"Realism" is the second installment of a series that focuses on poetic development in the United States. The first installment is a superficial examination of romanticism.
Preface
One aspect of history fundamental to the comprehension of Western literature is the idea that regardless how novel a cultural development may seem, it is not discontinuous from the aggregate intellectual and artistic achievements that precede it. Even Karl Marx's, Charles Darwin's, and Friedrich Nietzsche's great imaginative leaps must be viewed as a part of the intellectual environment in which their theories were born. Such a sense of continuity leads to two important conclusions. First, a sympathetic understanding of the past permits a more complete appreciation of current achievements. Second, the past, in contrast with being a repository, is the root of an organic process that continuously nourishes present and future achievements. The continuity of Western literature is best illustrated by the way in which writers continue to draw from the past to create original works. To demonstrate the creative continuity, we will attend to several representative figures, each recognizably a realist, their realism rooted in and continuous with the achievements of their predecessors.
Cultural Background
After the Civil War (1861-- 1865), the United States experienced two important shifts in the distribution of its population. First, many veterans, freed slaves, cattlemen, farmers, and immigrants moved to the West--joining earlier settlers, Native Americans, and the U. S. Cavalry. From the mixture emerged the legend of the Old West that engendered decades of western fiction and film. By the end of the century, however, the West was no longer wild. Second, 8 to 10 million Americans moved from rural to urban areas as the United States changed from an agrarian to an industrial nation. Whereas 20 percent of Americans lived in cities in 1860, over 40 percent lived in cities in 1900. In the industrial centers of the East, the high number of native and immigrant workers led to the formation of something new: a working class in the European sense. Meanwhile, the operations of the robber barons, after gaining headway during Ulysses S. Grant's administration (1869 -- 1877), grew in magnitude. The gap between rich and poor widened, working conditions were mostly unregulated, and a series of panic and depression, beginning in 1873, increased the burdens and the discontent of the poor.
Although the United States had become the world's richest nation and greatest industrial power by 1900, serious questions remained about the quality of American life. In 1890, the richest 9 percent of the population possessed 71 percent of all wealth. Unsafe working conditions, strict work discipline, and periodic cycles of high unemployment led workers to organize. Efforts to improve living conditions in the cities included attempts to eliminate political corruption. Reform-minded governors introduced elements of direct democracy, such as primary elections; many state governments enacted economic and social legislation, such as laws regulating wages, hours, and working conditions, especially for women and children. National progressivism was evident in the administrations of both Theodore Roosevelt (1901 -- 1909) and Woodrow Wilson (1913 -- 1921). Under Roosevelt a Meat Inspection Act and a Pure Food and Drug Act provided limited federal regulation of corrupt industrial practices. Wilson was responsible for the creation of a graduated federal income tax and a Federal Reserve System, which permitted the federal government to play a role in economic decisions formerly made by bankers.
From Romanticism to Realism
The wrenching actualities of the Civil War and the changing demographics from industrialization necessitated a change in the perspectives of American poets, and they steadily moved from a romantic aesthetics toward a realistic treatment of subject and form. Their realistic stance marked their works as products of a different world from that of the romantics. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, realistic exploration became naturalistic examination that recaptured some of the symbolic effect of Edgar Allen Poe.
The older voices did not remain silent. Poe, who had died in 1849, continued to grow in popularity; Ralph Waldo Emerson, still alive and productive, continued to exert influence. Three romantic poets--Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Sidney Lanier--were also realists. Their poems contain characteristics of both movements. The source of Whitman's vision of America was the idealism of the past: the individualism of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, the rise of the common man during Old Hickory's presidency (1829 -- 1837), the intuitional faith of Emerson, and the humanitarianism of transcendentalism. But Whitman expressed such idealism via a revolutionary form. His interest in psychology and science led to the transfiguration of disagreeable subjects, and no other realist explored more keenly than he the ordinary object or the lowly person. Emily Dickinson was a product of colonial and puritanical Amherst, where she inherited the rhythm of balladry, the form of Protestant hymns, and the tradition of romantic nature poetry. But the realistic details, the psychological explorations, and the affective expression are the reasons later poets regarded her work as modern. Sidney Lanier, a Georgia regionalist, infused his romantic nature poetry with the southern economics of corn and cotton, with incisive criticism of the abuses of the industrial and mercantile systems, and with a realistic sense of the complexities of individual responsibility.
Lanier
Sidney Lanier's poetry represents the end of romanticism in the United States. Lanier pursued a career in both music and literature after service in the Confederate army and confinement in the federal prison at Point Lookout, Maryland, where he was infected with the tubercle bacillus. His first published work was a novel, Tiger-Lilies (1867), the basis of which was his experience in the Civil War. Though Lanier constantly devoted himself to poetic composition, it was not until the opportune publication of "Corn" and "The Symphony" in Lippincott's in 1875 that he received recognition. The former concerns the plight of penniless Southern farmers; the latter condemns the negative effects of commercialism. In his cantata, The Centennial Meditation of Columbia, 1776--1876, he attempts to resolve the rhythms of music and poetry. Although the cantata was received well at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, when it was published without Dudley Buck's music, critics harshly judged it. Like Whitman, Lanier discovered that the majority of readers, accustomed to traditional meters, were deaf to the rhythms he introduced in such poems as "The Symphony" and "The Marshes of Glynn" (1878).
"The Marshes of Glynn" is an orchestral improvisation. The basis of the time, or meter, is the isochronal phrase in which the initial syllable of each line bears a stress. Lanier proposed in The Science of English Verse (1880) that the distance between stressed syllables is constant regardless of the number of syllables between them. The reader either will lengthen or shorten the unstressed syllables between stresses to keep the intervals isochronous--that is, equal in duration.
Affable live-oak, leaning low,--
Thus--with your favor--soft, with a reverent hand,
(Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!)
Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand
On the firm-packed sand,
Free
By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.
Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band
Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds
of the land.
Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines
linger and curl
As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows the firm
sweet limbs of a girl.
Vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight,
Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray looping of light.
And what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stand high?
The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!
A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,
Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,
Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,
to the terminal blue of the main.
Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes
of Glynn.1 (42 -- 64)
Although the musicality of his language--through alliteration, assonance, end rhyme, and internal rhyme--is intense, the metaphorical descriptions of the forests and marshes in Glynn County, which is in the southeastern corner of Georgia, and of the spiritual mood produced by those forests and marshes lighten or soften the timbre. "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise" celebrate the transition of the individual from a material to a spiritual state. "Sunrise," which Lanier composed on his deathbed, symbolizes the end of the romantic movement in the United States.
Realism (1870 -- 1936)
From the end of the Civil War until the late 1880's, poets struggling to find their voices were entangled in the idealism of the previous period and the expectations of a new age. As interim poets they combined the qualities of romanticism and realism. They depicted in dialects common people, identified those subjects with their surroundings, and achieved some psychological insight. But they also tended toward exaggeration, sentimentalization and didacticism. But from an interest in regions grew an awareness of commonality. From particulars of place, poets began to generalize characteristics of American culture, and realism became a deliberate rejection of romanticism. Poets continued to focus on ordinary people in actual settings, but they avoided inflated and emotional language by combining close observation with precise description. Their interest in everyday life led to examinations of social norms, but even then the realists tried not to preach, allowing their subjects to speak for themselves.
Robinson
Edwin Arlington (E. A.) Robinson may be the only major American poet who has treated human beings as the sole matter of poetry. It was through people that Robinson glimpsed the universal condition--the psychological, motivational aspects of behavior. His poems are dramatic narratives that force the audience to engage in speculation, for in any representative poem there are as many truths as there are auditors, which is remarkable considering each poem involves a single view and a single personality. Robinson's poetry reveals a compulsion to comprehend experience even when it is incomprehensible. As the following poem--"Miniver Cheevy" (1910)--illustrates, his characters are unable to endure themselves or to resolve their thoughts:
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam's neighbors.
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the medieval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.2
The bareness of Robinson's verse, the absence of distinct images is conspicuous. Much of his imagery is intellectual and scholarly. Usually the characters in a poem--especially in a narrative poem--are set in a distinguishable place, but there is little description of the outside world in this and other poems. Any externalities are diluted quickly by the anguished introversion of his characters.
The tone of the narrator's voice is distinctive. Although the subjects and forms of Robinson's poems vary, the tone of a single voice unifies his poetry. Whether the narrator is ironic, bitter, self-mocking, gentle or humorous, there is always an undertone of compassion sans sentimentality. Robinson is able to exhibit and shift the tone of his narrators through lineation. Declarative sentences do most of the work. But at those places he breaks the sentences are where changes in meaning occur, the whole poem shifting slightly yet clearly with each break.
Robinson's poetry exhibits variance. The works of his second period (1912 -- 1927) are in a particular blank verse suitable to lengthy narration, natural dialogue, dramatic effects, and philosophic discussion. The Arthurian poems--Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), Tristram (1927)--are faithful to the sources. But Robinson contemporizes the characters and uses his wit to draw parallels between the chaos of Arthur's world and the condition of society at the time of composition.
In his third period, Robinson composed several long narratives about modern life. Cavender's House (1929), The Glory of the Nightingales (1930), and Matthias at the Door (1931) are psychological studies on the nature of guilt or fidelity and the desire for power or possession. They are the climax of his criticism of modern life. In them Robinson subtly incorporates the symbols of light, darkness, regeneration and responsibility that are predominant in his poetry from The Children of the Night (1897) to Tristram, in which they reach their highest tragic synthesis.
Frost
Robert Frost, like his modernist contemporaries, discerned the increasing gravity and precariousness of the human predicament--the decline of religious belief and metaphysical certitude and the subversion of Enlightenment rationalism and of romantic intuition which left the unprotected individual at risk in an indifferent universe and in an increasingly violent world--but his strongly regional conservatism compelled him to reject the formal experimentation that propelled modernism internationally.
In 1900, with his grandfather's assistance, Frost purchased a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. He supported his wife and four children by a combination of farming and teaching, but they sold the farm in 1912 and relocated to England at the time of the Georgian movement. There Frost learned from Thomas Hardy's pastoral, regional verse and Edward Thomas' insightful criticism. A Boy's Will (1913) was hailed in England as a work of genuine merit; it was followed in 1914 by North of Boston; both were republished in the United States within the year. In 1915, the Frosts settled again on a New Hampshire farm, near Franconia, which induced the title of Mountain Interval (1916). Selected Poems (1923) preceded New Hampshire (1923), which won the Pulitzer Prize. An anecdotal discussion of the values of life and character imbued with regional examples, New Hampshire is one of Frost's longest and wittiest poems. In 1928, he published West-Running Brook; its title poem is a complex masterpiece. Collected Poems initially appeared in 1930 and earned him his second Pulitzer Prize. A Further Range (1936) also yielded the Pulitzer Prize.
Few major poets have exhibited such consistency as Frost. He captures the audience's attention as much by the trustworthiness of his poetic persona as by the appropriateness of his diction and forms. The subjects and the words of Frost's poems are interdependent, are authentic to the degree that he was able to adapt, more successfully than William Wordsworth, everyday speech to create an impression of naturalness. Frost rejected free verse and argued that traditional forms permit the clear expression and comprehension of ideas. In other words, he was a contrapuntist. In the following poem--"Mending Wall" (1914)--he combines the variable tones and inflections of speech with the metrical pattern of blank verse:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-gound-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying.
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."3
Frost employs declarative sentences to create a distinctive rhythm, for such units, according to him, contain abstract sounds that help communicate meaning. Furthermore, iambs mimic the natural rhythms of speech better than other feet. But the rhythms of speech are irregular, and meter, especially accentual-syllabic meter, is orderly, so Frost sets in direct opposition variable sentences against iambic lines.
Apart from his talent for public reading, Frost's popularity arose from his ability to convey seemingly simple ideas via common language and familiar images. His descriptive meditations contain contrasts: lightness and darkness, hope and doom. (In "Mending Wall" the structure symbolizes the division between the primitive and civilized.) In some poems the darkness or doom is apparent; in other poems it is concealed. Although Frost's vision of humanity is relatively optimistic, humanity is not innocent. He disagreed with Emerson's blindness to evil and insisted that an enduring dualism is the dialectic of man and nature. His New England pastorals--"Home Burial" (1914), "For Once, Then, Something" (1923), "West-Running Brook" (1928), "Design" (1936), "Directive" (1947)--test the premises of Puritanism and transcendentalism without drawing conclusions. In other poems Frost affirms an individualism restrained by innate principles, an echo of early transcendentalism. He avoids didacticism while seeking truths inherent in humans and nature.
A peculiar feature of Frost's work is the position from which his poetic persona observes or considers humans and nature. Woods symbolize the unexplored portion within oneself and may contain lightness and/or darkness, hope and/or doom. But one does not enter the woods, except in dreams, out of fear or morality. Whereas Poe courageously enters the inner wilderness, Frost contentedly stops at the edge of the woods. He also does not follow Whitman to a height that allows a panorama of society and nature. Thus, Frost is a poet neither of the woods nor of the mountains; rather, he is a poet of the pastures, the intervals.
In "Come In" (1942), for example, the speaker, narrating in the past tense, presents himself as having arrived at a place of boundaries--between forest and field, night and day, earth and sky. He heard a thrush's song through the darkening trees and felt the draw of sorrow. But he decided to ignore the invitation and to gaze at the stars.
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music--hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went--
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
Bu no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.4
The poem concerns mood rather than description, although the entire poem, excepting the penultimate and ultimate lines, is a sketch of a scene. Frost never exclusively presents a scene; he always converts his imagery into a second subject. In "Come In" the imagery--forest, song, shades, stars--becomes symbolic by way of the narrator's reflective activity. As we proceed from quatrain to quatrain, the poem's symbolic structure begins to materialize: the speaker paused between open field and enclosed forest, it was twilight, the narrator hesitated between going inside or staying outside. The speaker was not outdoors merely for a pleasant stroll. The penultimate stanza reveals the symbolic significance of the narrator's representation of the landscape: he was resisting the temptation of despair. The entire scene and the speaker's response to it become symbolic of his inner struggle, which is the poem's true theme. Scene and response are the vehicle of and inner struggle is the tenor of the fundamental metaphor which is the poem.
Most of the langauge of "Come In" is literal, but in the third stanza, "the light of the sun" is personified as having "died in the west," though it "Still lived for one song more / In a thrush's breast." That figure is enfolded within another and more important figure: the narrator identified the dying sunlight with the thrush's song. The thrush is singing, in other words, of the death of the day. Those associations are reinforced by the imagery of extremity which permeates the poem: "edge of the woods," "Too dark," "The last of the light," "one song more," "Far in the pillared dark." The mood is of desperation. But in the ultimate stanza, the speaker admits he realized the whole was a projection of his own despair. Whereas the first two lines refer to the vehicle (response and scene), the last two lines lead us out of the symbolic structure the narrator has persuaded us to build, the same one he himself built.
Ransom
Robert Frost and John Crowe Ransom admired each other's work and agreed that form is necessary to restrain the voice's modulations. Ransom maintained that poets and poetry need the freedom and permanence of metrical form especially in a century of free verse and modernism. During a period of war and dissolution, he emphasized love, honor, tradition and order; in an era of doubt and abstraction, he advocated intellectual intensity and clarity. Briefly, Ransom's poetic forms and his fundamental attitudes reflect his interest in tradition. Contrastingly, the characteristics of his mature poetry--ambiguous diction, subtle irony, metaphysical conceit, detached tone--are modern.
Ransom's conservative metrical theories stemmed from his distaste for the sentimentality of the romantic poets and from his fear of the enervative effects of science on the perceptive ability of humans. Versification, according to him, is a way to explore ideas and sounds that one would ignore in the rush to express oneself. It is a necessary discipline that prevents the poet's subjectivity from affecting the objects of his/her poem and the process of communication. One could argue that the following poem, "The Equilibrists" (1925), is not only about the love between a man and a woman, but also about the love that must mediate between the poet and his/her poem or between the idea and the form.
Full of her long white arms and milky skin
He had a thousand times remembered sin.
Alone in the press of people traveled he,
Minding her jacinth, and myrrh, and ivory.
Mouth he remembered: the quaint orifice
From which came heat that flamed upon the kiss,
Till cold words came down spiral from the head.
Grey doves from the officious tower illsped.
Body: it was a white field ready for love,
On her body's field, with the gaunt tower above,
The lilies grew, beseeching him to take,
If he would pluck and wear them, bruise and break.
Eyes talking: Never mind the cruel words,
Embrace my flowers, but not embrace the swords.
But what they said, the doves came straightway flying
And unsaid: Honor, Honor, they came crying.
Importunate her doves. Too pure, too wise,
Clambering on his shoulder, saying, Arise,
Leave me now, and never let us meet,
Eternal distance now command thy fleet.
Predicament indeed, which thus discovers
Honor among thieves, Honor between lovers.
O such a little word is Honor, they feel!
But the grey word is between them cold as steel.
At length I saw these lovers fully were come
Into their torture of equilibrium;
Dreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet
They were bound each to each, and they did not forget.
And rigid as two painful stars, and twirled
About the clustered night their prison world,
They burned with fierce love always to come near,
But honor beat them back and kept them clear
Ah, the strict lovers, they are ruined now!
I cried in anger. But with puddled brow
Devising for those gibbeted and brave
Came I descanting: Man, what would you have?
For spin your period out, and draw your breath,
A kinder saeculum begins with Death.
Would you ascend to Heaven and bodiless dwell?
Or take your bodies honorless to Hell?
In Heaven you have heard no marriage is,
No white flesh tinder to your lecheries,
Your male and female tissue sweetly shaped
Sublimed away, and furious blood escaped.
Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones
Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;
Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,
The pieces kiss again, no end to this.
But still I watched them spinning, orbited nice.
Their flames were not more radiant than their ice.
I dug in the quiet earth and wrought the tomb
And made these lines to memorize their doom:--
EPITAPH
Equilibrists lie here; stranger, tread light;
Close, but untouching in each other's sight;
Mouldered the lips arid ashy the tall skull.
Let them lie perilous and beautiful.5
Ransom's principal concern is the destruction of the civilized attitude of respect and love by the predatory approach of conquest and control, and he explores the subject via women and sexuality, creating lovers whose inhibitions keep them apart. Without some comprehension of the central metaphor in "The Equilibrists," one likely will miss the significance of the observer's attitude. The male lover's predatory temperament may be characteristic of cultures, may be a fundamental metaphysical principle. Extending his metaphor further, one discerns the sexual union, even in wedlock, is rape unless it is accomplished with the restraint and humility that are the traits of a gentleman. Similarly, when creating art, acquiring knowledge, and building civilizations, the pursuer must approach each act with respect and love.
In many of his poems, Ransom contrasts the body (passion, grief) with the head (intellect, honor). In "The Equilibrists" he balances the two parts, represented as love and honor, by means of a metaphysical conceit: twin stars that revolve around each other. Neither love nor honor is relinquished or diminished; though the lover desires the lady, he is reluctant to seize her. Because his restraint is as strong as his lust, a precarious equilibrium, a dance, occurs. The obligation to maintain the lady's inviolability and the concomitant urge to engage in sexual intercourse bring the lovers to an orbit that checks the polarities.
Initially the observer proposes alternatives, heaven (honor) or hell (passion), but the observer eventually perceives that the lovers are in a pleasant balance. The observer respects their condition and memorializes them with a tomb and a quatrain. The reader must be careful lest he/she disturb the susceptible equilibrium and combine the elements that should remain asunder.
The ultimate stanza implies the lovers' achievement is historical; their feat must be remembered and rendered. Ransom is suggesting, as he does in many other poems, that the act of composition gives form and permanence to principles, and he is suggesting that the act of balancing reality (norms) and myth (ideals) is difficult. Ransom's ability to anthropomorphize principles--that is, to embody values in concrete figures--is unique. The male, whose lust could debase and destroy the desirable object, is the norm, and the female, who demands and deserves respect, is the ideal.
Poetic composition, as Ransom conceived it, requires a respectful attitude toward nature, toward life, and his poems intimate an attitude that is simultaneously reverential and indifferent, a dichotomy he never synthesized but controlled via form. His goals as a poet were to experience reality, to allow those experiences to yield general principles, and to depict truly the deterioration of those values. Ransom quickly achieved his goals. After Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927), he devoted himself chiefly to teaching and advocating the New Criticism.
Naturalism (1890 -- 1914)
The work of the American realists was affirmed and strengthened by the popularity of European realists--William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert--near the end of the nineteenth century. The European realists reinforced the concept of pessimistic determinism that steadily spread in the 1890's, when naturalism became full-blown in the United States. The naturalists used the realistic movement as the basis to establish patterns that would influence modernistic literature.
Strict naturalism in the European sense did not flourish immediately in a country whose citizens understood that political remedies for social injustice were available, though the remedies sometimes were opposed or postponed. When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, Whitman was able to regard the work as verification of an idealistic belief in human progress. After 1880, however, religious doubt, moral instability, and social unrest began to predominate in American culture.
Before Darwin's theory most people believed the world had been operating via a divine plan. But his theory does not appeal to divine ends. Evolution occurs by chance variation. Whereas the utility of a trait sometimes accounts for its survival, it does not explain the trait's initial appearance.
Another influential idea of nineteenth-century science, mechanistic determinism, reinforced Darwin's theory. Determinism postulates that everything in the universe is governed by causal laws. Accordingly, every event has a prior condition, and all events are predictable if all the prior conditions are known. As social scientists proposed causal explanations about human decisions and conduct, many people started to think of humans as animals or machines, and they adopted the same scientific approach toward all of them, viewing behavior as events that occur in an orderly way. If choices and actions are causally determined, then only one course of action can occur: the one which will be the effect of the previous causes that are occurring in the situation. In other words, the act that a person ultimately chooses is inevitable; the person cannot act in another way. That means freedom and moral responsibility are illusions.
A third nineteenth-century movement--Herbert Spencer's individualism, which is sometimes called social Darwinism--asserts that unchecked competition between individuals is nature's way of improving the species. Poverty and suffering are natural ways of eliminating the unfit. Charity and compassion, unless controlled, are social threats because they artificially preserve those who are least able to maintain themselves. Responsibility, while perhaps suitable for personal relations or for public administration, is not suitable for business. Laissez-faire economists such as William Graham Sumner and industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie were followers of Spencer, but many others watched the industrial masses, poverty-stricken in a time of abundance, and wondered whether the movement was ethical.
From such disturbances the first American naturalistic writers emerged, but they were not merely the products of philosophy. They were impressed by the literary power of European naturalists--the novelists Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emile Zola, and Leo Tolstoy; the poets Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling--and by the value of empirical descriptions of experience in effecting realistic portrayals of life.
Crane
Among the avant-garde writers of the 1890's, Stephen Crane was the harbinger of the twentieth-century revolution in literature. Even more than Frank Norris, E. A. Robinson, Hamlin Garland, or Theodore Dreiser--his contemporaries--he broke literary tradition with respect to theme, style and voice. It was Crane's nature to be experimental. When he was twenty years old, Crane wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), the first wholly naturalistic novel produced in the United States. Although Maggie is not a great book, its portrayal of brutality and degradation in New York's slums was unique at the time of its creation. By the age of twenty-four, Crane had produced, in short stories and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), the first examples of modern American impressionism. Written by a man who had no combat experience, The Red Badge of Courage depicts the actualities of war, specifically the Battle of Chancellorsville. That year, 1895, Crane became the first writer to respond publicly to Dickinson's innovative poetry. The Black Riders and Other Lines is a volume of imagist impressionism that was twenty years ahead of the movement. And before he reached his twenty-ninth birthday, Crane had died, leaving enough work to fill twenty volumes in a collected edition.
Crane accepted the naturalistic idea that the destiny of a human, similar to the biological fate of an animal, is determined by agents beyond the control of the individual's will. Considering determinism offers no rationale for optimism, one would expect his themes to be pessimistic. They are. In The Black Riders the world is a rudderless ship set adrift by a spiteful and neglectful God. Institutional religion has devoted itself to the material world and has turned life's simple pleasures into sins. Conventional morality is a sham; truth and wisdom are illusions. Crane establishes the atmosphere and introduces his style in the first poem of the volume:
Black Riders came from the sea.
There was clang and clang of spear and shield,
The clash and clash of hoof and heel,
Wild shouts and the wave of hair
In the rush upon the wind:
Thus the ride of sin.6
The volume, the poem starts with a symbol that he employs to steer the reader's emotional response. The juxtaposition of the absence of light and the horsemen implies a warning similar to the inscription at the entrance to Hell: "Abandon all hope, you who enter here."7 (III.9) Crane's use of color reflects an adherence to the objective method by which the French naturalists, or impressionists, achieved a correspondence between their perceptions and reality. He believed that if he realistically portrayed events, they would impart their own emotional energy without sentimentalization, moralization or interpretation. Frequently detached and nonjudgmental, the impressionists regarded their subjects as opportunities to depict optical sensations. They perceived figures and objects as agents for the absorption and reflection of light. Because there are no sharp edges, no fine lines, in nature, the impressionists implied form and space by way of infinitely various intensities of color and light.
Crane's color schemes are suitable for allegories, and many of his poems are such. To construct an allegory, he outlines a situation in which there is a tension between two oppositional forces. He removes from the narrative all the details of the conflict that would restrict his description only to the particular situation. The result is a dynamic and universal representation of conflict. Because he does not name or describe his figures, because he sets them in opposition to elemental forces, because he figuratively depicts their ambitions and predicaments, Crane is able to offer imaginary representations of the real world.
Crane's allegoric poems are similar to his symbolistic poems; the difference between them is structural. The allegoric poems begin with a tenor (a subject), and a vehicle (a metaphorical term) is correlated with it. The symbolistic poems begin with a vehicle ("Black Riders," for example), and a tenor ("sin," for example) is revealed or suggested by Crane or effected by the audience. The basis of the connection between vehicle and tenor in "Black Riders" is narrative development, whereby one thing (the horsemen) becomes associated with another (violence). In his more structurally complex poems, Crane--similar to the Symbolists Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine--forces his audience to suppose the significance of the thoughts and emotions which his poems gradually reveal. But whereas a Symbolist poem has manifold meanings, a Crane poem has a certain meaning, though it may be complicated. His symbols are not metaphors detached from his subjects; rather, the relation of his metaphors to their subjects must be inferred.
To the extent that Crane's symbols have certain though implied meanings, they are closer to the objective correlative described by T. S. Eliot than they are to the symbols of Symbolism or to the images of Imagism.8 Crane resembles the Imagists in three respects: in clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail; in economy of language and brevity of treatment; and in organic development of rhythm. But he differs from the Imagists in a major respect. An Imagistic poem presents a captured moment of experience in a static manner that evokes an intellectual and emotional awareness of something outside the poem. But nearly all of Crane's imagistic poems are themselves in motion, having plots as his allegories have plots. Even with their central metaphors, the poems force attention inward upon themselves, not outward to extrinsic associations.
War Is Kind, published four years after Black Riders, is less allegorical and more stylistically mature. Crane's experience as a war correspondent during the interim obviously influenced him. He augments some of the earlier themes and enlarges the scope of his perceptions and thoughts. One new motif is the sea, which is the basis of three complete poems; another is a realistic awareness of social conflict.
Many critics have been classifying Crane's poems as free verse. Contemporary reviewers recognized definite affiliations with Whitman and Dickinson, both of whom in the nineties represented stylistic innovation and unconventional effect. After the publication of The Black Riders, however, he no longer rebelled against such conventions as stanzas and refrains. In his long poems, Crane frequently combines a fixed stanzaic structure with an allusive central metaphor. "Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War Is Kind" is perhaps Crane's most structurally complex poem, exhibiting numerous poetic techniques many associate with conventional verse: imagery, stanza, metaphor, irony, parallelism, refrain.
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom--
A field where a thousand corpses lie.
Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.9
In Crane's indifferent universe, because there is neither an almighty ruler nor a supreme order, there is conflict, leading to wars. Appeals to god, no longer an omnipotent being, prove inadequate; by the time god answers, the armies are in battle. Even god's supposed endorsement is secondary to the main engines of war: tradition and patriotism. Tragically, the combative instinct is part of humanity's genotype. War produces praiseworthy conduct, and it produces horror. "War Is Kind" celebrates duty as it emphasizes pain--the densely ironic stanzas supporting the grief of the wife, child and mother.
Crane's intense interest in war spanned his creative career. The wonder of war, the thrill of combat, and the toil of battle are subjects of his short stories, novels, and news dispatches. Nearly two dozen of Crane's poems are about war; war's glamour and its senselessness, for instance, are important themes in both volumes.
Although Crane's poems are limited in range, they fully explore his psyche. To appreciate his poetry, one must understand that his intent and manner differ from most other poets' intent and manner. Crane's poems are personal, expressing his sense of fate, his sense of isolation. Only Poe approached Crane's desolate outpost from which he views and elicits a universe in which force is law, love is doom, God is indifferent, humanity's fate is misery, hope is courage, and courage is self-sacrifice. Behind the hope and despair there is a voice, a human presence. Crane's true voice is characterized by humility, kindness, determination, and a belief in a symbolic truth that is elusive yet real. Crane's false voice is characterized by pride, dogmatism, aggressiveness, and an insistence on a literal truth. He often affirms the first voice, and he always mocks the second voice. Crane's true voice frees us to participate in his imaginative experience and to contemplate a part of ourselves.
Conclusion
There is no gap among the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary movements in the United States. Victorian principles lingered as genteel customs until World War I. The roots of the modern temperament, which produced a twentieth-century renaissance, were in the intellectual activities of the previous century. One strand of modernism can be traced to the optimistic voice of Whitman; another strand can be traced to the realistic movement, with its emphasis on character, psychology and objectivism; and another can be traced to the uncertainties that germinated naturalism. Between 1865 and 1915, the nation which Abraham Lincoln had envisioned as strong and unified became an actuality. But as the social problems of the country grew proportionately with its industrial and economic development, many people began to raise grave questions about the quality of American life.
For those who regarded the moral apathy with displeasure, realism helped to neutralize their discomfort. Because the romantics treated reality as a single, harmonious moral order and ignored empirical methods and evolution itself, the realists believed their idealistic approach did not effectively deal with the problems of the age. Instead, the realists denied there are clear-cut distinctions between matter and mind, science and morals, experience and reason. They examined human ideas and ideals from biological and social points of view, treated them as instruments for apprehending experience, and judged them in relation to their contexts. An idea's or ideal's capacity to solve a problem, not its connection to some transcendent or ultimate reality, determined its value. Rather than describing an imaginary world, the realists depicted ordinary people in actual settings. The social problems, although lamentable, were inspirational, inciting realists to attempt to solve them.
As the social problems worsened in the late nineteenth century, writers became less optimistic about the future of the United States. Similar to the realists, the naturalists believed that physical objects exist independently of perception and that literature should portray objects, actions, and social conditions as they actually are. Furthermore, writers could contribute to an objective understanding of the world by addressing social problems. But the naturalists were pessimistic. They doubted the existence of free will and depicted subjects caught in forces beyond their control, their actions determined by heredity and environment. Whereas realism is an attempt to reproduce faithfully ordinary life, in which unexceptional people undergo everyday experiences, naturalism, being a kind of realism, is an attempt to reproduce faithfully a section of existence, in which ignoble people deal with the more severe or disagreeable aspects of reality.
It is important to note that several features of the realistic movement continue to exert influence on poetics: insistence on analytic observation of a subject and a determination to portray it exactly, without subjective intrusions; emphasis on psychological reality and an enlargement of the poet's selection of themes, ideas that might have been rejected as commonplace or sordid; recognition of the indeterminate nature of truth and the creation of a voice that is often incapable of expressing fully what it perceives; and indication of the importance of literary effort by stressing the poet's social function as interpreter and critic of life.
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1Academy of American Poets, "The Marshes of Glynn," Poets.org, 2013, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16813 (3 October 2013).
2Edwin Arlington Robinson, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Faggen (New York: Penguin, 1997) 67 - 68.
3Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1979) 33.
4Ibid., 334.
5John Crowe Ransom, Selected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1991) 85.
6J. C. Levenson, ed., Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1996) 1299.
7Robert Hollander, "Inferno," Princeton Dante Project, 1998, http://www.etcweb.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/dante/campuscgi/mpb/GetCantoSection.pl?INP_Poem=Inf&INP_SECT=1&INP-Start=1&INP_LEN=15&LANG=2 (7 October 2013).
8Eliot's aesthetic--a poem must evoke emotion only by the representation of sensory experience--actually was conventional in the nineteenth century.
9J. C. Levenson, ed., Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1996) 1325.
