206 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865life is hidden from nearly every gaze apart from the divine – and those blessed with
some microscopic portion of divine sight.
Holmes addressing his companions at the breakfast table and Very watching the
antics of the “strangers” surrounding him is a contrast played out in a different key
by two other New England poets: James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) and Frederick
Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873). A member of one of the foremost families in
Boston, Lowell succeeded Longfellow as professor of French and Spanish as Harvard.
With Holmes, he co-founded Atlantic Monthly, editing it from 1857 to 1861; with
Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1898), an eminent scholar and translator, he later edited
The North American Review. His first volume of poetry, A Year’s Life, appeared in
1841, his second, Poems, three years later. Then, in a single year, 1848, he published
Poems: Second Series, A Fable for Critics, The Vision of Sir Launfal, and the first series
of The Biglow Papers. The Vision is a verse poem derived from the legends of the
Holy Grail. A Fable for Critics is a verse satire containing shrewd assessments of
the contemporary literary scene and its more notable figures. Ralph Waldo Emerson,
for instance, is said to have “A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range /
Has Olympus for one pole, for t’other the Exchange”; which neatly captures
Emerson’s peculiar blend of idealism and practicality. Edgar Allan Poe, in turn, is
said to be “three fifths ... genius and two fifths sheer fudge”; while, discoursing on
the state of American literature in general, the fictional critic talking to Phoebus
Apollo who is credited with these and other opinions, complains that, in general,
American writers “steal Englishmen’s books and think Englishmen’s thought.”
“Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, all things make new, / To your own New-
World instincts contrive to be true,” he tells these writers. “Keep your ears open wide
to the Future’s first call, / Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all.” It was a
command that Lowell himself sought to obey in his immensely popular Biglow
Papers, a series of satirical attacks on the slaveholders of the South and their political
representatives. Adopting the mask of Hosea Biglow, a crude but honest Yankee
farmer, Lowell attempted to fashion an authentically American voice – and to use
that voice to direct people into right ways of thinking. Like Holmes, Lowell had a
clear sense of his audience. Unlike Holmes, he saw this audience as a potentially
large one, which he could instruct and educate. The mission of creating an audience
and educating it was sustained in the second series of Biglow Papers. If the first series
had been written in opposition to the Mexican War – seen by many as simply a
means for the South to expand slavery into new territories – then the second was
produced in support of the North during the Civil War. But, although both series
were immensely popular, the mission Lowell had undertaken met, really, with only
partial success. It was perhaps symptomatic of his difficulties that Lowell felt obliged
to assume a rustic persona, in effect to “lower” himself so as to talk credibly to his
readers. And it was a further symptom of those difficulties that, in any event,
the voice of the Harvard professor, pointing the moral, kept breaking through the
accents of the farmer. Writing a poetry responsive to “New-World instincts,”
and creating an audience for that poetry, were not quite as easy as Lowell appears to
have believed. The public honors nevertheless accumulated for him, includingGGray_c02.indd 206ray_c 02 .indd 206 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM