Lowell and His Poetry (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By W.H. Hudson

This 1911 volume was written by Hudson for use in schools.  Part of the Poetry and Life series, it combines a biography with a selection of James Russell Lowell's poetry. Hudson created the series because he believed students’ interests would be piqued by the theory that personality informs poetry—he based this volume on Lowell’s conservative opinions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Feb 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411457911

W.H. Hudson

William Henry Hudson (1841–1922) was an author and naturalist. Hudson was born in Argentina, the son of English and American parents. There, he studied local plants and animals as a young man, publishing his findings in Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society, in a mixture of English and Spanish. Hudson’s familiarity with nature was readily evident in later novels such as A Crystal Age and Green Mansions. He later aided the founding of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

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LOWELL AND HIS POETRY

WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-5791-1

GENERAL PREFACE

A GLANCE through the pages of this little book will suffice to disclose the general plan of the series of which it forms a part. Only a few words of explanation, therefore, will be necessary.

The point of departure is the undeniable fact that with the vast majority of young students of literature a living interest in the work of any poet can best be aroused, and an intelligent appreciation of it secured, when it is immediately associated with the character and career of the poet himself. The cases are indeed few and far between in which much fresh light will not be thrown upon a poem by some knowledge of the personality of the writer, while it will often be found that the most direct—perhaps even the only—way to the heart of its meaning lies through a consideration of the circumstances in which it had its birth. The purely æsthetic critic may possibly object that a poem should be regarded simply as a self-contained and detached piece of art, having no personal affiliations or bearings. Of the validity of this as an abstract principle nothing need now be said. The fact remains that, in the earlier stages of study at any rate, poetry is most valued and loved when it is made to seem most human and vital; and the human and vital interest of poetry can be most surely brought home to the reader by the biographical method of interpretation.

This is to some extent recognised by writers of histories and text-books of literature, and by editors of selections from the works of our poets; for place is always given by them to a certain amount of biographical material. But in the histories and text-books the biography of a given writer stands by itself, and his work has to be sought elsewhere, the student being left to make the connection for himself; while even in our current editions of selections there is little systematic attempt to link biography, step by step, with production.

This brings us at once to the chief purpose of the present series. In this, biography and production will be considered together and in intimate association. In other words, an endeavor will be made to interest the reader in the lives and personalities of the poets dealt with, and at the same time to use biography as an introduction and key to their writings.

Each volume will therefore contain the life-story of the poet who forms its subject. In this attention will be specially directed to his personality as it expressed itself in his poetry, and to the influences and conditions which counted most as formative factors in the growth of his genius. This biographical study will be used as a setting for a selection, as large as space will permit, of his representative poems. Such poems, where possible, will be reproduced in full, and care will be taken to bring out their connection with his character, his circumstances, and the movement of his mind. Then, in addition, so much more general literary criticism will be incorporated as may seem to be needed to supplement the biographical material, and to exhibit both the essential qualities and the historical importance of his work.

It is believed that the plan thus pursued is substantially in the nature of a new departure, and that the volumes of this series, constituting as they will an introduction to the study of some of our greatest poets, will be found useful to teachers and students of literature, and no less to the general lover of English poetry.

WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

I

NO student of the fine body of literature produced by New England during the middle decades of the nineteenth century can fail to be impressed by its remarkable uniformity in mental character and moral spirit. The reason of this fact is not far to seek. The makers of this literature, of course, differed from one another greatly, as individuals, in temperament, outlook, and ideas of both life and art. But they all sprang from the same kind of stock, and were shaped and molded by the powerful forces of similar social and intellectual surroundings. Thus, despite all personal diversities of thought and feeling, their productions have many qualities in common. Very rarely has a group of writers appeared in any locality or period in whom the family likeness has been so strong.

It is well to consider a little carefully the influences which combined to give to New England literature its distinctive tone and spirit.

In the first place, its foundations were firmly laid in Puritanism. In early colonial days there had been two great distributing centres of the English race in America—Virginia and New England. The Virginian colonists from the first were drawn principally from the English landed gentry, who, preferring plantation life to that of cities, and having little interest in education or literature, settled down comfortably enough under their fresh conditions to the old existence of the country squire, and thus carried on the traditions in which they had been bred. The New England colonists, on the other hand, belonged for the most part to the class of separatists or independents, whose sturdy nonconforming temper had led them to a fatal rupture with the English Church and the political ideas associated with the Stuart dynasty, and who sought in their new home a place where they might establish a commonwealth of the reformed faith—a sort of Theocracy. The characteristics of these fathers of New England were those of seventeenth-century Puritanism of the most pronounced type. They were strong and earnest men, upright, God-fearing, intense, narrow, and fanatical; their energies were divided between practical work and the dominant interests of religion; and they cared nothing for the arts and graces of life, which, indeed, they frowned on as frivolous or banned as sinful. Manifestly, then, the conditions in New England were as unfavorable, though for a different reason, to the growth of literature as those which obtained in the south. But early in the nineteenth century came a great intellectual awakening. The Unitarian movement, which rose to be a paramount force in New England life about 1815; the ferment produced by the introduction of the German idealistic philosophy; the influence of some of our English poets, notably Wordsworth and Coleridge; all helped to break down the cramping limitations of the older theology and the views of life which had been based upon it, and to set a current of fresh and generous interests flowing fast and strong through churches, colleges, and the Press. The way was thus prepared for the literary outburst which soon followed. Only—and this is the point upon which the utmost stress must now be laid—though the hardness and narrowness of the old Puritanism had been outgrown, the influence of its strenuous moral temper was left behind. New England literature is essentially a product of the Puritan spirit, though of the Puritan spirit touched, liberalised, transfigured by new thought and cosmopolitan culture. Now, all the great New England writers were men of Puritan ancestry; and this fact enables us at once to account for their splendid moral fibre, the strength and nobility of their characters, the religious element which is so prominent in their works, and their insistent—often, indeed, over-insistent—didacticism and preoccupation at all times with ethical themes.

Secondly, while all these New England men thus sprang from a Puritan stock, they sprang from such stock at its very best. They were, with one or two exceptions only, offshoots from an aristocracy of brains and culture; they belonged to what one of their number, the wise and witty Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, called New England's Brahmin Caste. Their families had long enjoyed all the advantages of good breeding and a literary atmosphere in cultivated homes and in the best available schools; and generation by generation they had made their mark in the intellectual movements of their time and in public life. This long family history told in many ways. It told, for example, in the exquisite refinement which impresses us in the personal characters of such men as Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell. It told again in the facility with which such men themselves became instrumental in that liberalising and transfiguration of Puritanism of which I have spoken. It told, moreover, in their attitude to literature and feeling for it. Towards all questions of literary art the New England men, as a rule, adopted the position of scholarly conservatism. They were endued with a strong sense of the continuity of literature and of the permanence of critical standards and principles amid all temporary fluctuations of taste. Thus, though