Guy Vernon: A Novelette in Verse by John Townsend Trowbridge (review)

Well, what do you know. William Logan, able poet and a critic who causes fallible poets to tremble, is a competent scholar too. Now he has dusted off a neglected gem of narrative verse that dates from 1878, corrected its text by the light of the author's personal copy, draped it with laborious notes, some of them glossing common words like fop, mulatto, and anterior, and provided a thorough and entertaining introduction. The resulting book brings out a new minor star in the firmament of American poetry.

Once upon a time, the shorter poems of John Townsend Trowbridge (1827-1916) were highly regarded, to judge by the inclusion of passages from ten of them in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, edition of 1919. This one, from "Author's Night," states an insight with a striking metaphor:

If you will observe, it doesn't takeA man of giant mould to makeA giant shadow on the wall;And he who but in daily sightSeems but a figure mean and small,Outlined in Fame's illusive light,May stalk, a silhouette sublime,Across the canvas of his time.

But Trowbridge, when remembered anymore, rates a footnote in literary history not for his poetry but for his friendships with Emerson, Whitman, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Longfellow; and another footnote for his anti-slavery polemics and his sympathetic postwar travel book The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, which Edmund Wilson mentions in Patriotic Gore. Unfortunately for his posthumous reputation, Trowbridge made his living as editor of a forgotten children's magazine and as a hack writer, grinding out a flock of mildly successful plays and forty or so novels, some of them juvenile adventure stories, others with titles like Kate the Accomplice, or, The Preacher and the Burglar, and Father Brighthopes, or, An Old Clergyman's Vacation. Understandably, this immense Grub Street output has failed to escape oblivion. I can claim one slight personal connection to Trowbridge's work: my father, born in 1896, used to speak with enthusiasm of the Jack Hazard books, which he gobbled up as a boy.

Guy Vernon is a different case. In its witty, skillful management of a demanding verse form, it stands apart from Trowbridge's other work, and the history of its publication is curious. Originally, it came out in an anthology, A Masque of Poets, whose editors in following a fashion then current made the book a guessing game by keeping its contributors anonymous. Another nameless contributor was, of all people, Emily Dickinson, whose friend Helen Hunt Jackson had submitted "Success is counted sweetest," one of the eight poems printed in Dickinson's lifetime.

Logan has treated Guy Vernon with more respect than its author did. Trowbridge seems not to have realized what a rare thing he had wrought. He did not publicly admit to having written it until 1903, and, perhaps disheartened by sour reviews, left it out of his Poetical Works. As Logan tells us, Trowbridge was never to write another such sustained work of satiric verse again, and by and by he drifted away from poetry.

This rediscovered prize is a story poem in 362 seven-line stanzas, resembling Byron's Don Juan in its sophistication, bouncy rhythm, and comic rhyming ("The father, ghastly pale, perspiring clammily, / Over some fearful secret in the family"). Taking place shortly before the Civil War and soon after, it tells how Vernon, a rich Lousiana planter, marries a lovely younger woman exotically named Florinda. He takes her on a trip to Havana, where he suddenly grows cold and wild-eyed, and packs the bewildered girl off to Brooklyn to await his pleasure. The plot becomes triangular. On the ship returning to the States, Florinda reencounters a former suitor, lovelorn Rob Lorne, a dour young hack writer and aspiring poet. We might expect the two to launch a seaboard affair, but I...