The American Poets Longfellow!

Our book today is a lovely old slip-cased thing from 1945: the volume of Louis Untermeyer’s “American Poets” series dedicated to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This series was done up very prettily: solid binding, high-quality paper, and original artwork for each volume – in this case, wood engravings by Boyd Hanna that are as wonderful on still scenes and animals as they are cringe-worthy when it comes to depicting actual human beings.

The volumes in this wonderful series serve as a reminder of what a great editor and general all-purpose book-organizer Untermeyer could be, despite the off-kilter and ramshackle mess his life almost always was. In this case, he oversaw the creation of a Longfellow volume fit to stand alongside the many very pretty such volumes publishers had created in the last century, betokening Longfellow’s status as the most popular and beloved poet in the United States. And in addition to the artwork and the technical quality of the thing, there’s also what for some readers would have been the main selling point: an Introduction by Untermeyer himself that’s absolutely wonderful, full of pith and politely borrowed cadences.

In the brief essay, Untermeyer tells Longfellow’s story, from his birth in Portland, Maine in 1807 to his impulsive three-year-long trip to Europe when he was a newly-minted eighteen-year-old Bowdoin College graduate, a trip that Untermeyer shrewdly characterizes as something of a wake-up call for Longfellow, who never gazed upon an ancient cathedral or dusty heap of ruins without pining for the New World:

But he was not meant to be an expatriate. He missed the trim orderliness, the whitewashed tranquility of New England, the wineglass elms, the dark evergreens, the flaming maples, the walled cornfields studded with golden pumpkins. Europe, after all, was too European; it had no “orchards by the roadside, no slab fences, no well-poles, no painted cottages with huge barns and outhouses ornamented in front with monstrous piles of wood for winter-firing.” There was nothing, he confessed in a burst of homesickness, “to bring to the mind of an American a remembrance of the beautiful villages of his native land.”

And as generations of schoolchildren once knew, it was that fresh, beautiful New World that formed the very breath of Longfellow’s poems, filling such pieces as “The Herons of Elmwood” with its flashing autumnal grandeur:

Warm and still is the summer night,

As here by the river’s bank I wander’

White overhead are the stars, and white

The glimmering lamps on the hillside yonder.

Silent are all the sounds of day,

Nothing I hear but the chirp of crickets,

And the cry of the herons winging on their way

O’er the poet’s house in the Elmwood thickets.

Call to him, herons, as slowly you pass

To your roosts in the haunts of the exiled thrushes,

Sing him the song of the green morass,

And the tides that water the reeds and rushes.

…

Sing to him, say to him, here at his gate,

Where the boughs of the stately elms are meeting,

Some one hath lingered to meditate,

And send him unseen this friendly greeting;

That many another had done the same,

Though not by a sound was the silence broken;

The surest pledge of a deathless name

Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken.

But Untermeyer goes beyond simple biography in his splendid Introduction. In the 1940s, writing about the universally famous author of “The Song of Hiawatha,” “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” and “Evangeline,” our smiling editor knew he was addressing an audience that both knew Longfellow well and was also beginning to feel the strong undertows of the modernist versifying that would very soon, within the generation, consign Longfellow to an oblivion not even the most fanatical betting man would have predicted in the day’s of the poet’s fame. To that unsettled audience, Untermeyer feels the need to clarify – almost to re-introduce – the foremost poet of their parents’ generation:

Longfellow is not for those who demand ecstasy; yet what he lacks in force is made up in finesse. The verse is delicate, at times even thin; but it has an unusually even tone, an extraordinarily fine-grained texture. Such poetry is not heaven-shaking; it rarely strives for passionate heights. Nor does it probe psychological depths. But it maintains itself on its own unperilous level; it persists quietly in the mind as well as in the heart. It expresses a kindliness which is spontaneous, and a homeliness which is winning because it is so straightforward.

Untermeyer’s selections in this volume lean in the direction of that homeliness; softly-sighing pieces like “Hymn to the Night” crop up throughout the volume:

I heard the trailing garments of the Night

Sweep through her marble halls!

I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light

From the celestial walls!

I felt her presence, by its spell of might,

Stoop o’er me from above;

The calm, majestic presence of the Night,

As of the one I love.

It’s a melancholy thing, to find one of these stately old volumes at the outdoor Brattle sale carts. Once upon a time, they sat proudly on retail bookshop shelves, priced for special occasions, ready to be restocked for college graduations and faculty retirement parties. Once upon a time, the poets honored in this “American Poets” series were the everywhere-recognized titans of the art. Now, in 2016, handing a literate person a gift volume of Longfellow would have to be accompanied by a lip-curl of irony in order to make any sense, and that process was well underway when this great series first appeared. But there’s sometimes a pendulum to these things, the hopeful remind themselves.