Many argue that the birth cry of this new American poetry was Whitman's legendary,
Barbaric Yawp, sounded over the roofs of the world, as he put it,
near the end of his revolutionary poem, Song of Myself, in 1855.
To understand why Whitman's and Dickinson's poems sounded to many of their
contemporary readers like Barbaric Yawps, it helps to
hear the poetry their contemporaries read beneath the roofs of that world.
Poets in the United States were as numerous and
prolific in 1837 when Ralph Waldo Emerson put out a call for
a genuinely American literature as they are today.
But in his American Scholar Address,
Emerson challenged them to be more American.
Proclaiming, we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe, and
urged writers to create a literature distinctive to the New World, and
the still new country.
He said, our day of dependence,
our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.
The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed
on the sere remains of foreign harvests.
Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes' father called Emerson's American Scholar lecture
America's intellectual declaration of Independence.
But ten years later, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, another influential mind,
was still chewing on those sere remains that Emerson had warned against.
Insisting that American letters must develop from the rest of the world's
literature about which he was singularly knowledgeable for his time.
Including the familiar literature of England.
His short novel, Cavanaugh, a book Dickinson hid in her piano bench, so
her father wouldn't know she was reading a popular novel, dramatizes a lively and
urgent debate about the character of American literature.
In it, an editor, Mr. Hathaway, wants to found a journal devoted to
his vision of precisely the new national poetry Whitman would shortly inaugurate.
We want a national epic that shall correspond to the size of the country.
We want national drama in which scope enough shall be given to our gigantic
ideas and to the unparalleled activity and progress of our people.
In a word, we want a national literature altogether shaggy and unshorn,
that shall shake the earth like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the prairies.
A schoolteacher, Mr. Churchill, in contrast holds that literature is rather
an image of the spiritual world than of the physical, and
rejects the association of literary production with location.
All of what is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in
them, but what is universal.
Their roots are in their native soil, but their branches wave in the unpatriotic
air, that speaks the same language unto all men,
and their leaves shine with the illimitable light that pervades all lands.
In defiance of Emerson's appeal for an American literature, liberated from its
long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, Churchill believes that we
are very like the English, are in fact English under a different sky, and
does not see how our literature can be very different from theirs.
Much of the poetry written in the United States in the 19th century
confirmed Churchill's assertion that we are very like the English.
One of the most popular and influential poets of the day, and ironically also one
of the most widely read and innovative, was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Longfellow's poetry was extraordinarily diverse in both form and subject matter
and his work cannot be reduced to a single poem or even a single type of poem.
But it is fair to say that his Hymn To Night is one among many of the poems that
captures the popular literary taste in New England, before Whitman and
Dickinson tuned readers ears to new sounds.