“Funny—to be a Century,” said one of the very greatest poets of hers, And see the People—going by— I—should die of the Oddity— But then—I’m not so staid as He. Here, as usual, Emily Dickinson manages to grasp firmly, in a few words, a problem that taxed some of the best philosophical minds of her day: because we exist inevitably in time, we cannot see time from an unmoving point above it. Our view of history, of the past, is itself historical, conditioned by our present, ever-changing circumstances. To know the world the way staid, old “He” does would be, in effect, to die. Rather than a real segment of history that we discover and describe, a century is a construction we place upon historical data according to our own interests and intentions. Indeed, it is only quite recently, as the world goes, that historians began to think in terms of centuries at all or that people in general started thinking of themselves, the way we do, as living in one. Before 1800, history tended to come in other packages: reigns, ages, eras, millennia, and the like. The “Nineteenth Century,” in other words, is itself a nineteenth-century idea; and like all timely notions, this one has changed over time. The nineteenth century is not the same thing to us as it was to those who lived in it. It was not even the same thing to all of them, any more than it is to all of us—as it would be if we could all see it from outside history rather than from our various historical situations.

Location 44

There is, second, the assumption that poetry, like the nineteenth century, is a single, recognizable entity: in the case of this anthology, a form of writing that differs from prose by virtue of being broken into lines. Poetry in this sense is verse. The word, however, is also commonly used to designate writing of especial eloquence, suggestiveness, emotional effect, and the like. In that sense, poetry and verse may be very different things. To William Cullen Bryant, poetry had to be verse. Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, distinguished sharply between versifiers and poets. Edgar Allan Poe called his cosmological essay Eureka: A Prose Poem. To Walt Whitman, versification got in the way of poetry. He moved passages back and forth between his poems and prefaces without alteration. Comparing the jagged rhythms of Battle-Pieces and Clarel to the perfect blank-verse passages of Moby-Dick, more than one critic has opined that Melville was a poet only in prose.

Location 63

Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, and Poe were all Americans, to be sure. But what do their poems have in common that we could agree to call American? Often thought of as the most American poets of their time, they differ from one another as much as they do from their contemporaries elsewhere in the English-speaking world. They all wrote as they did, no doubt, at least partly because they lived in America, rather than somewhere else, and thought of themselves as Americans. These conditioning factors, however, surely influenced these poets far less than did the (mostly non-American) poetry they read and admired. And even if their nationality conditioned their writing more than did all other factors put together, it takes so many different forms in their work that the word “American” ends up denoting little more than whatever certain American poets happen, for whatever reasons, to have done.

Location 77

This is not to say what many nineteenth-century poets themselves believed: that true poetry is timeless. On the contrary, poems, like everything else, arise out of specific historical situations and are received amidst circumstances equally historical. What enables certain poems to escape their original occasions and to be read with pleasure and interest at later, very different times—to remain poems—is not timelessness but timeliness, an appearance of being as true and as pertinent to the world in which they are read as to the one in which they were written. Indeed, poetry may be said to be historically determined, insofar as only time will tell which poems will outlive their originating moment and how long they will do so.

Location 97

In the first place, the century carved out here has a beginning and an ending that are at once poetic and American. The period opens with a revolution in the way English poetry was written—or at least with the emergence of a sort of poetry so unfamiliar that many readers refused to call it poetry at all. Known to us as Romantic, this poetic revolution is usually said to have erupted in 1798, with the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, including that Romantic locus classicus, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the story of one man’s complete change of being as a result of his voyage from the Old World to the New. Our century then closes with a second, equally momentous poetic revolution, that triggered by the migration of the Americans Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot to London and the publication of Pound’s Personae (1908) and Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917).

Location 114

This revision of America’s perceived role in the evolution of English poetry has had, in turn, an effect on established ideas concerning the earlier, Romantic, revolution as a distinctly British phenomenon. Even if the poetic symptoms of upheaval first appeared in England and spread to the United States, their root causes have come to seem more and more American, first as scholars like John Livingstone Lowes unearthed the devotion of the young Wordsworth and Coleridge to narratives of New-World exploration, and more recently as literary historians have begun to think about the wholesale changes undergone by the English language as a result of its rapidly expanding presence in America and of America in the language, after 1500—a reciprocal development at once vividly displayed in writings of the sort that charmed the authors of Lyrical Ballads and largely responsible for the linguistic changes that seemed to them to demand a new poetry.

Location 126

By the later nineteenth century, there were more English-speakers in North America than in Great Britain; and as a result of this demographic shift, Boston and New York began to compete with London as the stylistic capital of the English-speaking world, the place where changes in the language were legislated and approved. Progressive Americans and Britons alike came to see the United States not as a rude province of the language, far removed from its elegant center, but as its advancing frontier, the place where things happened and the future came first into view. It is this feeling of newly won linguistic authority that pervades Emerson’s essay “The Poet” (1844) and Whitman’s original preface to Leaves of Grass (1855) and would lead Matthew Arnold, in 1883, to rank Emerson with Wordsworth as one of the century’s two most important writers of English.

Location 142

As Whitman never tired of saying, America is at once potentially the greatest poem and the threshold of the modern; to be modern, poetry must be American; and to be truly American, everyone must become a modern poet. Poetic, Modern, American: the three adjectives are virtually synonymous.

Location 156

And yet, a collection that included only those nineteenth-century poets most agreeable to present ideas of poetry would fail to show how truly unusual they were in their own time. The poems of Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville can come so close to current ideas of what poetry is and does that they may seem quite conventional, even natural, the way Hemingway’s prose and Mar lon Brando’s acting do, now that their once revolutionary styles have become virtual commonplaces. Only when we read these poetic innovators alongside the recognized giants of their day do we begin to see how truly extraordinary they are; why they remained either undervalued, unread, or altogether unknown in their own time; and, not least, how much any apparent resemblances among them consist in their differences from everyone else. What Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville manage to do depends heavily on what they decided not to do, on the ideas and methods of poetry they rejected.

Location 161

To readers accustomed to such modern poetic values as informality, colloquialism, compactness, concreteness, ambiguity, and difficulty, the poems of Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes are apt to seem rhetorically inflated, formally contrived, and morally simplistic—in a word, artificial. No one who reads much in the verse of these poets, never mind that of their less able contemporaries, will wonder at the feelings of suffocation that would send the Modernists screaming for the exits in search of unbreathed air—only to find Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville there before them. The effects of including the so-called Fireside Poets are by no means entirely negative, however. Their poems may seem to us unnatural—which is to say, unlike our own. But who is to say that ours are natural, rather than obedient to a set of conventions just as artificial and hence just as apt to disappear in time?

Location 169

It is Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville, however, who occupy the center of this anthology and command the bulk of its pages. These are the poets in whose ability to speak directly to our ears, modern poetry has recognized its forebears. They stand almost alone among poets of their time in regarding poetry as a necessary medium of knowledge concerning matters of ultimate importance, rather than as a haven for religious sentiment in an increasingly secular world or as an innocent pastime for the leisure hours of otherwise busy and useful people. Whereas Bryant, Longfellow, and Lowell entertain such troubling problems as religious doubt, personal loss, and social change, as a rule, to prepare the way for consoling reassurances of the most acceptable sort, Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville stare the hard questions of their day straight in the face and force them to deliver their own answers without the assistance of unexamined pieties or moral cant. If this deadly seriousness leads them, at times, into obscurity, irregularity, or inconclu siveness, these are the costs of framing a new language for a new world. Above all, while the Fireside Poets are masters at generating such sentiments as nostalgia, melancholy, wistful longing, and, when the occasion calls, righteous indignation, their verse generally lacks what has always been considered the essence of poetry, that aura of mystery that surrounds poems like Emerson’s “Days,” Poe’s “Eldorado,” Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and Melville’s “Pebbles,” rendering them impervious to paraphrase or final explication.

Location 182

The picture drawn by this assembly of poems is one of poetry gradually coming to terms with a new world by divesting itself of inherited methods and fashioning altogether different ones. The road from Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is very long, but it can be seen to pass through the metrical irregularities of Emerson, Poe’s symbolisms, Whitman’s free-verse evocations of the modern city, Dickinson’s densely impacted style, Melville’s self-sufficient images, Tuckerman’s obscurely personal allusions, and Robinson’s psychological themes. This picture of unilinear change is, of course, illusory in that the nineteenth-century American poetry on offer here is an editorial construction, not an organism or a biological species capable of evolution. A different selection of poems written in English by Americans between 1800 and 1900 might describe an altogether different development, or none at all. There were more poets like Bryant writing in the last quarter of the century than there were in the first, owing to the growing popularity during those years of his once innovative Words worthian style. There were, on the other hand, not many more poets like Melville or Robinson writing at the end of the century than there were a half century earlier, in the days of Emerson and Poe.

Location 248

If anything unites nineteenth-century poets as a group and distinguishes them from those who came before and after, it is their shared consciousness of living in a time of thoroughgoing and unprecedented change in every arrangement of life— social, political, intellectual, economic, material, and demographic—changes that would, in the view of Henry Adams, put the year 1800 closer to the Middle Ages than to the turn of the twentieth century. The overthrow of authoritarian regimes and the institution of democracies throughout Europe and the Americas; rapid industrialization and the explosion of technology; the mass migration of long-settled populations from farms and villages to cities, from the Old World to the New, and from the eastern United States to the western territories; the steep rise in literacy and in the production of printed materials to supply the new market; the infinite extension of the known universe both spatially and temporally, thanks to modern science; the desanctification of nature by Darwin, of culture by Marx, and of the mind by Freud and the delivery of these former habitations of God over to what Melville called “the eternal tides of time and fate”—these upheavals and a thousand others like them conspired to detach the present utterly from the past and set it adrift toward an unknown destination. Like every other department of knowledge, poetry responded in different ways to this dizzying panoply of change. Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes labored mightily to explain the present in past terms. Emerson saw the decline of past authorities as an opportunity to rediscover in the present those timeless truths that had become buried in time. Poe considered the loss irretrievable and made poetry its only mitigation and constant reminder. Jones Very fled the changing present to an ever-present God, Thoreau to the transcendent self. Tuckerman set his sonnets the task of finding some consolation for his unforgettable loss. Whitman sought to make the present, in all its variety and instability, explain the past anew and reveal the future. Dickinson wrote poem after poem in an attempt to reach that state of timeless being that Very reported and Emerson envisioned. Melville wedded seriousness and irony in a poetic idiom capable of confronting the present without either pointless regret or groundless hope.

Location 258

For Barlow (that is, for the poet implied by his poems), poetry is a largely public act, the exposition in an approved poetic form of views deemed worthy of general adoption. Indeed, since these views are seldom argued or explained, the readers addressed seem already to hold them, at least in general outline. Their enunication, therefore, serves not so much to bring the reader to the speaker’s way of thinking as to proclaim the speaker someone much like his audience. The poems have about them an air of ritual performance, like that of a commencement address, whose purpose is to tighten the communal bonds between the speaker and his readers. Except, perhaps, for his ability to array commonly held values in especially witty, eloquent, or original figures, and to set these easily in recognized verse-forms, nothing distinguishes the poet from his audience or singles him out as an authority for the things said.

Location 280

In 1798, the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge introduced a poetry so unusual as to be hardly recognizable, prompting Wordsworth to argue in his preface to the second edition that poetry is not what readers suppose but what poets do, while poets are not just producers of what poetry is supposed to be but individuals of exceptional sensitivity and insight, capable of apprehending and expressing the supernatural atmosphere in which ordinary life unconsciously proceeds. Instead of confirming what readers already know, poetry of this sort puts them in touch with dimensions of existence previously unrealized but immediately recognizable when displayed in the movements of the poet’s uniquely responsive soul.

Note: There’s something in here in the flight from the demotic [e]

Location 287

The thirty-five years of Whitman’s life leading up to the first edition of Leaves of Grass seem hardly to prepare for that momentous poetic event. Born on Long Island, he grew up in Brooklyn, where, after leaving public school at thirteen, he worked as a printer, as an itinerant schoolteacher, then as an editor and correspondent for various newspapers, churning out hack writing of every imaginable variety: reports, features, editorials, verse and pulp fiction, even a temperance novel. In 1848, he spent three months as an editor in New Orleans, where he is supposed to have undergone a transforming personal experience of some sort, returning in the guise of the rough and hearty “camerado” his later poems would celebrate.

Location 2629

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.   I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.   My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same,

Note: Montaignean “I am the subject/ interline rhyme

Location 2652

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death.

Location 2656

I permit to speak at every hazard,

Location 2658

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

Location 2660

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.     The smoke of my own breath, Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine, My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs, The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind, A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms, The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag, The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides, The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.     Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Note: p(A) ends with a general category, for p(B) to explode with specific instances of that category, so p(C) can then flip perspective back to the reader.

Location 2664

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Location 2674

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

Location 2677

Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world.   Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.

Location 2681

I and this mystery here we stand.

Location 2686

Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,

Location 2695

Trippers and askers surround me, People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself.

Note: “Surround me” as the frame for a list sentence that is shards of specificity with broken grammar, only resolving and generalizing near the end.

Robots and hucksters surround me, slang parrots too, the conscious and self-conscious and unconscious, the new brokers of language, degenerates drunk off never ending spouts of answer, policemen of virtue threatening to cut finger and tongues, a tidal cloud of caution and paranoia in innocent marks, the distant dead, family strangers, and virtual faces that bloom into living rooms of fleshcave, holding babe, Paul Staples in and out your window as far as the eye can see, Paul Staples the shapeshifting barista, Paul Staples the face in the clouds and the soul of fifteen rats who devour each other over street pizza, Paul Staples the memetic oversoul, Paul Staples with tragically no documents to cohere, Paul Staples without condiments, Paul Staples without condoms, Paul Staple the town mayor with only one law that you must breed with only Paul Staples, Paul not Paul, Faul Paul Faul, an infinite carousel who feeds me Fpaul more frequently than one in six, casino in car, casino in my walks, the phantasmagoricon that seizures my eyes and gets me cursing water, the flooooop of everything, the patterns, the maxims, discounts, the celebration dances and small talk, squeezing my kingdom into your plastic coin purse, desire leaking beyond pot brims, the exaltation of lax, the racks of lactation, the smarmification of reason and reasons and reasoning, devolving into AI-generated smurf conferences revealing all possible reproduction angles in rapid-succession split cuts, the doo dah dog band and other cultural flotsam, illegal jingles in CVS, check out counter revolutions, Knicks riots that smoke out anchorite ogres who wait until the divination of kairos to bend metal, Wembuyama hung, bedlam, all just a mosaic streamed through revolving prisms that once turned off reveal everything is quite normal, quite happy, quite of my own virtue and making, quite making me wonder why one would keep even a very small vile of unlabeled rotten milk with half-potent LSD from Marty P in their fridge next to breakfast.

Location 2698

from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,

Note: List of adj

Location 2703

Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.   Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

Location 2705

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.   I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

Location 2710

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.

Location 2717

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

Location 2720

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?   Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.   Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff,81 I give them the same, I receive them the same.   And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.   Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps, And here you are the mothers’ laps.   This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.   O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.   I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.   What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.   All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Location 2723

In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing, To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing, Absorbing all to myself and for this song.   Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

Location 2814

The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats, The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings, I see in them and myself the same old law.   The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections, They scorn the best I can do to relate them.   I am enamour’d of growing out-doors, Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses, I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.

Location 2826

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuff’d with the stuff that…

Location 2877

A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest, A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons, Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.   I resist any thing better than my own diversity, Breathe the air but leave plenty after me, And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

Location 2885

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.   This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This the common air that bathes the globe.

Location 2892

natural hunger, It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all, I will not have a single person slighted or left away, The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited, The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee86 is invited; There shall be no difference between them and the rest.   This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair, This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning, This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face, This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

Location 2905

Do you take it I would astonish? Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods? Do I astonish more than they?   This hour I tell things in confidence, I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

Location 2912