The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863

On 2 November 1863, a Monday evening, Boston's cultural elite packed the Boston Music Hall for the the much-anticipated inauguration ceremony of the new "Great Organ," as it was already widely referred to in the Boston press. In addition to the musical part of the program, the noted Shakespearean actress Charlotte Cushman was to preface the concert by reciting an ode specially written for the inauguration. Cushman had by this time in the Civil War won a considerable reputation for her benefit performances on behalf of the Union troops, performances that boosted her own acting career as well as her social respectability. The organizers of the inauguration ceremony had invited Cushman to recite some months before the dedication; seeking a poet to write a commemorative ode, the organizers turned to Cushman's friend, Annie Fields, to write a poem for the occasion. ¹ Although Annie and James T. Fields as a couple stood at the acknowledged center of Boston's literary elite, thanks to James Fields's editorship of the Atlantic Monthly and partnership in the publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields, Annie Fields herself was, as of November 1863, an aspiring but relatively little-published poet. (Some seven of her lyrics had appeared by then, anonymously or under a pseudonym, in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly.) The organ "Ode," then, constituted Annie Fields's debut as a poet of significant public ambition. The ode's authorship, although not publicly acknowledged in the ceremony, was an open secret among Boston's literati, and the poem was printed and distributed in program copies, in the Boston newspapers, and in an independent private printing. ² Under these distinctly mixed performance circumstances--of quasi-anonymous authorship, with her spoken words deferred to the female body of a professional actress--Fields would stake her claim to the status of civic poet laureate in her "Ode." She and James Fields celebrated the occasion on 2 November with a small dinner before the inauguration ceremony and concert. They invited Nathaniel Hawthorne, a family friend and, of course, one of Ticknor and Fields's most important authors, to come along with them; he declined, but his daughter Una attended both the dinner and the ceremony with the couple. A wider roster of guests, including Dr. and Mrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Julia Ward Howe, returned to the Fieldses' house for a reception following the concert. ³

My purpose in this essay is to bring forward for reading a slice of Boston's high culture of public poetry, circa 1863-beginning with this civic performance of poetry from late 1863, the reading of Fields's "Ode" at the inauguration of the Great Organ in the Boston Music Hall, and working backwards to another civic performance of poetry at the beginning of 1863, Ralph Waldo Emerson's recitation of his "Boston Hymn," also in the Boston Music Hall, at the 1 January ceremony celebrating the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation. I understand these texts and their public occasions as a set of skirmishes in a localized intra-elite culture war over the legitimacy of the religion of art in the city at war--a quarrel with ramifications reaching beyond Boston, and beyond 1863. This small culture war of 1863 illustrates something of the different and changing conditions under which women and men of Boston's literary elite entered the sphere of civic poetry in this historical moment. It dramatizes important nineteenth-century contests in the relations between poetry and oratory, over poetry as public performance and form of civil rhetoric, and over the autonomy of the field of culture. It places poetry in the larger story of the emergence of an autonomous realm of high culture in the late-nineteenth-century US. ⁴ It underlines poetry's role in the constitution of a nineteenth-century aestheticized...