Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 205Like Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) chose to identify with a
particular group. More modest and pragmatic in his aims and intentions, however,
he defined and delimited that group quite closely: the men and women of sense and
taste with whom he came into contact as a distinguished member of Boston society.
Holmes is to be seen at his best in his most famous work, The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Ta b l e. First published in Atlantic Monthly in 1857–1858 and in book form in 1858,
this consists of essays, poems, and occasional pieces in the form of table talk in a
Boston boarding house. The wit, good sense, and moral rigor that characterizes
this and later volumes such as The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1860) and The Poet
at the Breakfast Table (1872) is also to be found, in miniature, in poems like
“The Chambered Nautilus” (1858), with its famous concluding instruction to
the poet’s soul to “build thee more stately mansions,” and “The Last Leaf ” (1836).
In the latter poem, Holmes manages to keep a fine balance between sympathy and
amusement while describing a decrepit old man, who “totters o’er the ground / With
his cane.” The point of equilibrium is supplied by common sense, which prevents
Holmes from becoming either cruel or sentimental. It prevents him, too, from
meditating on the larger implications of this emblem of old age or even from
analyzing the reasons for his refusal to meditate. The most Holmes will say is that
he hopes people will smile in as kindly and detached a way on him when he is old:
“Let them smile, as I do now, / At the old forsaken bough / Where I cling.” It is a
conclusion as just and sensible as it is deliberately limited and limiting.
Whereas Holmes opted for a community consisting of men of sense, however
small it might have to be, a contemporary and neighbor of his chose a spiritual
isolation which some of his acquaintances interpreted as madness. Jones Very
(1813–1880) was a lay preacher given to mystical experiences. As a youth, he had
been forced to withdraw from Harvard after experiencing a religious frenzy; and
throughout his life he had visions which convinced him that his will and God’s will
were one. The conviction might have turned him into a fanatic or a bigot. Instead,
it enabled him to write poetry which, though neglected during his lifetime, some later
critics were to call great. It is, certainly, unique. The means of expression is traditional –
Very rarely used anything other than the sonnet form – but this belies a poetic stance
that is profoundly individualistic. In one of his poems, for instance, ordinary people
in the street are transformed into “The Dead” (1839), whose grotesque and lurid
shapes are an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual poverty. In
another, “Thy Brother’s Blood” (1839), Very claims to see, with the aid of his
“spiritgaze,” his “brother’s blood” on the hand of each man he meets: the blood,
that is, of guilt and damnation. Very in effect adopts the innocent and often savage
eye of the outsider, ignoring the masks people may use to evade self-knowledge. He
has no connection with the world he observes and exposes, and in a sense no
audience either. For as the poem “Yourself” (1839) makes clear, Very did not expect
his revelations of his inner being and his secret pact with God to be properly
understood by those around him. “He who speaks, or him who’s spoken to, /” the
poem concludes, “Must both remain as strangers still to you.” This is poetry that
circulates, with all due humility, around the secrecy of the inner life, the way thatGGray_c02.indd 205ray_c 02 .indd 205 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM