Chapter 5: the Boston BrahminsSocial background

The “Brahmins” refers to the famous group of aristocratic writers who lived in Boston in the 19th century. Most Brahmins came from rich, old Boston families. They considered Boston “ the thinking center of the (American) continent, and therefore the planet”. Their “ Saturday Club” met on Saturday a month for dinner. Their membership included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Lowell and the famous historians Prescott and Motley. In 1857, the club started its own magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. Through the magazine, Boston’s literary establishment tried to influence the intellectual life and tastes of the new American republic. For the next twenty or thirty years, it was leading intellectual magazine of the United States.In their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be called) supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for learning. Most of the Brahmin poets traveled or educated in Europe: They were familiar with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain.

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Upper class in background but democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States, through public lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the pages of two influential Boston magazines, the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly.The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature. Ironically, their overall effect was conservative. By insisting on European things and forms, they retarded the growth of a distinctive American consciousness. Well-meaning men, their conservative backgrounds blinded them to the daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson regarded as the “jingle man”). They were pillars of what was called the “genteel tradition” that three generations of American realists had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland influence, it was almost 100 years before the distinctive American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was generally recognized in the United States.

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, and educated at Bowdoin College, where one of his classmates was Nathaniel Hawthorne. A gifted linguist, he was appointed to a chair at Harvard as a professor of modern languages before he was thirty. By 1857, when The Atlantic Monthly was founded under the editorship of James Russell Lowell, Longfellow was in the prime of his writing life and incontestably the most celebrated poet in the land.

His verse narrative The Song of Hiawatha (1855) had sold 50,000 copies; its successor, The Courtship of Miles Standish, racked up 10,000 purchases on its first day in London when it appeared in 1858. This popular success, combined with a nearly unstinting critical acclaim (one notable dissenting voice belonged to Edgar Allan Poe, who years earlier had savaged Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems in a review, fuming that its author”s “conception of the aim of poetry is all wrong”) won for Longfellow an audience and eminence in the nineteenth century that even such beloved American poets as Frost and Sandburg were not to rival in later generations.

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Primary works

Voice of the Night (1839),

Hyperion (1839),

Ballads and Other Poems (1842),

Evangeline (1847),

The Song of Hiawatha (1855),

The Court ship of Miles Standish (1858),

Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), Christus (1872).

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A Psalm of Life (1838)         

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream ! —

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real!   Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

Be a hero in the strife !

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant !

Let the dead Past bury its dead !

Act,— act in the living Present !

Heart within, and God o'erhead !

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Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time ;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate ;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

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He published two considerable medical works, Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions (1842), and The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever (1843). In 1847 he became Parkman professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard, a chair he held until his retirement in 1882. Holmes was extremely popular as a teacher, and was famous also for his humorous essays and poems and his entertaining after-dinner speeches. During the late 1850s The Atlantic Monthly, which he co-founded with James Russell Lowell in 1857, published many of his essays---which were then collected in the successful The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), as well as poems such as “ the Chambered Nautilus” and “ The Deacon’s Masterpiece”. Among later collections of his essays are The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1860), The poet at the Breakfast Table (18972), and Over the Teacups (1891). Drawing upon hid scientific training, he wrote three novels about characters that are psychologically disturbed. All three explore the biological and psychological factors determining human behavior and reject any theological version of determinism. The first, Elsie Venner (1861), was the most successful; it was followed by The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Mortal Antipathy (1885). A scientific rationalist, Holmes sought in particular to discredit Calvinism and what he saw as its superstitious and stifling doctrine of determinism.

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James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)James Russell, who became professor of modern languages at Harvard after Longfellow retired, is the Matthew Arnold of American literature. He began as a poet but gradually lost his poetic ability, ending as a respected critic and educator. As editor of the Atlantic and co-editor of the North American Review, Lowell exercised enormous influence.

He was influential in revitalizing the intellectual life of New England in the mid-19th cent. Educated at Harvard, he abandoned law for literature. In 1843 he started a literary magazine, the Pioneer, which failed after two issues. The next year Lowell married Maria White, an ardent abolitionist and liberal, who encouraged him in his work. Lowell’s Poems (1844, 1846), A Fable for Critics (1848), The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848), and The Bigelow Papers (1848; 2d series, 1867) brought him considerable notice as a poet and critic. The best remembered of these are The Bigelow Papers, political and social lampoons written in Yankee dialect, which established his reputation as a satirist and a wit. The first of these two series of verses expressed opposition to the Mexican War, and the second supported the cause of the North in the Civil War.

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In 1855, Lowell became professor of modern languages at Harvard, a position he held until 1876. In addition to teaching, he served as first editor (1857–61) of the Atlantic Monthly and later (1864–72) of the North American Review. In his later writings he turned to scholarship and criticism. Collections of his essays and literary studies appeared as Fireside Travels (1864), Among My Books (1870; 2d series, 1876), and My Study Windows (1871). In 1877 he was appointed minister to London, where he remained until 1885. While abroad Lowell did much to increase the respect of foreigners for American letters and American institutions; his speeches in England, published as Democracy and Other Addresses (1887), are among his best work. Lowell’s letters (ed. by C. E. Norton, 2 vol., 1893) and New Letters (ed. by M. A. De Wolfe Howe, 1932) remain valuable for their shrewd and lively comments on public affairs and the literary activities of his generation.

Major works

A Year’s Life (1841), Poems (1842), A Fable for Critics (1848), The Vision of Sir Launfal(1848), The Biglow Papers (1848,first series, 1867,second series)

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The Biglow papers

In his early career, Lowell’s poetry often had a political message. In The Biglow Papers, written during the Mexican War (1846-1848), he attacked American policy. To him, the war was “ a national crime”. The book’s main character, Hosea Biglow, speaks in a New England dialect and often expresses humorous opinions. At other times, however, he is completely serious: “ Ez fer (as for) war, I call it murder.” Another humorous character, Birdofredom Sawin, is silly enough to join the army full of hopes. He returns home as a physically and morally destroyed man. The second series of The Biglow Papers was written to support the North during the Civil War (1861-1865), but it is far less interesting to read. For these, Hosea’s dialect was scarcely an adequate vehicle of expression, and the second series of Biglow Papers, if not inferior in skill, somehow lacks the entire sufficiency of the first; even when, as in the tenth paper, both the pathos and valor of the great conflict sound through the verse. The passions that the war aroused were too overpowering for poetry except the brief expression of dominant feeling, as in the fine stanza written in October, 1861.

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God, give us peace! Not such as lulls to sleep,

But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit

And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep,

Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit,

And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap!

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Fable for Critics (1848)

In A Fable for Critics Lowell makes fun of many of his fellow writers. He describes Poe as “ three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” W.G. Bryant is “ as quiet, as cool, and as dignified, / as smooth silent iceberg.” Emerson, who was influenced by the philosophy of Plato, has “ a Greek head on right Yankee shoulders”. Thoreau “ watched Nature like a detective “. Later in life, Lowell became an important literary critic. He had wider interests than the other Brahmins and several of his essays ate still read and studied today.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)John Greenleaf Whittier, the most outspoken abolitionist among the poets of his generation, was born into a Quaker farming family in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1807. Although his early life was one of relative hardship and isolation, his constant exposure to the wonders of nature gave him a poet's appreciation for the beauties of the world around him.

His first poem, The Exile's Departure, was published by William Lloyd Garrison in the Newburyport Free Press in June of 1826. Thus began a lifelong friendship with the fiery abolitionist leader. After acquiring the equivalent of a high school education (Garrison had persuaded the elder Whittier to allow it), Whittier supported himself for a time as a teacher and a shoemaker. Eventually, his involvement with Garrison pulled him into the world of politics. He became the editor of the American Manufacturer in Boston and then of the Haverhill Gazette and the New England Review and a co-founder (in 1839) of the Liberty party, a “political-action group of the Abolitionist party”.

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From his ready-made platform, Whittier joined Garrison and others in assailing the evils of slavery. His first collection of poems dealing with abolition was published in 1837. The rigors of his boyhood had left him in poor health and eventually forced his retirement from the high-pressure world of newspaper editing, but he continued to write tirelessly against the South’s “peculiar institution” and in favor of emancipation.

Whittier died in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, in 1892, having lived to see the successful conclusion of the abolitionist movement he had championed throughout his life.

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Whittier’s greatest poem, Snow-Bound (1866), describes a time when Whittier, his parents and family were “shut in from all the world” by a snowstorm. Whittier’s sharp images, simple constructions, and ballad-like tetrameter couplets have the simple earthy texture of Robert Burns. “Snow Bound”, vividly recreates the poet’s deceased family members and friends as he remembers them from childhood, huddled cozily around the blazing hearth during one of New England’s blustering snowstorms. This simple, religious, intensely personal poem, coming after the long nightmare of the Civil War, is an elegy for the dead and a healing hymn. It affirms the eternity of the spirit, the timeless power of love in the memory and the undiminished beauty of nature, despite violent outer political storms.

The first part of the poem describes the coming of the storm: The sun that brief December dayRose cheerless over hills of grayThe next mornings, they wake to find a changed world:And when the second morning shone, We looked upon a world unknown.

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Major works

…A universe of sky and snow!The old familiar sights of oursTook marvelous shapes…In the middle of this cold, wintry world, the poet invites us to:Sit with me by the homestead hearth,And stretch the hands of memory forthTo warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze!Farmhouse fireplace

But the fire isn’t the only kind of warmth in the house. More important is the warmth of family affection, which the poet values so highly.

Works:

Poems Written During the Progress of the Abolition Question (1938), Lays of My Home and Other poems (1843), Voices of Freedom(1896), Songs of Labor(1850), The Chapel of the Hermits (1853), The Panorama and Other Poems (1856), Home Ballads and Poems (1860), In War Time and Other Poems (1864), Snowbound (1866), The Tent on the Beach (18670, Among the Hills (1869), Miriam and Other Poems (1871), Hazel- Blossoms (1875), The Vision of Echard (1878), Saint Gregory’s Guest (1886), At Sundown (1890).

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