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American Poetry in the eighteen-nineties William Vaughn Moody his early death a serious loss to literature George Santayana a master of the sonnet Robert Underwood Johnson his moral idealism Richard Burton his healthy optimism his growth Edwin Markham and his famous poem Ella Wheeler Wilcox her additions to our language Edmund Vance Cooke Edith M. Thomas Henry van Dyke George E. Woodberry his spiritual and ethereal quality William Dudley Foulke translator of Petrarch the late H. K. Vielé his whimsicality Cale Young Rice his prolific production his versatility Josephine P. Peabody Sursum Corda her child poems Edwin Arlington Robinson a forerunner of the modern advance his manliness and common sense intellectual qualities.
The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here, beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it from the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we lay under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first years of that decade.
When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for SOAMES, ENOCH. I had feared he would not be there. He was not there. But everybody else was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr. Holbrook Jackson's pages.
Their inability to take themselves with gaiety is what makes the young men of the Twentieth Century so hopelessly different from the young men of the Eighteen-Nineties.
There was no real literary public in the South for a native writer like Simms. He was as dependent upon New York and the Northern market as a Virginian tobacco-planter of 1740 had been upon London. But within a dozen years after the close of the War and culminating in the eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied harvest of Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction.
Born at Odessa, of German-Jewish descent, he studied in Germany and in the early eighteen-nineties attained prominence as a prolific and brilliant contributor to the German Socialist review, Die Neue Zeit.
Of the old leaders, Whitman, Whittier, and Holmes lived into the eighteen-nineties; and when, in 1894, the last leaf left the tree, we could not help wondering what the next Maytime would bring forth. Had William Vaughn Moody lived longer, it is probable that America would have had another major poet.
Possibly he owed this change in style to the influence of the London movement so interestingly described in Holbrook Jackson's "The Eighteen-Nineties." The book begins with abortion and ends with a drop over a ferry-boat into the icy East River. There is an averted strangulation of a baby and for the second time in a Saltus opus a dying millionaire leaves his fortune to the St. Nicholas Hospital.
It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the eighteen-nineties nearly out of sight, and yet it is Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most of, from the last of this period. Poles apart these two poets are, the one so austere and almost collegiate in adherence to convention, the other too warm to let a coldness obsess his singing.
After our years of wandering, years of hotels and rooms and lodgings, we had just settled in London in the first place we had ever called our own the old chambers in the old Buckingham Street house overlooking the river; I was doing more regular newspaper work than I had ever done before or ever hope to do again; we were in the Eighteen-Nineties, and I need neither the magnifying glasses through which age has the reputation of looking backward, nor the clever young men of to-day who write about that delectable decade and no doubt deplore my indiscretion in being alive to write about it myself, to show me how very much more amusing and interesting life was then than now.
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