“Emily Dickinson at the post office,” by William Logan (original) (raw)

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson invented an American poetry that owed little to the traditions that long bedeviled London. To read our poetry from Bradstreet, Taylor, Freneau, and Wheatley through Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow is to see poets haunted by manners and methods practiced across the Atlantic—not by the great or greatish poets, but their replacements, the cod-Keatses, junkyard Shelleys, and the like. Even in the post-Revolutionary colonies, when the subjects are American, whether Freneau’s “The Indian Burying Ground,” Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” or decades later Longfellow’s quite silly The Song of Hiawatha, there’s scarcely a whisper of American idiom or American attitude. The poems could have been written in Harley Street or the bustle of Piccadilly Circus. Hiawatha’s meter was Finnish.

It takes an individual or corrupted imagination for colonial poetry to sever its ties to the mother country. Whitman responded to the clarion call of Emerson’s essay “The Poet” (1844), where the Sage of Concord remarked,

We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer.

Why shouldn’t the American poet use as his subject the American scene?

Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity