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.
In an earlier Puritan age, the Boston Brahmins would have been
ministers; in the 19th century, they became professors, often at
Harvard. Late in life they sometimes became ambassadors or received
honorary degrees from European institutions. Most of them travelled
or were educated in Europe: They were familiar with the ideas and
books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain.
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.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
The most important Boston Brahmin poets were Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell.
Longfellow, professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the
best-known American poet of his day. He was responsible for the
misty, ahistorical, legendary sense of the past that merged
American and European traditions. He wrote three long narrative
poems popularizing native legends in European meters "Evangeline"
(1847), "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), and "The Courtship of Miles
Standish" (1858).
Longfellow also wrote textbooks on modern languages and a travel
book entitled Outre-Mer, retelling foreign legends and patterned
after Washington Irving's Sketch Book. Although conventionality,
sentimentality, and facile handling mar the long poems, haunting
short lyrics like "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" (1854), "My Lost
Youth" (1855), and "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" (1880) continue
to give pleasure.
James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
James Russell Lowell, 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. Lowell's A Fable for Critics (1848)
is a funny and apt appraisal of American writers, as in his
comment: "There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge /
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge."
Under his wife's influence, Lowell became a liberal reformer,
abolitionist, and supporter of women's suffrage and laws ending
child labor. His Biglow Papers, First Series (1847- 48) creates
Hosea Biglow, a shrewd but uneducated village poet who argues for
reform in dialect poetry. Benjamin Franklin and Phillip Freneau had
used intelligent villagers as mouthpieces for social commentary.
Lowell writes in the same vein, linking the colonial "character"
tradition with the new realism and regionalism based on dialect
that flowered in the 1850s and came to fruition in Mark Twain.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, a celebrated physician and professor of
anatomy and physiology at Harvard, is the hardest of the three
well-known Brahmins to categorize because his work is marked by a
refreshing versatility. It encompasses collections of humorous
essays (for example, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858),
novels (Elsie Venner, 1861), biographies (Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1885), and verse that could be sprightly ("The Deacon's
Masterpiece, or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay"), philosophical ("The
Chambered Nautilus"), or fervently patriotic ("Old Ironsides").
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the suburb of Boston that is home
to Harvard, Holmes was the son of a prominent local minister. His
mother was a descendant of the poet Anne Bradstreet. In his time,
and more so thereafter, he symbolized wit, intelligence, and charm
not as a discoverer or a trailblazer, but rather as an exemplary
interpreter of everything from society and language to medicine and
human nature.
THE BRAHMIN POETS
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