21
Nadia Nurhussein
When William Dean Howells wrote his 1893 essay “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business,” the market for magazine literature exceeded the market for books.1 Of that magazine literature, it is the prose that survives in our modern‐day canon: between 1890 and 1910, Howells, Henry James, Mark Twain, and younger writers like Charles Chesnutt and Stephen Crane all published fiction in magazines such as Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly. The late nineteenth century was understood, then as now, to be a vibrant period for the production of American fiction. However, in contrast with the view of turn‐of‐the‐century American magazine poetry that currently predominates – that it is a remarkably forgettable blip in American literary history – Howells surprisingly insists that not only is it superior to that found in books and that of a generation earlier, the new generation of versifiers even surpass their short‐story writing contemporaries. Howells attacks those “old‐fashioned people who flatter themselves upon their distinction in not reading […] magazine poetry,” claiming that an “antiquated and ignorant prejudice” leads them to “make a great mistake, and simply class themselves with the public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best” (Howells 1893: 442, 432, 433). For Howells, who is rarely remembered today as a poet, magazine poetry was not peripheral.
It is tempting to read Howells’s defense of magazine poetry in light of the onslaught of an emerging group of magazines comparatively indifferent to poetry. The very month Howells published this essay coincidentally also marked the height of a price war in the wake of which Munsey’s began selling for 10 cents, followed soon after by Cosmopolitan and McClure’s, in contrast to the more established and venerable 25‐ and 35‐cent magazines such as the Atlantic, the Century, and Harper’s. This price war ushered in what many critics and historians have identified as a “magazine revolution.” The cheaper magazines accounted for their lower prices by relying more heavily upon advertising than subscription revenue and by shifting to new, less expensive print technologies. As a result of this threat to their continued cultural influence, elite magazines attempted to distinguish themselves from the lower‐priced “middle class” of magazines in terms of quality, contending that it was specifically in the elite magazines that one would find “the best,” to quote Howells. Like editors, some authors, too, struggled with the implications of this development. Roger Burlingame, an editor at Scribner’s, wrote that “there was resistance to the cheap magazines by the more sensitive authors, who did not like to see their best work in the company of so much trash” (1946: 217). Other authors, however, strategically exploited the growth of this new class of magazines by scattering their work across this divide, placing select pieces in the Atlantic, for instance, and others in Munsey’s, a magazine supposedly pitched at a “lower intellectual level” (Mott 1957, vol. 4: 46). For poets especially, knowledge of the distinct readerships found in the diverse periodical field made it possible to tailor facets of one’s work to particular magazines.2
With the increasing professionalization of authorship, even for poets, competition could be fierce. In his 1895 essay “The Modern Literary King,” Edward Bok claims that the modern author differs from his predecessor because now, Bok argues wistfully, the writer “must eke out his living by his pen, and there lies the root of the evil” (335). Although Edmund Clarence Stedman asserted that “there never was a better market for the wares of Apollo” – a claim echoed by Howells in “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” – the rates of acceptance for the top magazines of the era were in fact fairly low, making it more difficult to “eke out” a reliable income as a poet than Bok would admit (1895: 471). Of course, as editor of Ladies’ Home Journal from 1889 to 1919,3 Bok was well aware of the competition spurred by “the ‘needs’ of the publisher” and “the ‘requirements’ of the public” at the turn of the century – never, he claims, a concern for the writer of the past – and of his own contribution to what he condemns as “this commercial tendency in literary wares” (334, 338). Bok himself aggressively solicited James Whitcomb Riley for a poem, hoping to increase his magazine’s circulation by “one or two hundred thousand subscribers” (14 March 1890).4 However, with the exception of work by Riley and a very few poets of his ilk, poetry usually did not guarantee increased sales and the authors Bok criticizes for their pursuit of “the almighty dollar” were unlikely to be poets (335). Hardly any space or money was devoted to the genre, despite the fact that a magazine’s prestige depended upon the publishing of verse, both light and serious. As Joan Shelley Rubin points out, many poets – including Harriet Monroe, who later founded Poetry magazine – “blamed publishers and editors for devaluing their art,” as their decisions to allocate “leftover space in periodicals to verse, Monroe believed, reflected editors’ cavalier attitude toward poets’ work” (2007: 38). Poetry, in other words, was a respectable badge upon which magazines built and rested their reputations, but one that they also treated as a decorative and superficial flourish that simply “finished” the magazine.
Due to its commitment to include – at its margins – “the best” of the era’s poetry, a “quality” magazine’s prestige did not diminish as it faced the challenge of the newer magazine. The latter was more invested in the topical and journalistic than the literary, so the editors of quality magazines and influential critics largely remained the gatekeepers of the American poetic tradition at the turn of the century. Perhaps the most significant influences upon American poetry were Stedman (author of the 1885 Poets of America and the 1900 An American Anthology, 1787–1900), the Atlantic’s Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and the Century’s Richard Watson Gilder. An 1899 article called Gilder’s “influence upon American literature and art […] second to no man of his times,” and Hamlin Garland, best known as the author of Main‐Travelled Roads, credited Gilder’s praise when he was a young writer in 1890 with being “equivalent to a diploma” (Hopkins 1899: 310; Garland 1923: 412). Garland was hardly the only author to experience the king‐making effects of an association with the “big three” magazines at the beginnings of his career. Paul Laurence Dunbar was a young black aspiring poet when he succeeded in publishing his poem “The Land o’ Used to Be” in Munsey’s in 1894, but his career took off only after a group of his poems were accepted by the Century for three separate numbers in 1895 and his second self‐published book, Majors and Minors, was reviewed by William Dean Howells in Harper’s in 1896. The imprimatur of these two quality magazines launched Dunbar as a poet to be taken seriously.
Despite the occasional slush‐pile poet such as Dunbar breaking into the exclusive world of the quality magazine, the tables of contents of most issues of the Century, the Atlantic, and Harper’s featured the names of the same familiar poets, who, for the most part, epitomize what is known as the “genteel” style that dominated the turn‐of‐the‐century American poetic landscape. Although the president of the Century Company refuted charges that his magazine published only the work of a small group of established writers, a cursory glance at a sample issue of the Century (January 1895) proves that the magazine was mainly filled with now‐forgotten poets whose names would have signaled aesthetic good taste to contemporaneous readers. Excluding the “In Lighter Vein” section, we find in this issue Arthur Sherburne Hardy, Florence Earle Coates, William Prescott Foster, Helen Gray Cone, Edith Wharton, Ellen Burroughs (nom de plume of Sophie Jewett), Henry Jerome Stockard, and Meredith Nicholson – each of whom penned dozens (and, in many cases, hundreds) of magazine poems. But, to a modern eye, it is the rare 1890s magazine poem that calls out for special attention: many use antiquated poetic diction, inversions, and elisions; many prize musicality above all else; many evoke imagery of the natural world in hackneyed ways; many view the realm of verse as an ideal one far removed from the real (and rapidly modernizing) world. An example of a typical magazine poem of the 1890s is Gilder’s own “The Poet’s Day,” which appeared in the Century’s June 1895 issue:
The poet’s day is different from another,
Though he doth count each man his own heart’s brother.
So crystal‐clear the air that he looks through
It gives each color an intenser hue;
Each bush doth burn, and every flower flame.
The stars are sighing; silence breathes a name;
The world wherein he wanders, dreams, and sings
Thrills with the beatings of invisible wings;
And all day long he hears from hidden birds
The multitudinous pour of musicked words.
In this ars poetica, or poem defining the nature of poetry – a subgenre Gilder was especially fond of – what sounds initially like an Emersonian or Whitmanian view of the relationship of the poet to his fellow man turns out instead to reinforce the stereotype of the effete poet as one who breathes a rarified, aestheticized “crystal‐clear” air not shared with others, “Though he doth count each man his own heart’s brother.” The poet, for the appropriately named Gilder, lives a gilded existence; it is as if he literally sees the world through rose‐colored glasses, filtering out what is not beautiful or decorative in order to reveal “each color an intenser hue.” The world is more than alive to him, and its vibrancy is encapsulated best in two images characteristic of genteel‐style poems: its “invisible wings,” which, we learn in the next line, actually belong to “hidden birds”; and, from these same birds, “the multitudinous pour of musicked words.” That the birds sing “words” refers not to birdsong mnemonics, as, for example, in the poems “Bob White” by Henry T. Stanton and “A Little Brother of the Air” by Henry van Dyke, both published in the “In Lighter Vein” section of the following month’s issue of the Century. Instead, it lays bare Gilder’s view that a poem should approximate the musicality and pure aestheticism of verbalized birdsong, a mellifluous “pour” mirroring what one critic called Gilder’s “honey‐sweet voice of the Ideal” (Warner 1896: 6348).
In the same issue of the Century, but included in the “In Lighter Vein” section, is a poem titled “Strawberries” by Clinton Scollard. The highly formalist – even for his era – Scollard was likely the most published magazine poet during this period (Mott 1957, vol. 4: 120). A 1905 article in The Writer claimed that Scollard’s verse had been published “since 1881 [in] nearly every magazine of any note in the country,” and the article’s author, quoting directly yet another of the poet’s admirers, concludes that “a magazine published now without Mr. Scollard’s name in the table of contents is distinctly out of fashion” (Hatch 1905: 177). Scollard shared with Gilder an affinity for gilded imagery; and, like Gilder, he was a fan not only of the sonnet but of the self‐reflexive form of the sonnet‐on‐the‐sonnet. In a poem titled “Abjure the Sonnet?” printed in the literary section of the New York Times on 12 January 1907, Scollard responds to critics’ admonishments to lesser writers that they avoid the form used to such great effect by the masters. While conceding that “our unromantic modern day” automatically precludes any writer from attaining the heights reached by Milton or Keats, he does not accept this misfortune as a reason to abandon the attempt: “What! would you have the sculptor, then, forswear / His frieze lest he fall short of Phidias?” Here Scollard speaks for a generation of American poets holding fast to the sonnet form. As Robert J. Scholnick points out, two anthologies titled American Sonnets (one edited by William Sharp, the other by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Ellen H. Bigelow) were published in 1890, suggesting something of “a sonnet mania” (1999: 25).5 Sharp, a Scotsman, observes that the form has become extremely popular in the United States and that, in reviewing “over two hundred volumes of American minor verse, by living or recently deceased authors,” he finds an “almost universal adoption of the sonnet.” He also compares Gilder favorably to his British contemporaries, claiming that “there are among the more recent American poets one or two whose artistic care is as great, and whose touch is as light and dexterous, as that of any writer of verse among ourselves” (Sharp [1889?]: xxix, xxvii–xxviii).
In its idealism, its overwrought diction and imagery, and its commitment to formal conservatism expressed through a fixation upon the sonnet form, the verse of Scollard and Gilder exemplifies the stagnancy of American magazine poetry at the turn of the century. For all the praise heaped upon those two poets and their peers, the negative appraisal of such verse is not exclusively retrospective. It is, after all, during this period that “the term ‘magazine poet’ became one of derision” (Rubin 2007: 38). The most significant factor contributing to this assessment was Stedman’s view, in Poets of America, that the era marked, “if not a decadence, at least a poetic interregnum” (1885: 457). Throughout the late 1880s and 1890s, critic after critic leapt to confirm Stedman’s claim, borrowing the metaphor of “twilight” he uses to describe this decadence. This metaphor, as Elizabeth Renker puts it, “spread rapidly through literary culture and became an almost instant catchphrase, a sensationalist coin that writers enjoyed trading amidst their broader discussions about the degraded literary status, or status in general, of the modern era” (Renker 2011: 135). But Stedman ends on a supremely optimistic note, as an “interregnum” must by definition give way to a new reign. Regarding the new poetry to come, he asks, “Who can doubt that it will correspond to the future of the land itself, – of America now wholly free and interblending, with not one but a score of civic capitals, each an emulative centre of taste and invention, a focus of energetic life, ceaseless in action, radiant with the glow of beauty and creative power” (1885: 476). Even in the work of the foremost poets of this “interregnum” he finds the raw materials and the conditions for a rebirth of American verse. The study of turn‐of‐the‐century American poetry is not, therefore, important simply because it provides a literary influence against which the modernists can react in opposition – to quote David Perkins (1976), “poets of this generation were the opportunity which the next generation brilliantly exploited” (85) – but because underneath its seeming lethargy and weakness lies the unlikely spark necessary for the renaissance of American poetry that follows.
Although the genteel mode is the one most often associated with turn‐of‐the‐century American poetry, it competed for space with other, more vibrant styles in the magazines of the period. Alongside the development of realist and regionalist fiction in the United States, multiple subgenres of American poetry turned toward realism. This is a development often neglected by literary histories, as Renker and others have pointed out.6 Certainly, the turn toward realism was reflected in the early work of Edwin Arlington Robinson, who in one of his own numerous sonnets condescendingly referred to his popular contemporaries as “little sonnet men” (Robinson 1937: 93). Having for several years submitted his poems to periodicals throughout the country, Robinson accumulated “one of the largest and most comprehensive [piles of rejection slips] in literary history,” as he later recalled (quoted in Donaldson 2007: 113). He consequently self‐published and sent to various writers and critics copies of his first collection of verse, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896), a slim volume that included a sonnet in praise of the arch‐realist Émile Zola; the somber villanelle “The House on the Hill”; and the dark and enigmatic “Luke Havergal,” in which a voice from beyond the grave urges the title character to join his dead lover, apparently by committing suicide. Encouraged by some positive responses, Robinson swiftly self‐published another collection, The Children of the Night (1897), which in addition to poems from his first collection also included such stark portraits in verse as “Richard Cory,” a wealthy and envied young man who, “one calm summer night, / Went home and put a bullet through his head” (Robinson 1937: 82). The somber volume generated little interest until 1905, when Kermit Roosevelt brought it to the attention of his father, President Theodore Roosevelt, who convinced Charles Scribner’s Sons to republish the volume, which the president then reviewed in the magazine Outlook. Robinson’s next collection, The Town Down the River (1910), gained him additional attention, and his reputation grew during the following decade, though he did not gain widespread recognition and popularity until the 1920s, when he was the three‐time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.
The bestselling poet at the turn of the century was likely James Whitcomb Riley, otherwise known as the Hoosier poet, a dialect writer whose favorite poetic personae were Indiana farmers and children. The aforementioned “In Lighter Vein” section of the Century, along with similar sections such as “Walnuts and Wine” in Lippincott’s and the “Editor’s Drawer” in Harper’s, is proof that readers were as eager to consume dialect and light verse as lofty, serious verse. The dialect craze even led the Atlantic Monthly to offer Bret Harte an exclusive one‐year contract to write for the magazine in 1870, following the extraordinary popularity of his dialect poem “Plain Language from Truthful James,” which was reprinted in magazines and newspapers all over the country and even the world. Although, early in his career, Riley’s work barely qualified as verse to readers raised on genteel poetry, as a rejection letter from Scribner’s reveals – “Your writings show good poetic feeling but as yet we fear they fall short of literature” (22 January 1878) – his unique contribution to literature seemed, a generation later, indisputable. Oscar Lovell Triggs, in a 1901 review of Stedman’s An American Anthology, characterized the difference between Riley and Longfellow thus: “In Longfellow’s sense of poetry, Riley has not written poetry so much as in a new and more democratic sense he has depicted life” (633).
This poetry of “life” corresponds roughly to the mode dubbed “veritist” by Hamlin Garland, who rejected the term “realist” for its association with criminality and sexuality. Poetry of the Riley school, dialect and otherwise, often depicted the difficulties of rural living, but its mood was generally cheery and wholesome, tinged with nostalgia about a way of life rapidly disappearing, and had nothing to do with the French naturalist Émile Zola’s seamy underbelly. As Garland asserted, “They may be rough and sordid, and grim with a life of toil, but, as a rule, Americans are not sex‐maniacs” (1894: 694). Although Garland might call Riley a “veritist,” Riley’s poetry usually hid the most grueling aspects of rural life under a sheen of idealism and sentimentality. One might even argue, as Shira Wolosky does, that “Riley’s dialect is little more than genteel verse spelled funny” (2004: 328). It took Edwin Markham’s “The Man with a Hoe,” published in the San Francisco Examiner on 15 January 1899, and inspired by the painting of the same name by French artist Jean‐Francois Millet, to divest the poetry of rural life in the United States of any trace of the charming and picturesque. Formally conservative, much of Markham’s work shared qualities with genteel magazine poetry. In his sonnet “The Cricket,” for instance, which appeared in the August 1888 Century, the speaker bonds with his subject over their shared art, just as Gilder did with his “hidden birds”: “We worship Song, and servants are of her – / I in the bright hours, thou in shadow‐time.” But in the realist “The Man with a Hoe,” with its socialist message, Markham descended to earth and attained a level of popularity that led to the poem’s being reprinted in numerous newspapers and magazines for decades afterward, making him “the most talked‐of poet in the world” (Starrett 1922: 42). In a controversial representation – one that might be called anti‐georgic – Markham sees the exhausted hunched pose of Millet’s stultified figure as a step toward devolution, and warns those in power of the inevitable revolution that will force them to answer for these years of inhuman exploitation. Markham’s farmer is “[s]tolid and stunned, a brother to the ox,” a hopeless and mindless “[s]lave of the wheel of labor.”
Riley’s archetypal farmer, on the other hand – his semi‐literate persona Benj. F. Johnson of Boone, whose verses started appearing in the Indianapolis Journal in 1882 – was optimistic. In “Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer,” he encourages us to “be contented with our lot,” writing, “Some says the crops is ruined, and the corn’s drowned out, / And propha‐sy the wheat will be a failure, without doubt; / But the kind Providence that has never failed us yet, / Will be on hands onc’t more at the ’leventh hour, I bet!” (Riley 1993: 246). Even the destitute day laborers on the farm are romanticized in Riley’s work. The eponymous “Raggedy Man” “works fer Pa” and, despite the litany of arduous tasks for which he is responsible, he finds time to tell fanciful stories and fashion a “bow‐’n’‐arry” for the poem’s young speaker. Bewitched by the Raggedy Man’s charm, the child decides that he would like to grow up to be a Raggedy Man, rather than “keep a fine store,” “be a rich merchunt, an’ wear fine clo’es” like his father (Riley 1993: 462, 464).
Although Riley’s poems appeared frequently in the Century, they also appeared in the Century’s children’s magazine, St. Nicholas. The periodical market for children’s poetry, in magazines like St. Nicholas and Youth’s Companion, was crowded with poets who were also vying for space in the general‐interest magazines. Moreover, the distinctions between poetry for adults and poetry for children were sometimes blurred, as illustrated by the case of Riley’s most famous poem, “Little Orphant Annie,” originally published under the title “The Elf Child” in the Indianapolis Journal in 1885. Because his verse straddled the line between the adult and juvenile markets, Riley at times proved a puzzle for magazine editors. He insisted upon submitting what might look like children’s poetry to adult magazines – for example, “The Raggedy Man” was published in the Century in December 1890 – and believed that St. Nicholas was “rebukeful over [his] long neglect of them” (27 August 1894). Despite Riley’s efforts to transcend these categories, he would sometimes find resistance from magazines that worked hard to delineate the boundaries of their reading audiences and to define those audiences’ perceived needs. Scribner’s editor E.L. Burlingame, in addressing Riley’s submission of “Hoosier Child Rhymes,” distinguished between some that “might seem to us too specially directed to children for our purpose,” and “others, though of child‐subjects, [that] are of wider appeal” (6 January 1899). Similarly, Century editor William Carey wrote Riley that the editor of St. Nicholas “is afraid that ‘A Homesick Memory’ is too teary & adulty for St Nicholas & Mr [Robert Underwood] Johnson feels it is too youthful for the Century” (18 July 1895).
If Riley’s verse was often thought to be too childish for adults, Sarah Piatt had the opposite problem: one reviewer, for example, wrote of Piatt that “[s]he is not enough a child with children” (quoted in Bennett 2001: xxxii). As in Riley’s children’s verse, or that of newspaper poet Eugene Field – best known for his frequently reprinted 1889 bedtime poem “Dutch Lullaby,” also known as “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” – fantasylands feature prominently in Piatt’s verse, evoking a seemingly idyllic realm associated with childhood. In “Two Visions of Fairy Land,” published in St. Nicholas in February 1881, the girl’s vision of Fairy Land is a conventionally dreamy one, revolving around “Prince Charming,” about whom she dreamt after falling asleep reading a storybook. The boy’s, on the other hand, is a Fairy Land paradoxically seen “wide awake”; it is clear, but “all in mist.” Conflating reality and fantasy, his Fairy Land is verdant, bucolic, and peaceful. And it is revealed, in a chiasmatic riddle, to be our world: “the moon went down on one / Side, and upon the other rose the sun.” When the girl asks him how to get to this Fairy Land, he says “the path lies through / The dawn, you little sleeper, and the dew”; that is, you need only to wake up and enter the “real world,” which contains enough natural wonder to satisfy any child’s imagination (Bennett 2001: xxxvi). Here, even in her children’s verse, Piatt could be critical of the perceived safety of fantasy, and the temptation to fall into an unrealistic vision gives way to a sudden rending of the veil, to reveal hard truths. As Paula Bernat Bennett writes regarding Piatt’s “A Child Cry,” also published in a children’s magazine (in this case, Youth’s Companion), Piatt “targets not just the British but artists (like Spenser) who focus on ideal ‘fairylands’ while ignoring the misery crowding at their feet” (xlviii). “A Child’s Cry,” in which the speaker visits Spenser’s Kilcolman Castle and imagines she hears the scream of a baby killed during Ireland’s Nine Years’ War 300 years earlier, demonstrates even more starkly that the realist Piatt refuses to sugarcoat life’s pain and suffering even when publishing in children’s periodicals.
Furthermore, rather than the naive sincerity we might expect from one who occasionally wears the hat of children’s poet, Piatt’s poetry is shot through with a sardonic irony. Bennett notes that “what nineteenth century readers (and publishers) valued in Piatt’s poetry was not her originality […] but her unusually competent handling of the genteel style” (xxviii). Upon closer inspection, however, what looks like straightforward genteel poetry can turn out to be something like satire, as Renker shows in her analysis of Piatt’s work (Renker 2007: 91). It is thanks in part to recent scholarly interest in Piatt – largely occasioned by Bennett’s collection of her poems in Palace‐Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt (2001) – that a new Piatt has emerged, one dramatically different from the Piatt who would have been most appreciated by her first readers. The divisions between the conventional Piatt and the unconventional Piatt are not always neat and clear‐cut. Indeed, many of her poems are Janus‐faced, speaking through what Matthew Giordano (2006) identifies as “two different poetic voices – one, genteel and direct, the other, experimental and ironic” (30). Piatt’s contemporaries were generally confounded by the second of these voices, and, as a result, ignored or rejected it.
As both Bennett and Giordano have shown, the title poem of the recent collection of Piatt’s poetry, the now canonical “The Palace‐Burner,” places itself at the center of periodical culture. It was published in the Independent, which Bennett identifies (along with the Capital and the Galaxy) as a magazine that allowed Piatt to claim a more politically engaged poetics and in which she placed her riskier work, as opposed to work that appeared in the Century and Scribner’s Monthly (Bennett 2001: xxix). Her poems dealing with poverty, for instance, expose the harsh realities of income inequality during the Gilded Age. “His Mother’s Way” features a woman moved to tears over a beggar’s misfortune and her child’s mystification over her behavior. The mother is seen as overly sentimental but the poem ironically juxtaposes her tears over “an old glove or a ring” to tears over “even a stranger going by / the gate,” in a manner anticipating the ironically juxtaposed losses of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” There is a sharp gendered dichotomy between Papa and Mamma; Papa “cannot cry at all, / For he’s a man.” In an exaggerated display of masculine aggression, he even promises to threaten violence against the homeless man should he return. In the end, however, the poem turns its attention away from Papa and, with a reproachful second‐person address, toward the Independent reader, who sits before a fire with “your books, your ease, / Your lamp‐light leisure, jests, and wine,” even as he is complicit in creating the circumstances that led to the misery of his fellow man (Bennett 2001: 99–101). The contrast between Riley’s saccharine depiction of the Raggedy Man and Piatt’s unflinching depiction of the homeless man in “His Mother’s Way” is a stark one.
Piatt’s concern for social issues extends to the treatment of race. Consider, for example, “A Child’s Party,” published in the children’s magazine Wide‐Awake. The setting is a plantation in the antebellum South, where an enslaved black child and a white playmate play at having a party. They borrow all of the trappings of a proper parlor‐room affair from the house – a large mirror, candlesticks, a painting, etc. – in order to conduct their party en plein air. The adult speaker recalling this event expresses a clear self‐awareness of her racism in her dealings with the black girl. However, at its close, the poem brushes off any serious examination of race by idealizing the cross‐racial relationship between the speaker and her nurse, who saves the day; just when the speaker appears to be on the verge of being scolded by three of the slaves on her grandmother’s plantation, her nurse preemptively defends her and joins the girls on the lawn. “The Black Princess,” subtitled “(A True Fable of my Old Kentucky Nurse)” and published in the Independent, serves as an elegy to the same caretaker who rescued her from potential punishment for the crime of the child’s party. In both poems, the speaker insists that the story is “true,” prompting the reader to find parallels in Piatt’s biography – she was a member of a slaveholding family in the South – but in “The Black Princess” she attempts to distance her experience of slavery from “real life.” Although her nurse is a Princess “[s]uch as no dainty pen of gold / Would write of in a fairy book,” she is, only three stanzas later, described as “a slave – like one / I read of in a painted tale.” The princess must live inscribed within the world of fantasy; the same poet who often dispels the illusion of fantasy when writing for children finds that it is the only way in which she can come to terms with her nurse’s enslavement. In addition, because Piatt is unable to shake the negative connotations of blackness, she must conceive of the Princess as “Black, but enchanted black.” At this point in the poem, the Princess is completely enclosed in a fairy‐tale world, despite the equivocation at the poem’s opening: a giant imprisons her in a tower; a Knight rescues her and breaks the spell of her blackness; she awakens from a mystical sleep. After escaping this sleep, she promptly plunges into an eternal one, and the poem ends just as “A Child’s Party” did, with the speaker’s imagining her saintly nurse safely ensconced in heaven (Bennett 2001: 38–39).
As troubling as Piatt’s representations of slavery can be, Dunbar’s, at times, are surprisingly less nuanced. Early in his career, he learned that reading and listening audiences were particularly receptive to his depictions of black life in the antebellum South, especially in poems conforming to what was known as the “plantation tradition.” The son of former slaves, Dunbar invented a fantasy of the Old South that appealed to his magazine readers a generation after emancipation, with a nostalgic view of carefree slaves who loved their masters and appeared satisfied with their condition. In “Dat Chrismus on de Ol’ Plantation,” published along with festive illustrations in the December 1898 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, a group of former slaves continue to work for their former master after being freed. When their now‐employer, whom they still call “Mastah,” announces on Christmas Eve that he can no longer afford to pay their wages, “ol’ Ben” comes forward with his own announcement: “ef dat’s de way dis freedom ac’s on people, white er black / You kin jes’ tell Mistah Lincum fu’ to tek his freedom back.” Refusing to leave their “he’pless” employer, despite his efforts to “plead ner baig, ner drive us ’way,” the former slaves consider Christmas saved by their decision to offer up their labor for free, a decision that amounts to their re‐entering slavery.
However, two years later, in the December 1900 issue of the Century – coincidentally, also a Christmas issue – we find Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak,” a poem that even a British periodical noted was “creating a sensation” (Anonymous 1900: 10). Dunbar’s lifetime corresponds almost exactly to a period that Rayford W. Logan and other historians have referred to as the “nadir” of race relations in the United States, a period marked by a disturbing increase in lynchings. Written in standard English, “The Haunted Oak” presents the monologue of a tree that has absorbed the trauma of a lynching carried out in its branches, dying sympathetically along with the victim whose murder it involuntarily enabled. With its “note of restlessness, of dissatisfaction,” as Benjamin Brawley writes in 1930, “there were those who were amazed that Mr. Gilder dared to print it” (190). In fact, the Century agreed to print only a tempered version of the poem, cutting the final two stanzas (Rice 2003: 89). Nevertheless, they did publish it, offering Dunbar the relatively generous payment of $35, and the poem – even the version published by the Century – is a powerful indictment of a culture of racial violence. Its appearance in a Christmas issue of the magazine intensifies its effect, seeming to correlate the lynching victim with Christ. On the other hand, the Century immediately followed Dunbar’s poem with a racist essay titled “Paths of Hope for the Negro: Practical Suggestions of a Southerner” by Jerome Dowd, demonstrating that the magazine’s “pathological attitude toward the African‐American race and its place in America” continued well beyond the Reconstruction moment (Gabler‐Hover 1995: 240). Ironically, Dowd argues that “the Negro’s propensity to crime tends to excite the criminal tendencies of the white man” and “that the crimes of the one race provoke counter‐crimes in the other” (1900: 278). When juxtaposed with Dunbar’s poem, Dowd’s statement appears to be a thinly veiled justification for lynchings, conceiving of them as simply “counter‐crimes” against what Dunbar’s poem calls “the old, old crime” – the trumped‐up charges, presumably of rape, for which his “guiltless” lynching victim has been killed. Although, one assumes, this was not the Century’s intent, Dowd’s article in fact renders Dunbar’s poem even more forceful and harrowing in contrast.
African American reviewers, some of whom found Dunbar’s use of dialect demeaning, were united in their praise of “The Haunted Oak.” The reviewer in the AME Church Review, for example, remarked, “How much better this use of the muse than the Negro dialect that gets its praise from its excellence in caricature and the perfection of its mimicry” (Anonymous 1901: 394). However, despite their preference for the genteel mode, a mode perceived to be more compatible with the uplift ideology to which they were committed, most turn‐of‐the‐century African American periodicals did not hesitate to carry dialect poetry by Dunbar, James D. Corrothers, Daniel Webster Davis, and others. For example, the most successful African American monthly to carry verse during this period was the Colored American Magazine (1900–1909), whose April 1901 issue reprinted six poems by Dunbar, most of them in dialect. In fact, the poems appeared in a piece titled “Three Negro Poets” profiling all three of the aforementioned poets, all of whom were known primarily for dialect poetry.
Established by Walter W. Wallace, with Pauline E. Hopkins serving as literary editor for approximately the first half of its run, the Colored American succeeded in promoting itself as “the only first‐class illustrated monthly published in America exclusively in the interests of the Colored Race.” Curiously, Charles W. Chesnutt, when approached in 1899 by William Stanley Braithwaite – one of several enterprising young African Americans inspired by the 1893 magazine revolution and the vogue for periodical literature to launch a magazine of his own – urged him to abandon the idea because he believed “the time was not ripe for such a venture,” a claim he reiterates years later in his essay “Post‐bellum, Pre‐Harlem” (Braithwaite 1972: 114). In a sense, the leading African American periodical fiction writer was mistaken; as Michael Fultz (1998) has shown, the development of the black bourgeoisie at this time provided a ready audience for quality magazines targeted at African Americans. The Colored American’s professionalism and ambition in particular are borne out by the fact that Hopkins paid contributors; compare this stance to that of “a certain prominent negro journal” censured by Dunbar for its “announcement that all poetical contributions must be accompanied by payment for publication at regular advertising rates” (Braithwaite 1972: 119; Dunbar n.d.). Hopkins, Braithwaite writes, “not only wanted the Negro author to feel that his work, if accepted and printed, was worthy of remuneration, but as an editor she felt it gave her an independence of action in making selections, and a dignity in soliciting manuscripts of the best kind” (119).
A survey of the poems published on Hopkins’s watch gives a sense of her editorial values. She accepted work from many up‐and‐coming poets, such as Braithwaite, Olivia Ward Bush (later Olivia Bush‐Banks), and Benjamin Griffith Brawley, especially if that work rhetorically and directly addressed the African American’s position in the United States. Poems with titles such as “The Negro’s Worth,” “The Future of the Negro,” and “The Colored American” can be found throughout the magazine; Hopkins even reprinted “The Black Man’s Claim,” by the wildly popular white poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Like Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak,” many of the magazine’s poems took up the topic of lynching. Charles Fred White’s “Afro‐American,” published in the September 1900 issue, includes the following biting lines: “O, country, ’tis of thee, / Land of the Lynching Bee, / Of thee I sing.” Another anti‐lynching poem, “Columbia’s Disgrace,” written by Townsend Allen for the August 1903 issue, echoes Dunbar’s in its judgment upon “those lawless men with their faces white / Who avenged the deed in the dead of night!” With Hopkins as literary editor, the Colored American sought the most assertive and racially conscious verse.
One of the first indications that the tides had turned for the Colored American was the lead article of the June 1904 issue, “What a Magazine Should Be,” written by New York Age editor T. Thomas Fortune. The article appeared just as Booker T. Washington was purchasing the magazine, pushing Hopkins out of the editor’s chair, and was philosophically aligned with Washington’s view regarding belles‐lettres. Fortune argues that, although the “delights of pure literature will always have a large following,” the African American magazine should give especial priority to “what mankind are doing” over and above “what they are thinking” (1904: 395). Driven by a principle analogous to the new general‐interest monthly’s privileging of action over words, the new Colored American had little patience for a genre assumed to be at odds with utilitarian goals, and considerably less attention was devoted to poetry under Washington’s ownership. The poetry that the magazine did publish is of lesser quality and less radical in spirit. It was not until the Crisis appeared in 1910, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois – himself a poet – that one can argue that the moment for a new era in African American imaginative writing for which Chesnutt was waiting had finally arrived. Even so, the early issues of the Crisis are unremarkable in terms of verse; Jessie Fauset’s reign as literary editor, beginning in 1919, would brand the magazine as the premier venue for black poetry on the cusp of the Harlem Renaissance, featuring in those years poets such as Alice Dunbar‐Nelson and Georgia D. Johnson.
The historical circumstances around the Colored American’s shift away from verse are, admittedly, unique, but the shift also illustrates a larger trend. In the first decade of the twentieth century, there was comparatively less support for poetry than there had been previously, whether for a specialized African American audience or for an ostensibly more general one. As John Timberman Newcomb notes, no major contemporary poetry anthologies were published for 12 years after Stedman’s 1900 American Anthology; ending that dry spell in 1912 would be The Lyric Year, a publication resulting from a poetry contest judged by Braithwaite and Edward J. Wheeler, followed soon after by Braithwaite’s annual Anthology of Magazine Verse, a series first published in 1913 based upon contributions to the Boston Evening Transcript he had been writing since 1905 (Newcomb 2015: 498, 506–507). Simultaneously, in 1912, Harriet Monroe founded Poetry, a magazine often credited with ushering in the beginnings of modernist verse. Although traces of early modernist poetry can be found in the general‐interest magazines, Poetry provided the space needed at just the right moment to ignite a much‐needed regeneration of poetry in the twentieth century. One might add to Poetry a list of other magazines founded around this time that helped foster a culture for the production of poetry: the Masses, the Smart Set, the New Republic, the Little Review, the Seven Arts, and so on (Radway 2014: 219).
Above all, however, Poetry, with its first issue featuring Ezra Pound, serves as a logical benchmark, symbolically drawing the nineteenth century in American poetry to a close. As proclaimed in its inaugural issue, Poetry saw itself in contradistinction to the “popular magazines [that] can afford [poetry] but scant courtesy – a Cinderella corner in the ashes – because they seek a large public which is not hers, a public which buys them not for their verse but for their stories, pictures, journalism, rarely for their literature, even in prose.” In an attack upon an unnamed magazine editor, presumably at one of the general‐interest monthlies, who advised a contributing poet that he “must appeal to the barber’s wife of the Middle West,” Monroe makes her editorial stance clear: poetry in her magazine need not be accessible to “the public whose taste,” to revisit Howells, “is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best,” and serious poets need only concern themselves with a cultured, specialized readership capable of valuing the seriousness of their work (Monroe 1912: 27). In an attempt to break free of the restraints of late nineteenth‐century American poetry and its empty sterility, these early practitioners of modernist poetry ironically turned, in a sense, even further inward, with a solipsistic address that amounted to preaching to the converted and conveyed considerable disdain for the “average” reader. Nevertheless, Poetry and the other modernist literary magazines that followed carved out a new place for poetry in periodical print culture in the United States.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 19 (THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINT CULTURE, 1865–1914).
Notes