Chapter 13 - Other Voices, Other Verses

Summary

Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century was lousy with poets. At the apex of respectable high cultural ambitions, the Atlantic Monthly, under the editorship of James Russell Lowell and with the nods of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes among other worthies, was publishing poetry vigorously. At some point in the 1860s, each poet separately composed a self-consciously major poem on the summer chorus of the crickets. The other voices of mid-nineteenth-century American poetry could scarcely be more other than Thomas Hill's transcription of Martian verse. The journalistic branch of American poetry was closely related to other modes of gaining access to authorship: Walt Whitman began his authorial career in social movement writing, with a temperance novel, and John Greenleaf Whittier moved through stints as a school teacher and a newspaper editor before becoming one of the major poets of nineteenth-century social movements.