Has America Produced a Poet? by Edmund Gosse

For the audacious query which stands at the head of this essay, it is not I, but an American editor, who must bear the blame, if blame there be. It would never have occurred to me to tie such a firebrand to the tail of any of my little foxes. He gave it to me, just as Mr. Pepys gave _Gaze not on Swans_ to ingenious Mr. Birkenshaw, to make the best I could of a bad argument. On the face of it the question is absurd. There lies on my table a manual of American poetry by Mr. Stedman, in which the meed of immortality is awarded to about one hundred of Columbia's sons and daughters. No one who has a right to express an opinion is likely to deny that the learning, fidelity, and catholic taste which are displayed in this book are probably at this time of day shared, in the same degree, with its author, by no other living Anglo-Saxon writer. Why, then, should not Mr. Stedman's admirable volume be taken as a complete and satisfactory answer to our editor's query? Simply because everything is relative, and because it may be amusing to apply to the subject of Mr. Stedman's criticism a standard more cosmopolitan and much less indulgent than his. Mr. Stedman has mapped out the heavens with a telescope; what can an observer detect with the naked eye?

There is an obvious, and yet a very stringent, sense in which no good critic could for a moment question that America has produced poets. A poet is a maker, a man or woman who expresses some mood of vital passion in a new manner and with adequate art. Turning to the accepted ranks of English literature, Tickell is a poet on the score of his one great elegy on Addison, and Wolfe, a century later, by his _Burial of Sir John Moore_. Those poems were wholly new and impassioned, and time has no effect upon the fame of their writers. So long as English poetry continues to be studied a little closely, Tickell and Wolfe will be visible as diminutive fixed stars in our poetical firmament. But in a rapid and superficial glance, Wolfe and Tickell disappear. Let the glance be more and more rapid, and only a few planets of the first magnitude are seen. In the age before Elizabeth, Chaucer alone remains; of the Elizabethan galaxy, so glittering and rich, we see at length only Spenser and Shakespeare; then come successive splendours of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns; then a cluster again of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Last of all, still too low on the horizon to be definitely measured, Tennyson and Browning. Fifteen names in all, a sum which might be reduced to ten, perhaps, but never to fewer than ten, nor expanded, on the same scale, beyond eighteen or twenty at the outside. These fifteen are the great English poets, the selected glory and pride of five centuries, the consummation of the noblest dynasty of verse which the world has ever seen. What I take to be the problem is, Has America hitherto produced a poet equal to the least of these, raised as high above any possible vacillation of the tide of fashion? What an invidious question!