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Re-Forming Frontier Values: The Dialect Poetry of James Whitcomb Riley

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SOURCE: Robertson, David. “Re-Forming Frontier Values: The Dialect Poetry of James Whitcomb Riley.” Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 19, nos. 1-2 (1999): 14-27.

[In the following essay, Robertson provides close readings of “The Frost is on the Punkin,” “Rubáiyát of Doc Sifers,” and “The Good, Old-Fashioned People” to show how Riley uses character and warmth to evoke a comfortable humor that is filled with common-sense aphorisms.]

James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916) was not a great poet. Indeed, he is almost forgotten today. At the turn of the century, however, he was one of the most popular poets, if not the most popular poet, in America.1 In his own lifetime he was a literary phenomenon. Between the years 1881 and 1893, Riley toured all over the United States giving recitations of his poems and sharing the stage with such fellow humorists as Bill Nye and Mark Twain. His popularity may be judged from the fact that in 1888 he was sometimes earning as much as the phenomenal sum of $1000 a night from his performances. His literary reputation was such that even as late as 1940 the US Post Office issued a set of stamps in a “Famous Americans” issue celebrating Famous American Poets which included Riley's portrait on the 10 cent stamp.2 And although he established his reputation by performances of his humorous dialect verse, his standard language poems were also enormously popular. So much so that a collection of new poems, or even simply a new collection of poems, by Riley was an automatic best-seller at Christmas time during the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth.3

Despite Riley's reputation as one of the leading humorists in the United States at the turn of the century, Constance Rourke makes no mention of him in her seminal work on American humour, and Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill in their now classic survey of American humorists make only the briefest reference to him.4 Nevertheless, there may be some revival of interest in him, for a new edition of his complete poetical works was published in 1993.5 There is no doubt that Riley lost popularity soon after his death because his sentimentality and optimism were no longer in tune with public taste; but it is difficult to identify precisely the factors that caused his fall in popularity since light, almost doggerel humorous verse remains popular at least in Britain, as evidenced, for example, by the success of Pam Eyres in the late 1970s both in terms of sales and media attention. Part of the reason for the downgrading of Riley within the critical community may well be that even as late as the 1950s many grade-school children were required to learn Riley's poems by heart. It is not the aim of this essay to try to reinstate Riley as a major poet, but rather to suggest that he does not deserve to be as almost completely forgotten as he is today. His dialect poetry, especially the humorous poems, is a minor achievement, both in terms of intertextuality and in the way that it helped to create as well as reflect the “American” values it so obviously embodies.

In many ways it is fair to see Riley, as to some extent his contemporaries did, as a, indeed as the, Hoosier Poet. From the beginning of his career he wrote many of his poems, perhaps even the majority of them, in standard English, but his most famous and most popular poems were often written in dialect. In this respect, he has often been compared to Robert Burns in that, like Burns, he raised his dialect to the status of art and gave expression to the identity of his region.6 The persona Riley creates in these poems is most frequently a simple, though not necessarily uneducated, country dweller, often a farmer. It may well be the case, as Fred Lewis Pattee claims, that Riley's “dialect does not ring true”7 in the sense of being an absolutely accurate representation of the Hoosier dialect in all its phonetic and grammatical features; but this is in the final analysis immaterial. What matters is that Hoosiers themselves felt that Riley was celebrating their ways of speech and their own regional character and culture, and was establishing the Hoosier as a distinct regional type in American life and literature. As Donald Peattie could write as late as 1937:

[To] my ear, at least, not only does Riley write the way the Midwestern child and farmer still often speak, but in setting style to subject his sense of pitch is nearly absolute. He vies with the grand masters of regional American literature, the Mark Twain of “Huckleberry Finn,” the Lowell of the “Biglow Papers,” and the Harris of “Uncle Remus.”

But, as Peattie here suggests, Riley's Hoosier characters and their distinctive features were not necessarily limited to Indiana, but were as much representative of the Midwest in general. Indeed, it is difficult to find any specific references to Indiana geography or towns in Riley's poems. One of his greatest creations, Doc Sifers, despite the seemingly precise reference to his fame within “a radius o' fifteen mil'd, all p'ints o' compass round,” is the kind of country doctor who could be found anywhere in the Midwest. And yet there are references to such things as the climatic conditions of the Midwest which, together with the dialect, establish Riley's local color poems as distinct from the already established New England or Southwestern traditions. At the time when they appeared, they were felt to express Midwestern views and values to such an extent that Richard Crowder can claim that Riley was “the looking glass in which the Midwest saw its own archetypal reflection.”8 Tracing Riley's somewhat surprising popularity in Georgia during the post-Civil-War years, since he was a northerner, Doris Lanier notes that Riley's dialect poems “helped disperse the fear and mistrust between people of different geographical locations by showing the kinship that exists between all people.”9

There is no doubt that one of the major reasons for Riley's phenomenal success was that he gave his own generation and the succeeding one a feeling of security. Riley was brought up in the small town, or rather village at that time, of Greenfield, Indiana, where his father was a lawyer.10 The family house was on the extreme edge of the village, and, although by the 1850s when Riley was growing up Indiana was no longer the Frontier, the first federal national highway from the east coast to the West literally passed the Rileys' door. He recalls the sight of covered wagons taking settlers west in, for example, “The Old Home Folks” where realistic detail is used to foster regional and national pride:

The Mover-wagons' rumble, and the neigh
Of over-traveled horses, and the bleat
Of sheep and low of cattle through the stree—
A Nation's thoroughfare of hopes and fears,
First blazed by the heroic pioneers
Who gave up old-home idois and set face
Toward the unbroken West, to found a race
And tame a wilderness now mightier than
All peoples and all tracts American.

By the time he grew to maturity, however, the Frontier had almost disappeared. Midwesterners were no longer settlers, and the people of Indiana were eager to establish a distinctive culture. As James T. Farrell puts it:

Life was [for the pioneer], as it were, very new and very young and it was changing and full of motion. But there is, also, much evidence to suggest that many hungered for security. The history of the building of the American continent shows how many went so far, emigrated, set up their own stakes in a new place and there settled down, wanting, for themselves, no more change and uncertainty.

Riley responded to this new feeling in society. “Riley's verse emphasizes a feeling for security. It gives almost endless expression to received sentiments. It tends to ritualize human emotions in terms of accepted sentiments.”11

By the time Riley had grown to maturity in the 1870s and 1880s, then, the Midwest had become settled, but it was not unchanging. Towns and cities were growing rapidly, industry and commerce were becoming as important as farming to the economy of the region, and many of the inhabitants of the new towns and cities had either grown up on farms themselves, or were children of parents who had. It was precisely to these people that Riley's celebration of country values appealed. As Crowder says:

[Riley's] verses were generally about characters from that far-off land, that Eden, in which Americans in the eighties and nineties imagined they had spent their childhood. Riley had never lived on a farm, but he had the secret of an innocent, bucolic point of view that his readers—and listeners—gladly embraced in these decades of material advance, of labor strife—and of widespread esthetic naïveté.12

There is no arguing with the fact that Riley's standard language poems are almost invariably naive in both thought and aesthetics, often written in a rather stilted and conventional poetic idiom, in a rhythm which approaches that of doggerel, and with few exceptions make very dull reading today. They tend to be heavily sentimental, even maudlin, much like some scenes in Dickens's novels which Riley greatly admired, and for the same reason—namely that they were aimed at a similar Victorian audience which had similar tastes on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, sometimes, especially when the poem is written in the first person, these poems can achieve a freshness and truthfulness of language and feeling that is appealing, such as this passage from one of his most popular early poems, “An Old Sweetheart of Mine” in which the narrator is recalling a sweetheart he had when they were both at school:

And again I feel the pressure of her slender little hand,
As we used to talk together of the future we had planned,—
When I should be a poet, and with nothing else to do
But write the tender verses that she set the music to …
When we should live together in a cozy little cot
Hid in a nest of roses, with a fairy garden-spot,
Where the vines were ever fruited, and the weather ever fine,
And the birds were ever singing for that old sweetheart of mine.
When I should be her lover forever and a day,
And she my faithful sweetheart till the golden hair was gray;
And we should be so happy that when either's lips were dumb
They would not smile in Heaven till the other's kiss had come.

This is so overdone that the modern reader can enjoy it as a kind of gentle parody of the naive romantic dreams of that precise stage of late childhood or early adolescence when interest in the opposite sex is aroused. Indeed, by extension, the poem may be read as mocking the romantic notions of love and marriage our culture fosters to this day. The poem continues in a way which would seem to confirm such a reading, only to undercut it to finish on the kind of sentimental and easily reassuring note that spoils so many of Riley's texts:

But ah! my dream is broken by a step upon the stair,
And the door is softly opened, and—my wife is standing there:
Yet with eagerness and rapture all my visions I resign,—
To greet the living presence of that old sweetheart of mine.(13)

The faults of the standard language poems, though they are still to be traced in the dialect poems, are not nearly so obvious there. Pattee argues that in order to interest Westerners poetry needed to be “sharp and incisive and winged with a message. It must be lyrical in length and spirit, and it must ring true. If it dealt with social themes it must be perfect in characterization and touched with genuine pathos, like the folk songs of Riley.”14 The same sentiments expressed in the standard, conventional, language sound like unbearably trite and naive platitudes, but expressed in the voice of a simple, honest country dweller sound like the voice of true human experience. Mark Twain was aware of this aspect of Riley's work, and was not afraid to call it art. Speaking of Riley's prose version and performance of an old folk tale “The Old Soldier's Story” for which Riley created and perfected the persona of an old Hoosier farmer, Twain wrote: “The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness of the old farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result is a performance which is thoroughly charming and delicious. This is art—and fine and beautiful, and only a master can compass it.”15 The same can be said of Riley's dialect poetry—it is art, but it is also art with a social dimension or purpose.

“When the Frost is on the Punkin,” one of Riley's most famous poems, may fairly be compared to Keats's ode “To Autumn” in topic and sentiment if not in artistry.16 Both poems are celebrations of the joys of harvest time in the countryside, and both are tinged with the same melancholy. The narrator of Riley's poem, however, unlike Keats's undefined voice, is a farmer who can therefore fully appreciate what the season means even in the small details of everyday life: “Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees, / And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees; / But the air's so appetizin'.” Both poems share a willingness to personify aspects of the season, but Riley's personification, in keeping with the persona of the narrator, is much less consciously literary than Keats's, but gains in being familiar to his readers and in drawing attention to the economic and social significance of autumn: “The stubble in the furries—kindo' lonesome-like but still / A-preachin' sermons to us of the barns they growed to fill.”

Although it may be thought that the similarities between Keats and Riley on the evidence presented so far are simply a product of the subject matter, the last stanza of Riley's poem makes clear reference to Keats's text. The image and significance of cider-making occurs in both poems, where it is associated with the approaching death of the year, and therefore possibly of the individual human being. The difference is that Riley's stanza again emphasizes the social aspect of autumn:

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;
And your cider-makin' 's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr sous and saussage, too!

But the closing lines finally establish the relation beyond question. Both poems end with an image of winged creatures, but in Riley's poem Keats's robin and the gathering swallows are changed to “the whole-indurin' flock” of angels:

I don't know how to tell it—but ef sich a thing could be
As the Angels wantin' boardin', and they's call around on me—
I'd want to 'commodate 'em—all the whole-indurin' flock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock!

The narrator's exaggerated and humorous willingness to share the harvest with all the inhabitants of heaven brings together the traditional religious feast of Harvest Festival with the farmer's social duty of feeding the community. And so, indirectly, the importance of the farmer to the whole community, whether living in town or countryside, or even heaven, is established.

Another poem even more visibly modelled on a more famous work, for it is announced in the title, is “Rubáiyát of Doc Sifers.” Riley does not follow even the loose plan of FitzGerald's translation of the Persian original. Riley's poem is rather a presentation of the character and philosophy of a wise, modest country doctor. According to Daniel L. Marsh, Riley said himself that the “poem is an indirect reply to the epicurean pessimism and cynicism found in the other Rubáiyát.”17 And indeed, Doc Sifers is described as a humane and caring doctor who finds pleasure and fulfilment in caring for the community which makes up his country practice:

L

And I says, “Doc, you 'pear so spry, jes' write me that recei't
You have fer bein' happy by,—fer that 'ud shorely beat
Your medicine!” for says I.—And quick as s'cat! Doc turned and writ
And handed me: “Go he'p the sick, and putt your heart in it.”

LI

And then, “A-talkin' furder 'bout that line o' thought,” says he,
“Ef we'll jes' do the work cut out and give' to you and me,
We'll lack no joy, ner appetite, ner all we'd ort to eat,
And sleep like childern ever' night—as puore and ca'm and sweet.”

What saves this advice from being almost unbearably trite and optimistic is the fact that Doc has already been presented to us in stanzas II and III as a kind of flawed genius:

II

In radius o' fifteen mil'd, all p'ints o' compass round,
No man er woman, chick er child, er team, on top o' ground,
But knows him—yes, and got respects and likin' fer him, too,
Fer all his so-to-speak dee-fects o' genius showin' through!

III

Some claims he's absent-minded; some has said they wuz afreard
To take his powders when he come and dosed 'em out, and 'peared
To have his mind on somepin' else—like County Ditch, er some
New way o' tannin' mussrat-pelts, er makin' butter come.

Doc's prescription for happiness may still sound a little too pat, but at least it has been established that it is advice that has been thought out on the basis of knowledge of his own shortcomings and perhaps hard and disappointing experience (we are told in stanza XLV that Doc has no children of his own, and in the next stanza that this pains him). If this simple faith in contentment arising out of service for the common good makes Doc appear naive and perhaps even unworldly, this is quickly turned against other, more “professional” medical ethics, and by extension to all other walks of life as well:

LVIII

When Pence's Drug Store ust to be in full blast, they wuz some
Doc's patients got things frekantly there, charged to him, i gum!—
Doc run a bill there, don't you know, and allus when he squared,
He never questioned nothin',—so he had his feelin's spared.

LIX

Now sich as that, I hold and claim, hain't 'scusable—it's not
Perfessional!—It's jes' a shame 'at Doc hisse'f hain't got
No better business-sense! That's why lots 'd respect him more,
And not give him the clean go-by fer other doctors. Shore!

LX

This-here Doc Glenn, fer instance; er this little jack-leg Hall;—
They're business—folks respects 'em fer their business more'n all
They ever knowed, er ever will, 'bout medicine.—Yit they
Collect their money, k-yore er kill.—They're business, anyway!

Although the major thrust of Riley's “Rubáiyát” is to counter the cynicism of FitzGerald's enormously popular translation, the two poems do have one point of contact. The original Rubáiyát mocked the transience of human grandeur, and this was one of Riley's favourite targets, too; and so, towards the end of his poem, we are told:

XCII

Doc never wuz much hand to pay attention to p'tense
And fuss-and-feathers and display in men o' prominence:
“A railly great man,” Sifers 'lows, “is not the out'ard dressed—
All uniform, salutes and bows, and swellin' out his chest.

XCIII

“I met a great man onc't,” Doc says, “and shuk is hand,” says he,
“And he come 'bout in one, I guess, o' disapp'intin' me—
He talked so common-like, and brought his mind so cle'r in view
And simple-like, I purt' nigh thought, ‘I'm best man o' the two!’”

A similar sentiment can be found in a much shorter poem, “My Philosophy”:

The signs is bad when folks commence
A-findin' fault with Providence,
And baulkin' 'cause the earth don't shake
At ev'ry prancin' step they take.
No man is grate tel he can see
How less than little he would be
Ef stripped to self, and stark and bare
He hung his sign out anywhere.

Stanzas such as these, scattered throughout Riley's dialect poetry, lend support to Gray's assertion that Riley “produced some of the most egalitarian poetry that this country has ever seen.”18 And, indeed, Riley himself is reported as saying, at the annual meeting of the Western Association of Writers in 1897, that “an author … must write for the common people. If they were good enough for God they were good enough for him.”19

The decline in Riley's popularity after his death can be attributed to precisely the same factors that were thought of as his strengths during his lifetime. He has been accused of sentimentality, of simple-minded optimism, and of being “wedded to homely ways, surviving in a time whose different standards he scarcely cared to appraise or comprehend.”20 However, there is another explanation available: Riley's poetry fell out of favour because it celebrates just those country or small-town, Frontier values which could be recalled at the turn of the century, but which people, including Riley himself, realized they were losing, or had already lost. Carman's claim that Riley did not care to comprehend the new urban values is not quite borne out by the poetry. Nor is Gregory's claim that Riley desired an “escape from the conventions of a society that was rapidly changing from an agricultural civilization (where no one was either very rich or hopelessly poor) to an urban scene of unequal earnings and industrial wealth andApower.”21

Riley did, after all, choose to live in Indianapolis for most of the second half of his life. A recognition of, rather than an escape from, other values is present in many of his dialect poems, although not always openly expressed. In “Home-Folks,” for example, the eponymous group is defined against their other, the group who has lost contact with the homely, country virtues.

Home-Folks—they're jis the same as kin—
All brung up, same as we have bin,
Without no over powerin' sense
Of their oncommon consequence!
They've bin to school, but not to git
The habit fastened on 'em yit
So as to ever interfere
With other work 'at's waitin' here:
Home-Folks has crops to plant and plow,
Er lives in town and keeps a cow;
But whether country-jakes er town-,
They know when eggs is up er down!
La! can't you spot 'em—when you meet
'Em anywheres—in field er street?
And can't you see their faces, bright
As circus-day, heave into sight?

It is not the case that all “Home-Folks” live in the countryside; they can live in a town and keep a cow, but their chief distinguishing feature is a down-to-earth attitude to life and a non-inflated assessment of their own importance and place in society: “They know when eggs is up er down!”

In other poems the urban, sophisticated values are openly acknowledged, but are found to be unsatisfying and false. In “Down to the Capital,” for instance, an Indiana Congressman who made his money as a Forty-niner, and is now living in a big house in Washington D.C. with “gas burnin' mighty nigh / In ever' room about the house; and ever' night, about / Some blame reception goin' on,” is nevertheless made to confess to the narrator, one of his constituents, who failed to find any gold in Forty-nine, and who lost a leg in the Civil War:

“It's all jes' artificial, this-'ere high-priced life of ours;
The theory, it's sweet enough, tel it saps down and sours.
They's no home left, ner ties o' home about it. By the powers,
The whole thing's artificialer'n artificial flowers!
“And all I want, and could lay down and sob fer, is to know
The homely things of homely life; fer instance, jes' to go
And set down by the kitchen stove—Lord! that 'u'd rest me so,—
Jes' set there, like I ust to do, and laugh and joke, you know.”

The first line of this extract, along with the fact that the text implies that only rich men can become Congressmen, suggests that the title of the poem is ambiguous: the “Capital” of the title is certainly Washington D.C., but it is also where much of the capital of the nation is congregated. The distance between these “old-fashioned” values and the new, harder capitalist ones that were being espoused is openly acknowledged here, leading the narrator to declare that “They's nothin' much patheticker'n jes' a-bein' rich!” The text therefore deconstructs the power structure of American society by valorizing the small town communities of the Midwest.

There is little doubt that such criticism of American society as this held little attraction for the generation that achieved prosperity in the years immediately following the First World War, and led them to reject Riley's work. But perhaps it was not entirely rejected: in 1931, fifteen years after Riley's death, in the year Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Fred Lewis Pattee was prepared to revise his earlier negative assessment of Riley's achievement:

An antidote for Lewisism in this Nobel year is this hearty volume [of Riley's letters] that makes one glad one is an American rather than be driven to hang one's head. And yet Riley has worked in precisely the same materials as have Lewis and Dreiser and Masters,—western gopher prairie folk, and like them he has seen only people. Never, however, has he made use of cynicism, never of the muck-rake sense of superiority, never of the weapons of criticism, or reform agitation. And as he himself viewed his work he was no sentimentalist: he was simply following Nature.22

Perhaps by then, with the Wall Street Crash already eighteen months in the past, and the Depression already under way, it was possible to read Riley more sympathetically and feel that perhaps he had been the spokesman for honest, decent values which could be usefully labelled “American.”

However, Riley's reputation did not take off again in the 1930s, nor has it ever recovered. There is no doubt that his texts do embody the communal values that were necessary in rural America during the push west and while the Midwest was still predominantly an agrarian society. But, by the 1930s, and even more so by the 1950s, it is possible that poems such as “The Good, Old-Fashioned People” were viewed with deep suspicion:

They was God's people, Uncle says,
          An' gloried in His name,
An' worked, without no selfishness,
          An' loved their neighbers same
As they was kin: An' when they biled
          Their tree-molasses, in the Spring,
Er butchered in the Fall, they smiled
          An' sheered with all jist ever'thing!—
                    The good, old-fashioned people—
                    The hale, hard-working people—
                    The kindly country people
                              'At Uncle used to know!

And the text reveals that even Riley knew he was celebrating a sense of community which had died, an America, a Midwest that no longer existed. In a sense, the text contains its own deconstruction:

He tells about 'em lots o' times,
          Till we'd all ruther hear
About 'em than the Nurs'ry Rhymes
          Er Fairies-mighty near!—
Only, sometimes, he stops so long
          An' then talks so low an' slow,
It's put' nigh sad as any song
          To listen to him talkin' so
                    Of the good, old-fashioned people—
                    The hale, hard-working people—
                    The kindly country people
                              'At Uncle used to know!

Such people and such community spirit are now reduced to the status of fairies and nursery rhymes. And the refrain makes it clear that Uncle might have known such people in the past, but not even he can name any living examples.

Perhaps it is a measure of the minority appeal of poetry that Riley has been so thoroughly neglected and forgotten whereas such prose works as Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series has found new popularity in the late twentieth century (or possibly it is a measure of how it is impossible to turn poetry into television!). Both Riley's and Wilder's texts share a number of features, including sentimentality, and both are openly nostalgic for a time and for values which are presented as having been lost. The difference is that, in many ways, Riley's texts were in fact helping to create a regional identity and regional values whereas Wilder's texts, coming so much later (the Little House on the Prairie series did not begin to appear until 1932), are almost purely nostalgic. Moreover, Riley's texts contain within themselves a recognition of other, competing and opposing, values which interrogate and constantly threaten to unsettle the comfortable platitudes presented on the surface. These newer values are always found wanting, however, as even a brief discussion of a few poems shows. Perhaps in this sense a fairer comparison is with F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which was written in the 1920s, a time of crisis, of change from an industrial and rural America to a consumer society, and which also questions the values of industrial capitalist America by constant reference to the values of the “Middle West.” Riley's texts, particularly his dialect poems in which the narrator's persona is a simple, honest, clear-eyed farmer, may not be as multivalent as Fitzgerald's, but nor are they as univalent as they have often been claimed to be. Their multivalence threatens to unsettle not just the simple platitudes of the narrator, but the reader's values as well, for the virtues and values Riley's texts celebrate are those necessary for the creation and preservation of truly civilized human communities everywhere and at all times, not only Frontier times. These simple and innocent values may never have been fully and pervasively present even in the Midwest, as Riley's poems do in fact acknowledge, but our sense of unease in their presence marks a loss, and a deterioration of the ethical life of twentieth-century society.

Notes

  1. Paul H. Gray claims that, by the nineties, Riley was unquestionably the most popular poet in America. See “Poet as Entertainer: Will Carleton, James Whitcomb Riley, and the Rise of the Poet-Performer Movement,” Literature in Performance, 5 (1984): 1.

  2. I am indebted to Roy Goldblatt of Joensuu University, Finland, for drawing this to my attention. The other poets in the series were Henry W. Longfellow, J. G. Whittier, James R. Lowell, and Walt Whitman.

  3. The most detailed biography of Riley remains Marcus Dickey's, published in two volumes: The Youth of James Whitcomb Riley (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1919) and The Maturity of James Whitcomb Riley (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1922). Dickey was Riley's tour manager and agent, and knew his subject intimately, but his biography is marred by almost unrelenting sycophantic praise of his friend. A more balanced and shorter biography is Richard Crowder's Those Innocent Years (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). Gray gives a useful potted biography, pp. 7-9.

  4. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931). Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); see p. 265, where Riley is simply listed in a footnote as a local colorist; p. 322, where Twain's opinion of his ability as a storyteller is noted; and p. 383, where he is referred to as the author of dialect poems. A further measure of how Riley has been ignored is the fact that C. Carroll Hollis, in “Rural Humour of the Late Nineteenth Century,” makes only the following reference to him: “Bill Nye's most successful tour was when he shared the stage with James Whitcomb Riley” (The Comic Imagination in American Literature, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ed. [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973], p. 175). In fact, Riley, who must be regarded as one of the leading exponents of rural humor in late nineteenth-century America, is mentioned in passing only three times in this whole book, including Hollis's reference.

  5. The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). All quotations from Riley's poetry will be taken from this edition.

  6. See, for instance, Henry A. Beers, “The Singer of the Old Swimmin' Hole,” in The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), pp. 31-43; and Donald Culross Peattie, “Riley as a Nature Poet,” The Saturday Review of Literature, 16 (3 July 1937): 10, who suggests that “like Burns he wrote in two different languages, and was two different men in them. The dialect poems are, on the whole, the good poems, as Burns's were.”

  7. Fred Lewis Pattee, A History of American Literature since 1870 (New York: Century, 1915), p. 326. Horace Gregory claims that “The Hoosier dialect as Riley wrote it was … a skilful combination, a fabric … of interwoven threads of speech, a kind of speech that denotes the presence of uneducated, shrewd, unselfconscious people to those who enjoy the exotic pleasure of reading about them, or rather meeting them behind the footlights of a stage” (“James Whitcomb Riley: An American Victorian,” in Jeannette Covert Nolan, Horace Gregory and James T. Farrell, Poet of the People: an evaluation of James Whitcomb Riley [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951], p. 43).

  8. Those Innocent Years, p. 13.

  9. Doris Lanier, “James Whitcomb Riley's Georgia Connection,” The Old Northwest, 11 (1986): 175.

  10. The size of Greenfield during Riley's early years is not wholly without significance, as he is often criticized for being a town-bred poet who, despite knowing little about farming, wrote about life in the countryside. A childhood friend, Major Ridgeway, calls Greenfield a village which by 1902 had grown to “a very prosperous city of about 5,000 inhabitants” (Early Recollections of James Whitcomb Riley [Harrison, Ohio: n.p., 1902], p. 2).

  11. James T. Farrell, “The Frontier and James Whitcomb Riley,” Poet of the People: an evaluation of James Whitcomb Riley, p. 88.

  12. Those Innocent Years, p. 145. Gray also notes that “His most popular lyrics … depict an edenic past that probably bore little resemblance to the actual experiences of his listeners” (p. 10).

  13. Riley, in fact, remained unmarried all his life. This poem remained popular with the public for many years, and, after he became famous, reporters and would-be biographers hunted up many women who had been at school with him in an attempt to identify the “old sweetheart.” Too many claimed to be the girl for anyone ever to have identified her, assuming she was any more real than “my wife” in the text was.

  14. A History of American Literature since 1870, p. 22.

  15. Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story,” in How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1897), p. 8. That Riley could achieve similar effects in poetry is evident from “The Bear Story” which uses the techniques Twain praises, and which remains hilarious when read aloud.

  16. It is interesting and amusing that no critic ever feels it necessary to comment on the fact that Keats was a Londoner who probably never saw a gleaner, while any number of critics complain that Riley never actually grew up and worked on a farm.

  17. Daniel L. Marsh, The Faith of the People's Poet (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1920), p. 45.

  18. Gray, p. 1. Gray is in fact claiming that not just Riley, but many other writers on the lecture circuit from 1870 to 1930 were producing such poetry.

  19. Those Innocent Years, p. 181.

  20. Bliss Carman, James Whitcomb Riley (New York: privately printed, 1918), p. 19. It is not really fair to say that Carman criticised Riley, for Carman is rather praising Riley for his commitment to these old-fashioned virtues and standards.

  21. “James Whitcomb Riley: An American Victorian,” in Poet of the People: an evaluation of James Whitcomb Riley, pp. 54-55.

  22. Fred Lewis Pattee, “Main Street, Old Style,” The Saturday Review of Literature, 7 (17 January 1931): 531. This is a review of Letters of James Whitcomb Riley, William Lyon Phelps, ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1930).

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James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916)

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