Bret Harte’s “The Poetry of the Centennial”: A Recovered Essay

“Did you publish the Critique on the Centennial Poems?” Bret Harte queried Charles A. Dana, the editor of the New York Sun, in a letter dated 16 July 1877 and sent from Washington, D.C.¹ He referred to a review he had contributed to the paper of Our National Centennial Jubilee: Orations, Addresses and Poems delivered on the Fourth of July 1876, a compilation of over a hundred items. In fact, this review, new to scholarship, had been printed the day before.² Written six years after his triumphant arrival in the East after his literary successes in California but as his career was in decline, Harte had been ostracized by his former friends and patrons at Fields, Osgood and Co., the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly. Often credited with saving the Atlantic in the wake of the scandal over the publication in the magazine of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Lady Byron Vindicated,” Harte would not even be invited to the celebration of John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday hosted by the Atlantic staff in Boston in mid-December 1877. Harte’s unsigned review in the Sun clearly was designed to settle some old scores. Among his primary targets were Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose books were issued by Harte’s former publisher; William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York Evening Post, which had recently panned Harte’s play Two Men of Sandy Bar;³ and Bayard Taylor, with whom Harte apparently had a falling out after he accompanied both Bryant and Harte on a cruise to Cuba in January 1872.⁴ The review also slighted Walt Whitman’s verse in passing. For the record, Harte had declined Whitman’s “Passage to India” for publication in the Overland Monthly in 1870.⁵ After criticizing all of these well-known canonical poets, Harte singled out for praise the centennial oration of an obscure Southern orator, Alfred R. Lamar.

The Poetry of the Centennial

It must be confessed that the average American poet is rarely equal to the average American occasion. Of course it will be borne in mind that a people who make and ignore history as rapidly as we do must require for all national or political uses a bard with an exceedingly lively and supple spine and a faculty of falling upon his feet in a graceful pose after each new turn. On looking over the thick octavo volume lying on our table for some time past, entitled Our National Jubilee (E. B Treat),⁶ containing both the great orations and the great poems of last year’s Independence Day, we are satisfied that such a poet has not yet appeared.

It is possible that on previous occasions Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes has approached nearer the ideal American bard than any other. But the Doctor’s muse, although always graceful, always fastidious, always correct, and often glowing with lyrical fire, has been invariably a local muse, wearing on wet days an aquascutum [watershield] and sandalled with “arctics”—that she has on important occasions rather voiced the proper sentiment of Boston, Chelsea, Roxbury, and the suburban towns, than the broader feeling of the American people. That Boston, Harvard College, the Puritan descendants, and romantic New England literary history lie under deep obligations to Dr. Holmes for his readiness and grace in sounding their praises, will, we think, be universally admitted; but that he ever understood or appreciated the meaning of as broad an American as Abraham Lincoln typified will, we think, in the years to come, be as promptly denied. In the volume before us, unfortunately, we have only the Doctor’s manner—a good manner, a correct manner, but highly suggestive of Gilmore rather than of Thomas⁷—a peal of artillery after each verse, a blowing of trumpets after certain lines, and always, among the audience, that peculiar movement of the foot and hand with which the rustic is apt in his recitation of poetry to mark its rhyme and accent its quantity. We confess that, finding Dr. Holmes’s name among the poets in this astounding collection...