Critical Appreciations
"The proportion of his poetry that can be so called is small. But a
great deal of it is very fine, very noble, and at times very
beautiful, and it discloses the distinctly poetic faculty of which
rhythmic and figurative is native expression. It is impressionable
rather than imaginative in the large sense; it is felicitous in detail
rather than in design; and of a general rather than individual, a
representative rather than original, inspiration. There is a field of
poetry, assuredly not the highest, but ample and admirable--in which
these qualities, more or less unsatisfactory in prose, are
legitimately and fruitfully exercised. All poetry is in the realm of
feeling, and thus less exclusively dependent on the thought that is
the sole reliance of prose. Being genuine poetry, Lowell's profits by
this advantage. Feeling is fitly, genuinely, its inspiration. Its
range and limitations correspond to the character of his
susceptibility, as those of his prose do to that of his thought. The
fusion of the two in the crucible of the imagination is infrequent
with him, because with him it is the fancy rather than the imagination
that is luxuriant and highly developed. For the architectonics of
poetry he had not the requisite reach and grasp, the comprehensive and
constructing vision. Nothing of his has any large design or effective
interdependent proportions. In a technical way an exception should be
noted in his skilful building of the ode--a form in which he was
extremely successful and for which he evidently had a native aptitude
... Lowell's constitutes, on the whole, the most admirable American
contribution to the nature poetry of English literature--far beyond
that of Bryant, Whittier, or Longfellow, I think, and only
occasionally excelled here and there by the magic touch of
Emerson."--_W. C. Brownell_, in _Scribner's Magazine_, _February,_
1907.
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"Lowell is a poet who seems to represent New England more variously
than either of his comrades. We find in his work, as in theirs, her
loyalty and moral purpose. She has been at cost for his training, and
he in turn has read her heart, honoring her as a mother before the
world, and seeing beauty in her common garb and speech.... If Lowell
be not first of all an original genius, I know not where to look for
one. Judged by his personal bearing, who is brighter, more persuasive,
more equal to the occasion than himself,--less open to Doudan's
stricture upon writers who hoard and store up their thoughts for the
betterment of their printed works? Lowell's treasury can stand the
drafts of both speech and composition. Judged by his works, as a poet
in the end must be, he is one who might gain by revision and
compression. But think, as is his due, upon the high-water marks of
his abundant tide, and see how enviable the record of a poet who is
our most brilliant and learned critic, and who has given us our best
native idyll, our best and most complete work in dialectic verse, and
the noblest heroic ode that America has produced--each and all ranking
with the first of their kinds in English literature of the modern
time."--_Edmund Clarence Stedman_.
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"As a racy humorist and a brilliant wit using verse as an instrument
of expression, he has no clear superior, probably no equal, so far at
least as American readers are concerned, among writers who have
employed the English language. As a satirist he has superiors, but
scarcely as an inventor of _jeux d'esprit_. As a patriotic lyrist he
has few equals and very few superiors in what is probably the highest
function of such a poet--that of stimulating to a noble height the
national instincts of his countrymen.... The rest of his poetry may
fairly be said to gain on that of any of his American contemporaries
save Poe in more sensuous rhythm, in choicer diction, in a more
refined and subtilized imagination, and in a deeper, a more brooding
intelligence."--_Prof. William P. Trent_.
* * * * *
"In originality, in virility, in many-sidedness, Lowell is the first
of American poets. He not only possessed, at times in nearly equal
measure, many of the qualities most notable in his fellow-poets,
rivaling Bryant as a painter of nature, and Holmes in pathos, having
a touch too of Emerson's transcendentalism, and rising occasionally to
Whittier's moral fervor, but he brought to all this much beside. In
one vein he produced such a masterpiece of mingled pathos and nature
painting as we find in the tenth Biglow letter of the second series;
in another, such a lyric gem as _The Fountain_; in another, _The First
Snow-Fall_ and _After the Burial_; in another, again, the noble
_Harvard Commemoration Ode_.... He had plainly a most defective ear
for rhythm and verbal harmony. Except when he confines himself to
simple metres, we rarely find five consecutive lines which do _not_ in
some way jar on us. His blank verse and the irregular metres which he,
unfortunately, so often employs, have little or no music, and are
often quite intolerable. But after all the deductions which the most
exacting criticism can make, it still remains that, as a serious poet
Lowell stands high. As a painter of nature, he has, when at his best,
few superiors, and, in his own country, none. Whatever be their
esthetic and technical deficiencies, he has written many poems of
sentiment and pathos which can never fail to come home to all to whom
such poetry appeals. His hortatory and didactic poetry, as it
expresses itself in the _Commemoration Ode_, is worthy, if not of the
music and felicity of Milton and Wordsworth, at least of their tone,
when that tone is most exalted. As a humorist he is inimitable. His
humor is rooted in a fine sense of the becoming, and in a profounder
insight into the character of his countrymen than that of any other
American writer."--_John Churton Collins_.
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"He was a brilliant wit and a delightful humorist; a discursive
essayist of unfailing charm; the best American critic of his time; a
scholar of wide learning, deep also when his interest was most
engaged; a powerful writer on great public questions; a patriot
passionately pure; but first, last, and always he was a poet, never
so happy as when he was looking at the world from the poet's mount of
vision and seeking for fit words and musical to tell what he had seen.
But his emotion was not sufficiently 'recollected in tranquillity.'
Had he been more an artist he would have been a better poet, for then
he would have challenged the invasions of his literary memory, his
humor, his animal spirits, within limits where they had no right of
way. If his humor was his rarest, it was his most dangerous gift; so
often did it tempt him to laugh out in some holy place.... Less
charming than Longfellow, less homely than Whittier, less artistic
than Holmes, less grave than Bryant, less vivid than Emerson, less
unique than Poe, his qualities, intellectual, moral and esthetic, in
their assemblage and cooerdination assign him to a place among American
men of letters which is only a little lower than that which is
Emerson's and his alone."--_John White Chadwick_.