Poetry, Lyrical, Narrative, and Satirical, of the Civil War
Selected and Edited by . New York: The American News Company.
WE confess that our heart had at times misgiven us concerning the written and printed poetry of our recent war ; but until Mr. White gave us the present volume, we did not know how strong a case could be made against it. The effect is perhaps not altogether intended, but it shows how bad his material was, and how little inspiration of any sort attended him in his work, when a literary gentleman of habits of research and of generally supposed critical taste makes a book so careless and slovenly as this.
We can well afford the space which the editor devotes to Mr. Lowell’s noble poem, but we must admit that we can regard “ The Present Crisis ” as part of the poetry of the war only in the large sense in which we should also accept the Prophecies of Ezekiel and the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Many pious men beheld the war (after it came) foreshadowed in the poetry of the awful and exalted prophecies, and we wonder that Mr. White did not give us a few passages from those books. It is scarcely possible that he did not know “The Present Crisis” to have been written nearly a score of years ago ; though he seems to have been altogether ignorant of “The Washers of the Shroud,” a poem by the same author actually written after the war began, and uttering all that dread, suspense, and deep determination which the threatened Republic felt after the defeats in the autumn of 1861. As Mr. White advances with his poetical chronology of the war, he is likewise unconscious of “ The Commemoration Ode,” which indeed is so far above all other elegiac poems of the war, as perhaps to he out of his somewhat earth-bound range. Yet we cannot help blaming him a little for not looking higher : his book must for some time represent the feeling of the nation in war time, and we would fain have had his readers know how deep and exalted this sentiment really was, and how it could reach, if only once and in only one, an expression which we may challenge any literature to surpass. Of “The Biglow Papers,” in which there is so much of the national hard-headed shrewdness, humor, and earnestness, we have but one, and that not the best.
As some compensation, however, Mr. White presents us with two humorous lyrics of his own, and makes us feel like men who, in the first moments of our financial disorder, parted with a good dollar, and received change in car-tickets and envelopes covering an ideal value in postage-stamps. It seems hard to complain of an editor who puts only two of his poems in a collection when he was master to put in twenty if he chose, and when in both cases he does his best to explain and relieve their intolerable brilliancy by foot-notes ; yet, seeing that one of these productions is in literature what the “Yankee Notions” and the “ Nick-Nax ” caricatures of John Bull are in art, and seeing that the other is not in the least a parody of the Emersonian poetry it is supposed to burlesque, and is otherwise nothing at all, we cannot help crying out against them.
The foot-notes to Mr. White’s verses are comical, however, we must acknowledge; and so are all the foot-notes in the book. If the Model of Deportment had taken to letters with a humorous aim, we could conceive of his writing them. “ If burlesque,” says Mr. White of his “Union” verses, “ were all their purpose, they would not be here preserved ” ; adding, with a noble tenderness for his victim, “ Mr. Emerson could well afford to forgive them, even it they did not come from one of his warmest admirers,”— in which we agree with Mr. White, whose consideration for the great transcendentalist is equalled only by his consideration for the reader’s ignorance in regard to most things not connected with the poetry of the war. “ Bully,” he tells us, was used as “an expression of encouragement and approval ” by the Elizabethan dramatists, as well as by our own cherished rowdies; which may be readily proven from the plays of Shakespeare. But what the author of the poem in which this word occurs means by “ hefty ” Mr. White does not know, and frankly makes a note for the purpose of saying so. Concerning the expression “ hurried up his cakes,” he is, however, perfectly au fait, and surprises us with the promptness of his learning. “ As long as the importance of hurrying buckwheat pancakes from the griddle to the table,” says he, with a fine air of annotation, “ is impressed upon the American mind, this vile slang will need no explanation. But the fame,” — mark this dry light of philosophy, and the delicacy of the humor through which it plays, — “ but the fame of the Rebel march into Pennsylvania, and of the victory of Gettysburg, will probably outlive even the taste for these alluring compounds.” This is Mr. White’s good humor ; his bad humor is displayed in his note to a poem by Fitz James O’Brien on the “Seventh Regiment,” which he says was “ written by a young Irishman, one of its members.” The young Irishman’s name is probably as familiar to most readers of the magazines as Mr. White’s, and we cannot help wondering how he knew a writer of singularly brilliant powers and wide repute only as “ a young Irishman.”
But there are many things which Mr, White seems not to know, and he has but a poor memory for names, and in his despair he writes anonymous against the title of every third poem. We might have expected a gentleman interested in the poetry of the war to attend the lectures of Dr. Holmes, who has been reading in New York and elsewhere “The Old Sergeant,” as the production of Mr. Forcythe Willson of Kentucky. By turning to the index of that volume of the Atlantic from which the verses were taken, Mr. White could have learned that “ Spring at the Capital ” was written by Mrs. Akers ; and with quite as little trouble could have informed himself of the authorship of a half-score of other poems we might name. We have already noted the defectiveness of the collection, in which we are told “ no conspicuous poem elicited by the war is omitted ” ; and we note it again in Mr. White’s failure to print Mr. Bryant’s pathetic and beautiful poem, “ My Autumn Walk,” and in his choosing from Mr. Aldrich not one of the fine sonnets he has written on the war, but a jeu d'esprit which in no wise represents him. Indeed, Mr. White’s book seems to have been compiled after the editor had collected a certain number of clippings from the magazines and newspapers : if by the blessing of Heaven these had the names of their authors attached, and happened to be the best things the poets had done, it was a fortunate circumstance ; but if the reverse was the fact, Mr. White seems to have felt no responsibility in the matter. We are disposed to hold him to stricter account, and to blame him for temporarily blocking, with a book and a reputation, the way to a work of real industry, taste, and accuracy on the poetry of the war. It was our right that a man whose scholarly fame would carry his volume beyond our own shores should do his best for our heroic Muse, robing her in all possible splendor ; and it is our wrong that he has chosen instead to present the poor soul in attire so very indifferently selected from her limited wardrobe.