advantage to his loss: that Shaw will not have to endure ‘mid-life's doubt’.

Despite his rôles as polemicist and satirist, Lowell returns for his professional satisfaction to the claims of the fireside. In ‘L'envoi: (To the Muse)’ he records the vocational frustrations that an American poet faced. If the ministrations of Nature never attracted Lowell as they did Bryant, the satisfactions in the course of empire—the stuff of the daily newspaper—were not congenial either. He feels vaguely guilty that seeking the muse across the continent—‘mountains, forests, open downs, / Lakes, railroads, prairies, states, and towns'—is as difficult for him as pursuit of her in such egalitarian places as logging camps, factories, party caucuses, the exact places where Emerson was urging American authors to find their inspiration, until Lowell hears a voice reminding him that the muse ‘sits at home’ at the open door, by the chimney hearth. Here the ‘household mirth’ is modulated by the ‘sweet serious undertone / Of duty, music all her own’, and thus the ‘homestead's genial heart’ becomes the ‘stamp and warrant’ of his kind of poetry. The same muse reinforces the patrician pleasures of ‘Agassiz’: ‘long evening-ends’, lingering by ‘cosy chimney-nooks’, the ‘high companionship’ of books, and the ‘slippered talk of friends’.

Though Lowell himself wears many hats during his career, the idealist in him remains the sustaining source of his most characteristic work. The Biglow Papers is written by the same sensibility as the man who wrote ‘The Vision of Sir Launfal’. And if we are tempted to think that Lowell complacently arrived at his poetic mission, we have only to read his letters and accounts of his life for evidence to the contrary, evidence that is fully apparent in those poems showing vocational worries, vexations, personal grief and metaphysical doubt. His own life also confirms the message in the image from ‘On the Death of a Friend's Child’, that we mount toward heaven on a ladder of calamities. Lowell's most imaginative creative moments were associated with misfortune, personal blows such as the deaths of his children and wife, professional disappointments such as his failure to be promptly appointed minister to Spain under Grant, and national tragedies such as the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination.³

Like Lowell, Whittier became identified with the social and political causes that formed the subject matter of many of his well-read poems, but having, unlike Lowell, no sense of humour and little wit, Whittier composed ‘Ichabod’ and ‘Massachusetts to Virginia’ under the powerful aegis of indignation and scorn. Unashamed of his rhymed propaganda, he was always modest enough to disclaim a ‘rounded art’; but his priorities, devotion to freedom and human brotherhood, allowed him to boast of being superior to mere verse-makers.⁴ But Whittier was a beloved poet not because of his memorable political work but because he appropriated the common lore of his region at the very time that certain habits and customs seemed threatened by vast economic changes. No other Fireside Poet wrote such ‘available’ verse, and not even Longfellow recreated the New England past with the charm and sentimental appeal of Whittier in his Yankee pastorals—‘Maud Muller’, ‘The Homestead’, ‘Telling the Bees’, ‘The Barefoot Boy’, ‘My Playmate’. Moreover, the poignancy behind the Currier and Ives quality of all these genre pieces celebrating rural life is the fact of loss, not merely as subject—the mourning of a lost love in ‘Telling the Bees’—but as the very condition for creating poems, the sense of pastness that accounts for his pervasive melancholy at the thought of human transiency.

In ‘To My Sister’ Whittier's unspecified inner tensions are transposed into a public key; he justifies turning to ‘an idle rhyme’ inspired by childhood as relief from a ‘long, harsh strife with strong-willed men’, the very image of the national competitive spirit. It is in what Robert Penn Warren calls this ‘refuge in assuagement’ that Whittier found full release for his poetic powers.⁵ Like Bryant, Whittier voices a sense of grievance at a present because it is busy, bustling, contentious. Bryant finds solace in an unpeopled nature, Whittier in recreated moments of the past. Snow-Bound, his masterpiece, is at once his most personal poem and the one which his name most readily summons up. The values of the fireside—family affection, closeness and cohesion—are pitted against those of the outside world—one literally chilled, ‘mindless’, ‘blind’, ‘unmeaning’. Only through the effort of the creating imagination can love and wholeness win the struggle against pain and death, and the victory is only momentary. If it is a memorial piece, a nostalgic record of New England farm life precisely detailed, Snow-Bound is also a stark reminder of loss and the depredations of time. The fact of loss generates this work of memory, which is structured by the temporal separation of loved ones and textured by the spatial alienation of man from nature and of man from man. As the poem begins with loss, so it ends; there is no way for the poet to compensate for the basic privations that time brings except the temporary triumph of re-creation, Keats's deceiving elf of fancy, but the residue of that creative process, the poem, is a sequence of beneficent ‘Flemish pictures’, now available for a contemplative audience far beyond the boundaries of New England. But whatever else these ‘pictures’ do, they fail to define correctives for loss because, as both Whittier and his readers knew, there are none. Properly speaking, there is no lesson in Snow-Bound. There is, and only can be, the sad and helpless acceptance of the human experience in time.

The values of the fireside in Whittier are love, familial affection, friendship and the sense of belonging to a particular place; and since they all belong to the world of the past, their only utility is psychological: their mournful contemplation in a present stripped of such values. The situation in Longfellow is more complex but no more cheering. If each of the Fireside Poets achieved popularity for particular poems or volumes, none except Longfellow had the kind of cumulative and sustained success that makes his reputation still a literary phenomenon.⁶ One of the reasons we often hear for such a spectacular reputation is that Longfellow, among his peers, was the most overt moralizer and the most assiduous spokesman for human aspiration, the dominant spirit of the times in both its high-minded variety, Emersonian self-reliance, and its commercial vulgarization, the self-made expediency of Andrew Carnegie. Certainly most of Longfellow's poems are structured on simple analogy—observation of example followed by application—and certainly repetitive injunctions to do and dare seem to make this poet the apostle of activism. As several modern commentators have noted, however, at the heart of the more personal of Longfellow's lyrics lies a profound anxiety that belies the apparent thrust of their subjects.⁷ ‘Excelsior’ is usually touted as the purest expression of Longfellow's optimism; but though its dramatized courage in resisting the blandishments of ordinary human life reveals this poem as a parable of heroic aspiration, the poem ends in unambiguous failure: when the values of the fireside—here identified as family cohesiveness, paternal wisdom, romantic love and folk wisdom—are one after another rejected, the individualism of an extraordinary mission can only come to grief. What is being counselled? To be faithful to our vision we must die, alienated from the human family. In ‘Prometheus’ the general idealism of the youth in ‘Excelsior’ is specified as the poetic spirit, but the price of ‘noble daring’ and ‘Aspiration’ is the agony of punishment: the ‘darkened lives’ of Dante, Milton and Cervantes. ‘Epimetheus’, a companion piece, is even more negative:

Disenchntment! Disillusion!
          Must each noble aspiration
Come at last to this conclusion,
Jarring discord, wild confusion,
          Lassitude, renunciation?

One of the curious features of this lyric poetry is that a poet whose remarkably peaceful and comfortable life would seem to have precluded an obsession with such worry is even more repetitive than Lowell in the language of care. The humble poet whom Longfellow invokes in ‘The Day is Done’ has composed his melodies despite ‘long days of labor’ and ‘nights devoid of ease’, yet his modest creations will help quiet the reader's ‘restless pulse of care’, our ‘cares that infest the day’. Longfellow's first great success, ‘A Psalm of Life’, is marked not by optimistic cheer but a stoicism even grimmer than Bryant's. The life that is real and earnest is to be neither enjoyed nor bewailed but simply endured; the only realistic goal is ‘that each to-morrow / Find us farther than to-day’. The example of the sublime life as model for a later generation is transitory; ‘footprints on the sands of time’ by their very nature are more evanescent than the corporeal being who made them. What one learns from all this—‘to labor and to wait’—is minor balm. The metaphor of life as a battlefield is accompanied by the injunction to act in the present, to be wary of the future and to be indifferent to the past; there is no promise of significant reward for labouring except the patient spirit that the activist must fall back on. ‘The Light of Stars’, originally published as ‘A Second Psalm of Life’, is no more optimistic; since the poet's inspiration comes from the ‘mailèd hand’ of Mars, his advice, as hopes one by one depart, is to be resolute and calm, for by such inner discipline one can learn how ‘sublime’ it is to ‘suffer and be strong’. Unremitting toil constitutes the cheerless duty of ‘The Village Blacksmith’, and what attracts Longfellow to the Jews buried at Newport is that they were ‘Taught in the school of patience to endure / The life of anguish and the death of fire’. The explicit function of Voices of the Night—to whisper ‘Be of good cheer!’ to all those who doubt and fear—in its ‘L'Envoi’ is imagistically denied by dark and hoar forests, Pentecostal tongues of fire, funeral lamps and the vast plains ‘where Death encamps!’ The famous ballads—‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ and ‘The Skeleton in Armor’—are tales of death with lessons on the necessity of bearing up. Unsurprisingly, Longfellow in ‘The Goblet of Life’ celebrates fennel, bitter but necessary medicine ‘for strength to bear / Our portion of the weight of care’.

The darker implications of life in Voices of the Night persist through Longfellow's succeeding volumes. Indeed with old age, personal tragedies of loss and the gradual dying off of friends, the dark strain is intensified. ‘The Wind Over the Chimney’ is a later, despairing reiteration of the real message of the earlier ‘Excelsior’. Though the flames seem to say ‘Aspire!’ they are mocked by the night wind: ‘Hollow / Are the visions that you follow’. The works of poets are but ‘flying sparks’ from God's forges; and since ‘The dead laurels of the dead / Rustle for a moment only’, the only reward is in ‘the doing’. The structures of ‘Fata Morgana’, ‘The Haunted Chamber’ and ‘The Meeting’ omit Longfellow's customary applications, concluding in citations of loss, premonitions of death and the bitter-sweet reunion of old friends for whom no other friends remain. The visionary structure of ‘The Hanging of the Crane’, putatively a hymn to domesticity, traces not only the growth of the table of a newly married couple but also its cruel shrinking in old age. And ‘Morituri Salutamus’ is a predictable reminder to Longfellow's Bowdoin classmates fifty years later that the ‘gulf stream of our youth may flow / Into the arctic regions of our lives’, but the most stirring passage has a tonic sincerity rarely so nakedly expressed in his work:

Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
It is the waning, not the crescent moon;
The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon;
It is not strength, but weakness; not desire,
But its surcease; not the fierce heat of fire,
The burning and consuming element,
But that of ashes and of embers spent,
In which some living sparks we still discern,
Enough to warm, but not enough to burn.

The truth is that Longfellow holds out few rewards for ‘days well spent’ and nothing but failure for those who aspire to more extraordinary accomplishment. His vision grimly acknowledges the depressing actualities of routine human activities, inevitable decline and decay. His stoic message is the overt sign that he saw little to be optimistic about; his repetitive diction, tonal balance and poetic structures are its formal equivalents. Longfellow may be more languid than the other Fireside Poets in his melodic catalogues of ‘drooping souls’ (as he calls them in ‘Endymion’) whose destinies are ‘fraught with fear and pain’, but his poetic mission was both proffered and accepted in that spirit. That he was so widely read indicates that his was no dourly unique vision. ‘The Singers’, an 1849 parable of three different kinds of poets—the youthful, mature and old singers whose respective gifts ‘To charm, to strengthen, and to teach’ are in reality one and the same gift—is a fair statement of how Longfellow viewed that mission. Its aesthetic and its moral basis are the same, one that is consonant with his belief as early as 1832 that poetry ‘should’ be made ‘an instrument for improving the condition of society, and advancing the great purpose of human happiness’. Those terms establish the ground for most of this generation of poets, but the recurring language of care is a reminder of how difficultly, not how effortlessly, that sanative task was undertaken.

His contemporaries tended to regard the poet of Craigie House as the very model of human sweetness, generosity and congenial companionship, an image that has by and large shaped our own image of the successful public poet whose serenity is almost indistinguishable from complacency. The poetry itself, however, suggests that Longfellow was neither serene nor complacent. To assume that the recurring concern with care in his verse betrays a human complexity undreamt by his contemporaries, that his seeming placidity was achieved by masking inner tensions, is necessary for any accurate revaluation of the most popular of the Fireside Poets. But Longfellow is only the most conspicuous of that hierarchy whose works should be re-read for what they reveal of an era too easily designated as optimistic.⁸ Their response to their harshly progressive, competitive society may finally be more escapist than realistic, but the fact that their consolations were so minimal—holding out the general moral and social good that might come despite inauspicious conditions—indicates the inadequacy of one theory: that the Fireside Poets were minor because ‘they failed to respond, except superficially, to the new experience of being American in the middle of the nineteenth century’.⁹

Friends as well as peers, each of this group honoured the others as the sequence of deaths began, until Holmes's in 1894, when none was left to mourn the falling of ‘The Last Leaf’. Between 1878, Bryant's death-date, and Holmes's sixteen years later, the pessimism of Mark Twain that became increasingly suggestive of his darkening final years would come to seem more modernly congenial than the kind of idealism represented by the Fireside Poets. If all these men died in an age apparently inimical to their temperaments and teachings, it may be that the new age was no longer able to read their works except as sacred texts. All of these poets were buried as national institutions, revered and honoured more as icons than as men or writers, and as icons they were invested with the same spiritual configurations as an earlier nation that had both sanctioned and sanctified them. But the real configurations are in the lines they wrote, which record an impressive struggle with the demons of fear, failure and loss, and a realistic appraisal not only coexisted with the public rôles these men assumed—moral guardian, teacher, uplifter, spokesman for national values—but also significantly ratified those rôles.

One of the reasons that Emerson's optimism was so iterative is that it ran across, not with, so much of the American grain. Many Americans who intellectually believed that they should and could be hopeful giants emotionally still clung to a view of the human enterprise that the Enlightenment and a liberal religion of humanism failed fully to displace. If we prefer to remember the idealistic Yankee spirit that could generate and maintain so many reforms in that period once called ‘The Flowering’, we should not forget the Yankee scepticism that resisted or bemusingly tolerated them. But despite their obession with the strife and cares of day-to-day life, the Fireside Poets were finally conservators, commited more to society than to man, a bias that shows up in the reason behind not only their support of the Civil War—not to free southern slaves but to preserve the union—but also their resolute cultivation of the domestic affections—to preserve and strengthen the family, the basic unit of a civilized society, and the close-knit circle of like-minded friends, the most dependable carriers of culture.

What Holmes, that quintessential Brahmin, offered his non-Brahmin readers—tolerance, decency, compassion, moderation, faith in both scientific and moral progress, and the rational belief that common sense was available and operable in men of all ranks—was what in varying degrees all the Fireside Poets offered their public, even the often fiery Whittier and the often testy Lowell. Readers obviously agreed that such values were normative and good despite all the widespread lapses in the moral and political structure of American society. They, like the authors they loved, were aware of discrepancies, dislocations, injustices and failures, and were perfectly attuned to the shortcomings of American life as well as human life generally. Theirs, like the poets’, was a chastened hopefulness, not naïveté.

Notes

1. Mark Twain Speaking, ed. Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976), pp. 135-36.

2. Quotations from the Fireside Poets are drawn from the following texts: William Cullen Bryant: Representative Selections, with Introduction, Bibliography and Notes by Tremaine McDowell (New York: American Book Company, 1935) and these Cambridge Editions—The Poetical Works of Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975); The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978); The Poetical Works of Whittier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975); and The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).

3. Leon Howard, Victorian Knight-Errant: A Study of the Early Literary Career of James Russell Lowell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), p. 355. Martin Duberman, in James Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), emphasizes the man of affairs rather than the poet.

4. Robert Penn Warren, John Greenleaf Whittier's Poetry: An Appraisal and a Selection (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 25. See also Samuel T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 573.

5. Warren, p. 35.

6. See particularly Clarence Gohdes, American Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), especially the chapter ‘Longfellow’.

7. See Edward Wagenknecht, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist (New York: Oxford, 1966), pp. 21-8, and Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), pp. 42-4.

8. For a recent recapitulation of this old view see Chapter 3 of Everett Carter's The American Idea: The Literary Response to American Optimism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).

9. Waggoner, p. 84. In an otherwise admirable treatment, George Arms is also unduly apologetic about the achievement of the Fireside Poets in his The Fields Were Green: A New View of Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1953).