White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled - the best books of 1866

The best book of 1866 is so obvious that it is barely worth disagreeing, but as Raskolnikov says himself, “The wrong form, you mean – the aesthetics aren’t right!” (VI.7, tr. Oliver Ready).  My favorite book of 1866 is not Crime and Punishment but Victor Hugo’s staggering and preposterous man-against-nature – man-against-hurricane – man-against-octopus – epic The Toilers of the Sea, illustrated above.  The steamboat pictured is about to get stuck on a strange rock formation, and the hero will spend most of the novel fighting everything Hugo can throw at him to get it moving again.  “Then, taking up in the hollow of his hand a little water from a pool of rainwater, he drank it and cried to the clouds: ‘Fooled you!’”  That’s right, he is insulting the clouds, defying the cosmos, as one does in a Victor Hugo book.

Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler this year, too, alongside Crime and Punishment, under contractual conditions that would have crushed most writers.  Now there is some kind of heroism.  I would like to read a Victor Hugo novel about Dostoevsky writing Crime and Punishment and The Gambler.

Henrik Ibsen’s Brand is from 1866, as well, about another defier of the cosmos.  Brand, Raskolnikov, and Hugo’s hero – big characters in big stories.

I do not believe I have read any English-language novels from the year.  Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, George Eliot’s Felix Holt, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, just barely unfinished, would be likely candidates for the Booker Prize, if there had been such a thing.  Gaskell had never won the prize, beat by Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope, so I think she picks this one up posthumously.  I am just making this up.  Like I care about prizes.

It was a broadly interesting year for poetry.  Paul Verlaine published his first book, Poèmes saturniens, which I have only read in part, and of course in English.  The French looks like this, from “Chansons d’automne,” one of Verlaine’s best-known poems:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
     De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
     Monotone.

Lip-smacking French verse.  Those first three lines, those vowels, those nasalizations.  Maybe the poem also means something.

Algernon Swinburne’s first books of lyrics, Poems and Ballads, appeared, ruining English poetry for decades until austere, brutal Modernists dynamited and carted off his lush, sweet gibberish:

from Hymn to Proserpine

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

It is like The Toilers of the Sea turned into English verse.  Swinburne was Hugo’s greatest English champion.

Christina Rossetti’s second book, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems seemed like a paler version of her brilliant first book, but I’ll note it, at least.

In the United States, Herman Melville published Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, his debut as a poet and his first book in a decade, the first of all too few volumes of poetry.  Even more surprising somehow is James Greenleaf Whittier’s nostalgic, ironic “Snow-Bound,” surprising because Whittier was generally such a bad poet, but one who occasionally wrote a great poem.  Whether the torments inflicted by the poem on several generations of schoolchildren are to the demerit of Whittier I leave to the conscience of the individual reader.  Those days are long past.

The grateful sense of sweetness near - a bit of "Snow-Bound"

"Snow-Bound" (1866) was, one might suspect, actually designed as a unique form of torment for high school students. Twenty pages of rhymed couplets describing a snowed-in week of the poet's childhood, "These Flemish pictures of old days," mixed with reflections on loss and the passage of time and the road not taken and so on. Which contemporary writer was it who described growing up in Whittier's Haverhill, MA, and being forced to memorize parts of "Snow-Bound" on the finest May afternoon of the year? It's all perfectly crafted to bore a poor high school kid to death.

Well, that's all before my time. The Fireside Poets were all pretty much gone from my high school curriculum. Maybe a little Longfellow remained. So I have the freedom to actually enjoy "Snow-Bound," a nostalgic childhood poem that is also a complex investigation of nostalgia. It's also masterfully structured, and has some superb lines. It's the John Greenleaf Whittier paradox - if he was capable of this, why did he do it so seldom?

The beginning of the poem is cleanly nostalgic. A storm approaches; the farm hunkers down; the storm hits; the farm digs out a bit, enough to feed the animals. In the evening, the family entertains itself around the fire. There are a lot of nice touches ("And through the glass the clothes-line posts \ Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts"), but a reader might wonder if there's more to the poem than nostalgic remembrance.

There is, there is. The fireside entertainment is storytelling. Whittier deftly switches from his parents' stories of their own childhood to descriptions of the other inhabitants of the house - his uncle the amateur naturalist, his maiden aunt, his sisters, the schoolmaster, and one really odd one, a guest, Harriet Livermore, a religious enthusiast who later traveled the world and lived for a time with the Queen of the Desert, Lady Hester Stanhope. But that's a whole 'nother story. "Or startling on her desert throne \ The crazy Queen of Lebanon \ With claims fantastic as her own."

That sympathetic portrait of the strict, dedicated schoolmaster - just one more turn of the screw for those poor high school students. "Brisk wielder of the birch and rule," wonderful. But it's these people who make the poem great, and cuts the cloyingness of the nostalgia. Their loss is real. It should be mourned, they should be remembered. Well, I want to think about this more. It's a complicated poem.

The poetic language is unusually good. For Whittier, I mean. The last line, for example:

The traveller owns the grateful sense
Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,
And, pausing, takes with forehead bare
The benediction of the air.

Trembling, I listened - there's at least one Whittier masterpiece

John Greenleaf Whittier makes a good punching bag. Even in a short collection like the Robert Penn Warren edition that I'm reading, just 143 pages of poems, there are some duds shocking enough to almost make me morbidly curious about the contents of Whittier's seven volumes of collected poems. And plenty of other poems have fine lines or passages, but falter.

Whittier began publishing poems in 1826, at the age of 19. He was poetically gifted, without a doubt. Neither Warren or Brenda Wineapple, who edited the short Library of America Whittier, thinks he wrote a decent poem for twenty years or more ("Song of Slaves in the Desert" (1847), that's the first good one). Both editors essentially skip the entire period.

Reading Whittier's lesser poems perhaps softens my judgment, but it was once again a shock to turn to "Telling the Bees" (1858), which looks and sounds to me like a genuinely great poem.

Here is the place; right over the hill
  Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
  And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.

It is not a linguistically complicated poem, and the single effect is hardly unique to this poem. The narrator returns to his girlfriend's house after a month's absence. As he approaches, he looks at this, he looks at that. Almost nothing has changed.

Just the same as a month before,--
  The house and the trees,
The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,--
  Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,
  Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
  Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Whittier tells us, in a header, of the rural New England custom of telling the bees of any death, and of dressing the hives in mourning.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
  Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
  Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps
  For the dead to-day:
Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
  The fret and the pain of his age away."

Two stanzas left. I'll bet you can guess the ending, and if not the surprise will be appreciated. The bee custom adds a sense of mystery or sublimity to what might be a cloying scene. The nostalgic tone, which seems to be Whittier's primary late career mode, is undercut by real loss. The lines are not necessarily individually perfect, but I can't hear any clinkers.

The pace, which I have butchered, is well-measured. The second line of each stanza, the five beat line, really works, whether reading silently or aloud:

Heavy and slow;
To love, a year;
The house and the trees,
Forward and back,

Very simple, looking at them on their own. Simple in language, not in metrical effect. A little touch of poetical magic there.

An odd feature of poetry is that a poet can occasionally remain well-known ("immortal") for a single poem. I think "Telling the Bees" will keep Whittier in those American poetry anthologies.

Evidence of the decline and fall of John Greenleaf Whittier

I counted the pages devoted to 19th century poets in eight anthologies of American poetry. With one exception, the books all try to cover all of American poetry, from the Anne Bradstreet or what have you to their own day. The Library of America anthology is in two volumes, and covers the 19th century only. Robert Frost is included as a reference point. Clicking should enlarge the table:

I find this all a little too interesting. Look at that stuffy 1912 Yale Book of American Verse - no Dickinson, no Melville, almost no Whitman. Just Fireside Poets as far as the eye can see. The 1900 E. C. Stedman anthology is much more daring.

Note how David Lehman's 2006 New Oxford anthology, compared to Richard Ellman's 1976 version, decimates the 19th century poets. He puts everything before the 20th century in a vise, and freezes the pre-World War II poets, in order find room for more recent poets. Look what he does to poor John Greenleaf Whittier - 39 pages in 1976, 6 in 2006.

Another way to see this is to look at the rankings. I report the top 6 or 7:

Note the rise of Walt Whitman from obscurity to crushing eminence. Dickinson, and to a lesser degree Melville, also show nice, steady increases in ranking. The Fireside Poets do terribly. Holmes and Lowell completely shrivel, Bryant fades with dignity, Whittier hangs on with the long "Snow-Bound" (typically half of his pages). Only Longfellow maintains any sort of parity.

This is one way that canon formation works. Editors have limited space in their anthologies. If they want to add anything, they have to cut something else. A publisher can add pages - see the "Total Pages" row - but there are physical limits.

Whitman was clearly underrated. Dickinson and Melville, too. Or maybe now we greatly overrate them. Based on my own reading, this progression has been exactly right. But I live now, so of course my tastes, prejudices, and judgments are not those of a reader of 1900. I guess I could be a cranky contrarian. That's fun. Actually, I would say that Longfellow is now a bit underrated, and would also note that Poe is probably not served well by this page-counting measure, since he did not write much verse, although he seems to do all right in the rankings.

This is all motivated by my reading of a collection of John Greenleaf Whittier poems, the oddly labeled John Greenleaf Whittier's Poetry "by" Robert Penn Warren. Not sure about that "by" - Warren includes a long essay on Whittier, but I'm pretty sure the 150 pages of poems are by Whittier. The selection (and length) is similar to the Brenda Wineapple Library of America volume. The heart of the problem is that despite the seven thick volumes of John Greenleaf Whittier poems, there are nowhere close to 150 pages of good poems. Maybe forty. The great puzzle to Warren is not how a great poet wrote so much junk, but how a bad poet occasionally wrote a masterpiece.

David Lehman is too hard on Whittier, but to anyone who classifies him as the third or fourth or fifth best 19th century poet, I say: overrated!

All errors my own (and likely), data available by request, etc. Bibliography, in chronological order:

An American Anthology: 1787-1900 (1900), ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Greenwood Press reprint, available as a Google Books PDF.
Yale Book of American Verse (1912), ed. Thomas R. Lounsbury, Yale University Press.
The Oxford Book of American Verse (1927), ed. Bliss Carman, Oxford University Press.
The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950), ed. F. O. Matthiessen, Oxford University Press.
American Poetry (1965), eds. Gay Wilson Allen, Walter B. Rideout, and James K. Robinson, Harper & Row.
The New Oxford Book of American Verse (1976), ed. Richard Ellman, Oxford University Press.
American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vols. 1 and 2 (1993), ed. John Hollander, Library of America.
The New Oxford Book of American Verse (2006), ed. David Lehman, Oxford University Press.