American Romantics

America in the nineteenth century was expanding in all directions. Texas and California were annexed in 1845 and the Pacific Northwest in 1848, extending the boundaries of the new nation from coast to coast and as far north as the 49th parallel. Fifteen million immigrants arrived between 1815 and 1890, by which time one of every eight Americans was foreign born. In 1869, railroads completed their race to the Pacific, and the discovery of gold in California drew people west to opportunity, both real and imagined. Industrial production was booming. Tariffs kept foreign goods out of the market, and by the end of the century, Americans had health, wealth, and leisure time.

Much of that was devoted to self-education, culture, and entertainment. The Lyceum movement, unique to America, created an extraordinary platform for poets. By 1840 more than 5,000 towns in the Northeast and Midwest had established programs of speakers and singers, philosophers, preachers, and poets who toured and performed. Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne joined Frederick Douglass, Daniel Webster, Josh Billings, Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, and even young Abe Lincoln, traveling from town to town. Sometimes in ornate halls built for the purpose, sometimes in churches, barns, and tents, a program of lectures might cover steam engines, physiology, the human mind, friendship, and circulation of the blood, as well as recitations from Shakespeare and scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Early in the century, a night at the Lyceum meant four to six hours of lectures, poetry, and minstrel shows. Later the programs were simplified; the talent grew more professional, and the content more nationalistic. After the Civil War, the Lyceum program became the foundation for a nationwide system of public education which encouraged literacy, a rags-to-riches optimism, and a love of knowledge.

The Lyceum also became the most important way for a poet to earn his living. Beginning in 1833 and continuing for thirty years, Emerson gave as many as eighty lectures in a season, charging $50 or more for each one. Daniel Webster charged $100. Mark Twain charged $300. Henry Ward Beecher charged twelve bushels of potatoes.

Thoreau was on the circuit for twenty-three years, talking about Society, Walden, Walking, A Plea for Captain John Brown, or Sir Walter Raleigh, but he was not made for the public hall, and demand for him was slight. Toward the end of the century, narrative poems read by professionals were the greater draw. “Casey at the Bat” took five minutes four seconds and always brought down the house. James Whitcomb Riley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Vachel Lindsay at the turn of the century wrote poetry specifically for the stage. “Congo”, Lindsay’s finest poem—sadly unprintable today because of its racial stereotypes and epithets—was published with stage directions and notes for vocalization and tambourines. Edgar Allan Poe gave Lyceum lectures on European and American poetry hoping that the income might save him from financial ruin. (It did not.) People recited Walt Whitman’s verse from time to time, and talked about him as the “good gray poet”, but he did not appear himself. The man and his verse were not stage-ready.

American poetry became public poetry in a way that English poetry did not. Riley, Dunbar, and later Carl Sandburg spoke to and for the American heartland with simple verse, sentimental, and written for the working classes. They were not Romantic poets in the sense of Wordsworth or Byron, but to a greater extent than any of their English counterparts, they wrote about the nobility of the common man, which had been Rousseau’s original idea.

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns