Back American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Freneau to Whitman

American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Freneau to Whitman

Edited by John Hollander

“Capacious, comprehensive, wide-ranging, and judiciously fair, the Library of America anthology presents the great body of American poetry in the century of the Louisiana Purchase, the Alamo, the Civil War, the expansion of the western frontier, the gilded age and the age of innocence. All the major figures and minor prophets are represented, in proportions both ample and calculated to reflect degrees of greatness.” — The Washington Post

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents
Contributors

Overview

News Margaret Fuller’s Thanksgiving Day revelation
July 22, 2021

Audio | News Listen: “The Republic of Verse” now open to all who will hear
May 13, 2021

News Happy 200th birthday, Walt Whitman
May 31, 2019

Save $20 when you buy both volumes of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century in a deluxe boxed set.

In nineteenth-century America, poetry was part of everyday life, as familiar as a hymn, a love song, a patriotic exhortation. The two volumes of The Library of America’s American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century reveal the vigor and diversity of a tradition embracing solitary visionaries and congenial storytellers, humorists and dissidents, songwriters and philosophers. These extraordinary anthologies reassess America’s poetic legacy with a comprehensive sweep that no previous anthology has attempted.

Extending chronologically from the classic couplets of Philip Freneau to the pioneering free verse of Walt Whitman, this first volume charts the formation of a distinctly American poetry. Here, in generous selections, are the major figures: Poe, Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier—as well as such unexpected contributors as the landscape painter Thomas Cole, the actress Fanny Kemble, and the presidents John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln.

This collection offers the unique opportunity to appreciate anew such classics as Whittier’s “Snow-Bound,” Bryant’s “Forest Hymn,” and Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” while discovering a world of less familiar pleasures: the mystical sonnets of Jones Very, the Romantic fantasias of Maria Gowen Brooks, the whimsical meditations of Transcendentalist Christopher Pearse Cranch, the stirring political poems of Joel Barlow and John Pierpont, and the somber and undervalued late lyrics of Longfellow.

The range of the poems’ subject matter is equally extraordinary and suggests the wide-ranging interests and passions of a national culture in the making: the War of 1812 and Napolean’s retreat from Moscow, the horrors of slavery and the struggle for Greek independence, historical figures from Dante to Rubens to Daniel Webster and Red Jacket, Byzantine history and New England folklore, the landscapes of Italy and India, Florida, and Niagara Falls.

Woven among the poetry of the early nineteenth century is a wealth of popular ballads, recitations, and songs both secular and religious: “Home, Sweet Home,” “The Old Oaken Bucket,” “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” From Lydia Maria Child’s Thanksgiving poem (“Over the river and through the wood”) to George Pope Morris’s “The Oak” (“Woodman, spare that tree!”), these pages ring with the phrases that have become part of the national memory.

Unprecedented in its textual authority, the anthology includes newly researched biographical sketches of each poet, a year-by-year chronology of poets and poetry from 1800 to 1900, and extensive notes.

Distinguished poet and critic John Hollander (1929–2013), volume editor, was A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English at Yale University.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One is kept in print by a gift from the Ingram Merrill Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in memory of James Merrill.
News & Views

News Margaret Fuller’s Thanksgiving Day revelation
July 22, 2021

Audio | News Listen: “The Republic of Verse” now open to all who will hear
May 13, 2021

News Happy 200th birthday, Walt Whitman
May 31, 2019

Interviews Walt Whitman speaks!—embraces multitudes, and becomes our contemporary
May 31, 2019

News | Video Documentary project locates Walt Whitman’s “multitudes” in today’s Deep South
May 31, 2019
Table of Contents

PHILIP FRENEAU (1752–1832)
On the Civilization of the Western Aboriginal Country
On the Great Western Canal of the State of New York
To Mr. Blanchard, the Celebrated Aeronaut in America
On the Conflagrations at Washington

JOEL BARLOW (1754–1812)
from The Columbiad
Advice to a Raven in Russia

MANOAH BODMAN (1765–1850)
from An Oration on Death

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS (1767–1848)
The Wants of Man
To the Sun-Dial
To Sally

JAMES KIRKE PAULDING (1778–1860)
from The Backwoodsman

CLEMENT MOORE (1779–1863)
A Visit from St. Nicholas

FRANCIS SCOTT KEY (1779–1843)
Defence of Fort McHenry

WASHINGTON ALLSTON (1779–1843)
from The Sylphs of the Seasons
On a Falling Group in the Last Judgement of Michael Angelo, in the Cappella Sistina
On the Group of the Three Angels Before the Tent of Abraham, by Raffaelle, in the Vatican
On Seeing the Picture of Aeolus by Peligrino Tibaldi, in the Institute at Bologna
On Rembrant; Occasioned by His Picture of Jacob’s Dream
On the Luxembourg Gallery
To My Venerable Friend, the President of the Royal Academy
America to Great Britain
Coleridge
Art
On the Statue of an Angel, by Bienaimé, in the Possession of J. S. Copley Greene, Esq.
On Kean’s Hamlet
A Word: Man
On Michael Angelo
Rubens

JOHN PIERPONT (1785–1866)
from Airs of Palestine
from A Word from a Petitioner
The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star

SAMUEL WOODWORTH (1785–1842)
The Bucket

RICHARD HENRY DANA (1787–1879)
The Dying Raven
The Pleasure Boat
Daybreak
The Husband’s and Wife’s Grave
The Chanting Cherubs

RICHARD HENRY WILDE (1789–1847)
The Lament of the Captive
To the Mocking-Bird
from Hesperia

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK (1790–1867)
On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake
Alnwick Castle
Marco Bozzaris
Red Jacket
from Connecticut

JOHN HOWARD PAYNE (1791–1852)
Home, Sweet Home!

LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY (1791–1865)
Indian Names

JOHN NEAL (1793–1876)
from The Battle of Niagara

CARLOS WILCOX (1794–1827)
from The Age of Benevolence

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794–1878)
Thanatopsis
“I Cannot Forget With What Fervid Devotion”
To a Waterfowl
Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood
Green River
A Winter Piece
“Oh Fairest of the Rural Maids”
The Ages
The Rivulet
An Indian at the Burying-Place of His Fathers
After a Tempest
Autumn Woods
November
Forest Hymn
The Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus
October
The Damsel of Peru
To an American Painter Departing for Europe
To the Fringed Gentian
The Prairies
The Fountain
The Painted Cup
The Night Journey of a River
The Constellations
Dante

MARIA GOWEN BROOKS (1794?–1845)
from Zophiël, or the Bride of Seven: Canto the Third, Palace of the Gnomes
Composed at the Request of a Lady, and Descriptive of Her Feelings

JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE (1795–1820)
The Mocking-Bird
The National Painting
from The Culprit Fay
The American Flag
Niagara
To a Friend
Bronx

JAMES GATES PERCIVAL (1795–1856)
The Coral Grove

GEORGE MOSES HORTON (1798?–1883?)
On Liberty and Slavery
On Hearing of the Intention of a Gentleman to Purchase the Poet’s Freedom

SAMUEL HENRY DICKSON (1798–1872)
Song—Written at the North

A. BRONSON ALCOTT (1799–1888)
Sonnet XIV: “Not Wordsworth’s genius, Pestalozzi’s love”
Sonnet XVIII: “Adventurous mariner! in whose gray skiff”
Sonnet XIX: “Romancer, far more coy than that coy sex!”

THOMAS COLE (1801–1848)
“I saw a Cave of sable depth profound”
A Painter
Lines Suggested by Hearing Music on the Boston Common at Night
The Lament of the Forest
The Voyage of Life, Part 2nd
The Dial
Lago Maggiore

EDWARD COOTE PINKNEY (1802–1828)
Italy
The Voyager’s Song
To ……….
Serenade
A Health
On Parting
The Widow’s Song

GEORGE POPE MORRIS (1802–1864)
The Oak

LYDIA MARIA CHILD (1802–1880)
The New-England Boy’s Song About Thanksgiving Day

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882)
The Sphinx
Each and All
The Problem
To Rhea
The Visit
Uriel
The World-Soul
Mithridates
Hamatreya
The Rhodora
The Humble-Bee
The Snow-Storm
from Woodnotes II
from Monadnoc
Fable
Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing
Astrja
Compensation
Forerunners
Sursum Corda
Give All to Love
Eros
from Initial, Djmonic, and Celestial Love
Merlin I
Merlin II
Bacchus
Merops
Saadi
Xenophanes
The Day’s Ration
Blight
Musketaquid
Threnody
Hymn: Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument
Brahma
Freedom
Voluntaries
Days
Sea-Shore
Song of Nature
Two Rivers
Waldeinsamkeit
Terminus
Suum Cuique
Memory
The Harp
Grace
Mottoes from the Essays
Nature (1836)
Compensation
Spiritual Laws
History
Self-Reliance
Circles
Art
Experience
Nature (1844)
Nominalist and Realist
Fate
Wealth
Worship
Illusions
“Awed I behold once more”
“Dear brother, would you know the life”
“Who knows this or that”
Intellect
“The patient Pan”
Maia

SARAH HELEN WHITMAN (1803–1878)
To ——

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804–1864)
“I left my low and humble home”
“Oh could I raise the darken’d veil”
The Ocean

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS (1806–1867)
January 1, 1829
Psyche, Before the Tribunal of Venus
from Melanie
The Confessional
Unseen Spirits
City Lyrics
The Lady in the White Dress, Whom I Helped Into the Omnibus
To Charles Roux, of Switzerland

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS (1806–1870)
The Lost Pleiad
By the Swanannoa
from The City of the Silent
The New Moon

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807–1882)
The Spirit of Poetry
A Psalm of Life
Hymn to the Night
The Wreck of the Hesperus
The Village Blacksmith
The Skeleton in Armour
The Warning
Mezzo Cammin
The Day Is Done
Seaweed
Afternoon in February
The Bridge
Curfew
The Evening Star
Autumn
Couplet: February 24, 1847
Fragment: December 18, 1847
The Fire of Drift-Wood
from Evangeline
The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
from The Song of Hiawatha
XIV: Picture-Writing
from XXII: Hiawatha’s Departure
My Lost Youth
The Children’s Hour
from Tales of a Wayside Inn
Prelude: The Wayside Inn
The Landlord’s Tale: Paul Revere’s Ride
The Spanish Jew’s Tale: Azrael
Snow-Flakes
Divina Commedia
Aftermath
Belisarius
Chaucer
Kéramos
Venice
The Harvest Moon
The Cross of Snow
The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
Night
The Poet’s Calendar
from Elegiac Verse
The Bells of San Blas

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807–1892)
Proem
Song of Slaves in the Desert
from Songs of Labor: Dedication
Ichabod!
Astrja
First-Day Thoughts
The Haschish
Maud Muller
The Barefoot Boy
Skipper Ireson’s Ride
Telling the Bees
My Playmate
Barbara Frietchie
What the Birds Said
Snow-Bound
from Among the Hills: Prelude
My Triumph
Burning Drift-Wood

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)
“Stanzas”
The Lake—To ——
To Science
Al Aaraaf
Romance
Fairy-Land
“Alone”
To Helen
Israfel
The Valley of Unrest
The City in the Sea
To F——
The Coliseum
The Haunted Palace
Silence
The Conqueror Worm
Lenore
Dream-Land
The Raven
Ulalume—A Ballad
The Bells
For Annie
Eldorado
Annabel Lee

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809–1865)
My Childhood-Home I See Again

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809–1894)
Old Ironsides
The Chambered Nautilus
The Living Temple
The Deacon’s Masterpiece: or the Wonderful “One-Hoss-Shay”
Contentment
The Voiceless
The Two Streams
from Wind-Clouds and Star-Drifts: III. Sympathies
Nearing the Snow-Line
The Flaneur
Prelude to a Volume Printed in Raised Letters for the Blind

THOMAS HOLLEY CHIVERS (1809–1858)
To Isa Sleeping
Avalon
Apollo
Lily Adair
The Wind

FANNY KEMBLE (1809–1893)
To the Wissahiccon
Impromptu

MARGARET FULLER (1810–1850)
Sistrum
Flaxman

EDMUND HAMILTON SEARS (1810–1876)
“It came upon the midnight clear,” 588

CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH (1813–1892)
Correspondences
Gnosis
The Bird and the Bell
The Cataract Isle
In the Palais Royal Garden
Cornucopia
The Spirit of the Age
An Old Cat’s Confessions
The Evening Primrose
December
My Old Palette
Music
Bird Language
from Seven Wonders of the World
The Printing-Press
The Locomotive
The Photograph

CHARLES TIMOTHY BROOKS (1813–1883)
Our Island Home
Lines: Composed at the Old Temples of Maralipoor

JONES VERY (1813–1880)
The New Birth
“In Him we live, & move, & have our being”
The Morning Watch
The Garden
The Song
The Latter Rain
The Dead
Thy Brother’s Blood
The Earth
The Cup
The New World
The New Man
The Created
Autumn Leaves
The Hand and the Foot
The Eye and Ear
Yourself
The Lost
The Prayer
The Cottage
The Strangers
The Wild Rose of Plymouth
The Lament of the Flowers
Autumn Flowers
The Origin of Man, I

EPES SARGENT (1813–1880)
The Planet Jupiter
The Sea-Breeze at Matanzas
Rockall

DANIEL DECATUR EMMETT (1815–1904)
Dixie’s Land
Boatman’s Dance

PHILIP PENDLETON COOKE (1816–1850)
Florence Vane
Orthone

JOSIAH D. CANNING (1816–1892)
The Indian Gone!

HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817–1862)
“They who prepare my evening meal below”
“On fields oer which the reaper’s hand has passd”
Fog
“Dong, sounds the brass in the east”
Rumors from an Jolian Harp
“My life has been the poem I would have writ”
“I am a parcel of vain strivings tied”
“Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird”
Guido’s Aurora
Music
Inspiration

CORNELIUS MATHEWS (1817–1889)
from Poems on Man in His Various Aspects Under the American Republic
The Sculptor
The Journalist
The Masses

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING (1818–1901)
The Harbor
Hymn of the Earth
The Barren Moors
Walden
Murillo’s Magdalen

WILLIAM WETMORE STORY (1819–1895)
Cleopatra
from A Contemporary Criticism

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819–1891)
from The Present Crisis
from A Fable for Critics
from The Biglow Papers: Letter Six—The Pious Editor’s Creed
from The Vision of Sir Launfal: Prelude to Part the First
Remembered Music—A Fragment
from Under the Willows
Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865

JULIA WARD HOWE (1819–1910)
My Last Dance
Battle-Hymn of the Republic

JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND (1819–1881)
from The Marble Prophecy

THOMAS DUNN ENGLISH (1819–1902)
Ben Bolt

WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)
Leaves of Grass (1855)
(Song of Myself)
(A Song for Occupations)
(To Think of Time)
(The Sleepers)
(I Sing the Body Electric)
(Faces)
(Song of the Answerer)
(Europe the 72d and 73d Years of These States)
(A Boston Ballad)
(There Was a Child Went Forth)
(Who Learns My Lesson Complete?)
(Great Are the Myths)
from Leaves of Grass (1860)
Chants Democratic and Native American
from Leaves of Grass (1891-92)
from Inscriptions
Eidólons
from Children of Adam
from Pent-Up Aching Rivers
I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ
As Adam Early in the Morning
Calamus
In Paths Untrodden
Scented Herbage of My Breast
Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand
For You O Democracy
These I Singing in Spring
Not Heaving from My Ribb’d Breast Only
Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances
The Base of All Metaphysics
Recorders Ages Hence
When I Heard at the Close of the Day
Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?
Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone
Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes
Trickle Drops
City of Orgies
Behold This Swarthy Face
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
To a Stranger
This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful
I Hear It Was Charged Against Me
The Prairie-Grass Dividing
When I Peruse the Conquer’d Fame
We Two Boys Together Clinging
A Promise to California
Here the Frailest Leaves of Me
No Labor-Saving Machine
A Glimpse
A Leaf for Hand in Hand
Earth, My Likeness
I Dream’d in a Dream
What Think You I Take My Pen in Hand?
To the East and to the West
Sometimes with One I Love
To a Western Boy
Fast Anchor’d Eternal O Love!
Among the Multitude
O You Whom I Often and Silently Come
That Shadow My Likeness
Full of Life Now
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Sea-Drift
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life
Tears
To the Man-of-War-Bird
Aboard at a Ship’s Helm
On the Beach at Night
The World Below the Brine
On the Beach at Night Alone
Songs for All Seas, All Ships
Patroling Barnegat
After the Sea-Ship
from Drum-Taps
Come Up from the Fields Father
Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night
As Toilsome I Wander’d Virginia’s Woods
The Wound Dresser
Dirge for Two Veterans
Reconciliation
from Memories of President Lincoln
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
O Captain! My Captain!
By Blue Ontario’s Shore
from Autumn Rivulets
Italian Music in Dakota
Proud Music of the Storm
Passage to India
from Whispers of Heavenly Death
Chanting the Square Deific
A Noiseless Patient Spider
Contributors

John Quincy Adams
A. Bronson Alcott
Washington Allston
Joel Barlow
Manoah Bodman
Charles Timothy Brooks
Maria Gowen Brooks
William Cullen Bryant
Josiah D. Canning
William Ellery Channing
Lydia Maria Child
Thomas Holley Chivers
Thomas Cole
Philip Pendleton Cooke
Christopher Pearse Cranch
Richard Henry Dana
Samuel Henry Dickson
Joseph Rodman Drake
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Daniel Decatur Emmett
Thomas Dunn English
Philip Freneau
Margaret Fuller
Fitz-Greene Halleck
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Josiah Gilbert Holland
Oliver Wendell Holmes
George Moses Horton
Julia Ward Howe
Fanny Kemble
Francis Scott Key
Abraham Lincoln
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
James Russell Lowell
Cornelius Mathews
Clement Moore
George Pope Morris
John Neal
James Kirke Paulding
John Howard Payne
James Gates Percival
John Pierpont
Edward Coote Pinkney
Edgar Allan Poe
Epes Sargent
Edmund Hamilton Sears
Lydia Huntley Sigourney
William Gilmore Simms
William Wetmore Story
Henry David Thoreau
Jones Very
Sarah Helen Whitman
Walt Whitman
John Greenleaf Whittier
Carlos Wilcox
Richard Henry Wilde
Nathaniel Parker Willis
Samuel Woodworth

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