New England Poets

Of the six New England poets, five lived within thirty miles of Boston. William Cullen Bryant moved away to New York when he was twenty-nine. Emerson, Holmes, Whittier, and Longfellow were contemporaries. Bryant was ten years older than the others, Thoreau ten years younger. They were friends, and their literary friends had literary friends, all writing for publication. When California novelist Bret Harte visited Boston in 1871, he observed that “it is impossible to fire a revolver [in this city] without bringing down the author of a two-volume work.”

That so much poetry should burst into bloom in the same city, in the same decade, after a hundred years of American silence, is a mystery. Boston was a wealthy manufacturing center, a world-class shipbuilder, the nation’s financial hub, and home of several major colleges and universities. It was also the liberal fomenter of America’s anti-slavery sentiment, and of its transcendentalist philosophy. All of this activity was recorded and to some extent stimulated by The Atlantic Monthly, a literary and cultural affairs magazine started in the 1870s by Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

New England poetry took its forms from England. Long narrative poems by Longfellow and Whittier echoed Tennyson. The introspective poems of Emerson sounded at times like Browning. But in one important aspect, the New England poets were different. They lacked the emotional range and artistic heights of Thomas Hardy or Gerard Manley Hopkins but offered instead sober, hard-working verse, socially conscious, sentimental, and didactic.

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns