FIRESIDE POETS

"May is a pious fraud of the almanac," complains James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) in "Under the Willows" (1868). Spring seems to have arrived in New England, but then winter suddenly returns, "like crazy Lear," carrying the dead spring in his arms, "her budding breasts and wan dislustred front / With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard / All overblown." He retreats into his study, "warmly walled with books," where his "wood-fire supplies the sun's defect / Whispering old forest-sagas in its dreams." Sheltered against the unexpected cold outside and comforted by his blazing fireplace inside, the speaker takes a book off his "happy shelf" and creates his own springtime indoors, reading "vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods / Throb thick with merle and mavis all the year" (Complete Poetical Works, p. 383). Never mind that Chaucer's "sweet-showered" April must have been invention, too, a shivering Englishman's memory of his visits to the Mediterranean.

Lowell's poem rehearses a scene one finds, with slight variations, in much of the poetry written in mid-nineteenth-century New England: discouraged by the weather, which, as William James once observed, may change in Boston as many as three times a day, a speaker finds solace and predictability in front of the fireplace, where he, often joining the rest of the family or a circle of congenial friends, will tell a story or read a book. Unsurprisingly, Lowell and three of his colleagues who were also fond of their indoor fires—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), and John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)—became known as the "Fireside Poets." Some historians have argued that William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), who left Massachusetts in 1825 to begin a long and successful career as a newspaper editor in New York, also belonged to, or at least paved the way for, this loose circle of writers.

And a loose circle it was. Superficially at least, Holmes, the witty conversationalist and urbane Harvard doctor, has little in common with Whittier, the humble Quaker and confirmed bachelor from rural Haverill, Massachusetts, who had enjoyed a spotty education at best. Similarly, the Maine-born Longfellow, who studiously kept his political and literary opinions to himself and always refused to speak at public events, seems far removed from the Boston blue-blood diplomat, satirist, and trenchant essayist Lowell. Seen from a modern critical perspective, however, the Fireside Poets—the "worst offenders" in the twentieth-century critic F. O. Matthiessen's catalog of poetic blunderers—all subscribed to similar ideas about the purposes of poetry. For Longfellow and his peers, a poem's proper place was in the home or, more precisely, the parlor. There, a family would listen to the poet's words of wisdom, warmed by his uplifting message as well as by the pleasantly flickering fire before which they had so cheerfully assembled. Poetry should, declared Longfellow, "soothe our worldly passions and inspire us with a love of Heaven and virtue" ("Defence of Poetry," p. 64). While Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was busily searching for an American bard to "chaunt our own times and social circumstance," someone to write about "our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians" (p. 238), Lowell was still invoking the "loftiest muse" who "has ever a household and fireside charm about her" ("Poe," p. 19). The fire in the fireplace was, of course, a metaphor for the poet's imagination, which was to burn brightly especially on cold days but always in a familiar, contained, safely domestic space—in fact, a space often imagined as more feminine than masculine (Roberts, p. 46). Intended to comfort rather than to convert, a typical fireside poem acted as a digestif rather than as a stimulant, allowing the reader to lean back in his rocking chair and get ready for a pleasant nap. Longfellow himself parodied a moment of such postprandial ecstasy in a cartoon drawing of a character he invented for the amusement of his children, Mr. Peter Quince.

POETS AS READERS

That such fantasies about the comforting effect of the "hearth-fire's ruddy glow," in Whittier's phrase (Snow-Bound, in Complete Poetical Works, p. 490), should haven taken hold at a time when Victorian Americans were plotting ways to get rid of fireplaces altogether seems richly ironical, at least from a modern perspective. (The model house featured in Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's book, The American Woman's Home, 1869, included a system of heating and ventilation that supplied hot air from a furnace in the basement to every room.) Considered a major part of the American canon in their own day and a staple in the successive editions of Rufus Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America (1842), the Fireside Poets, pale imitators of the European Romantics, look distinctly minor today: derivative, antiquarian, sentimental, and shallow. The fire that once warmed the cockles of the Victorian American heart is not, the editors of our anthologies agree, the flame that inspires great poetry. Written for literate but not literary Americans, to paraphrase the critic Roy Harvey Pearce, the poems of the firesiders, in which depth was "not far below the surface" (pp. 196–197), had to make way for the much more radical sensibilities expressed in the works of Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.

But such criticism belittles one of the most salient features of American "fireside poetry," one that might make it worthy of reconsideration today, namely the relentless de-emphasis of the author's sovereign authority over his work. What Pearce found missing in fireside poetry—namely the attempt to challenge or transform, rather than minister to, the common reader—could also be interpreted as a rejection of what the modern social theorist Pierre Bourdieu has called "the field of restricted production" (pp. 17–22). Rather than producing poetry only for other producers of poetry or those aspiring to become such, the firesiders were serious in their appreciation for those "Poets Who Only Read and Listen" (to quote the title of a poem by Holmes, p. 292). What the fire-side in these poems epitomizes is a radically reader-centered poetics, a conception of literature not as the divinely inspired creation of the few but as the shared possession of the many. The poet is, above all, a reader himself, a patient listener to stories told and poems passed on by others.

He appears as such in the dedication to Longfellow's collection The Seaside and the Fireside (1850), in which he joins his friends on a twilight walk by the seaside, the grateful recipient of their "words of friendship, comfort, and assistance." He himself is "mostly silent" so as not to disturb them or the ocean with "intrusive talk." When he finally joins his friends (that is to say, his readers) in their home, he does so only after he is sure that no one will object to his presence:

Therefore I hope, as no unwelcome guest,

At your warm fireside, when the lamps are lighted,

To have my place reserved among the rest. 

Nor stand as one unsought and uninvited!

(Complete Poetical Works, p. 99)

The three double negations ("no unwelcome"; "nor . . . unsought"; "nor . . . uninvited") underscore the deliberately diminished role the poet has chosen for himself in poems that are, as he wants us to believe, little more than faithful transcriptions of what others have heard, felt, or seen.

Take "The Fire of Drift-Wood: Devereux Farm, near Marblehead," which Longfellow strategically placed at the juncture between the first part ("By the Seaside") and the second part ("By the Fireside") of The Seaside and the Fireside, at a point where the ocean meets the land. The poem evokes the memory of a day (29 September 1846, according to Longfellow's journal) that he himself had spent remembering the past. In Longfellow's poem, old friends are assembled round the fireplace in a drafty farmhouse near the harbor of Marblehead, Massachusetts, on a stormy, cold, and damp night, swapping stories about vanished friends and events that took place long ago:

We sat within the farm-house old,

Whose windows, looking o'er the bay,

Gave to the sea-breeze, damp and cold, 

An easy entrance, night and day.

Not far away we saw the port, 

The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,

The lighthouse, the dismantled fort, 

The wooden houses, quaint and brown.

We sat and talked until the night, 

Descending, filled the little room;

Our faces faded from the sight, 

Our voices only broke the gloom.

(Complete Poetical Works, pp. 106–107)

From the beginning, the distinctions between the inside and the outside, between the sea and the land are porous. Through rattling windows, the sea wind enters the house, where wood taken from "the wreck of stranded ships" (Complete Poetical Works, p. 107) is burning in the fireplace. What is implied here—none too subtly, as Longfellow's critics would charge—is the old and familiar idea of life as a seafaring journey and of shipwreck as the fate that may befall everyone. As the philosopher Hans Blumenberg has pointed out, the "harbor is not an alternative to shipwreck"—rather, it is the place where we abandon the pleasures of life (p. 35).

And so it seems in Longfellow's poem. In a room so dark that we seem to be listening to disembodied voices rather than actual people, Longfellow's speakers (as so often in his poetry, he employs the collective "we" rather than the first person singular) sadly reminisce about lost opportunities and long-lost friends ("We spake of many a vanished scene, / Of what we once had thought and said, / Of what had been, and might have been, / And who was changed, and who was dead" [Complete Poetical Works, p. 107]). In the light of the flickering fire, the difference between tenor and vehicle, between actual shipwrecks and the metaphorical ones we suffer in life, becomes irrelevant. And when the friends finally fall silent, the glimmering wood turns into an image also for their aimlessly drifting thoughts. Through the agency of the fire, the outside (the ocean, the wind, and the beach) and the inside (both the inside of the old house and the thoughts of the guests assembled there) become indistinguishable:

The windows, rattling in their frames, 

The ocean, roaring up the beach,

The gusty blast, the bickering flames, 

All mingled vaguely in our speech;

Until they made themselves a part

Of fancies floating through the brain,

The long-lost ventures of the heart,

That send no answers back again.

O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned! 

They were indeed too much akin,

The drift-wood fire without that burned, 

The thoughts that burned and glowed within.

(Complete Poetical Works, p. 107)

In a sense, Longfellow's poem describes its own genesis—not as the miraculous product of a "strong poet's" active individual imagination but as the joint re-collection, the collective merging of voices and identities, in which it ultimately does not matter anymore who creates and who responds, who writes and who reads. A fireside poem induces in the reader the same state of heightened awareness and receptivity in which it was first conceived and which it seeks to represent. The "too much akin" in Longfellow's final stanza can be read both as a joke (as if Longfellow were mocking his own transparent image-making here) as well as a less than funny reminder that all fires will eventually burn out, leaving us with little more than charred wood and what Longfellow elsewhere calls "the ashes in our hearts" ("Palingenesis," Complete Poetical Works, p. 288).

TEA-TIME FOR THE WITCHES

A similarly melancholy tone informs the long poem that made Whittier famous, Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl (1866). Preceded by a motto taken from Emerson's poem "The Snow-Storm" (first published in 1841), in which "the housemates sit / Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed / In a tumultuous privacy of storm" (p. 414), Whittier's poem recalls two days in the poet's youth, when a roaring blizzard confined his family to their homestead and the world outside changed into an unfamiliar "universe of sky and snow" (p. 487). In the eyes of the child, the transformation was nothing short of frightening:

No church-bell lent its Christian tone

To the savage air, no social smoke

Curled over woods of snow-hung oak.

A solitude made more intense

By dreary voicëd elements,

The shrieking of the mindless wind,

The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind,

And on the glass the unmeaning beat

Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet.

Beyond the circle of our hearth

No welcome sound of toil or mirth

Unbound the spell, and testified

Of human life and thought outside.

(Complete Poetical Works, pp. 489–490)

All the more important becomes the fire that the family builds inside, which they take care to make just right:

The oaken log, green, huge, and thick,

And on its top the stout back-stick;

The knotty forestick laid apart,

And filled between with curious art

The ragged brush; then, hovering near,

We watched the first red blaze appear,

Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam

On whitewashed wall and sagging beam,

Until the old, rude-furnished room

Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom. . . .

(Complete Poetical Works, p. 490)

In a letter to an admirer who wanted to recreate the scene for a pageant in Cleveland, Ohio, Whittier later described exactly what their "hearth" had looked like: "the mantelpiece was at least 10 feet long, and the fire place wide enough to take in a five-foot log. . . . How plainly I can see it all" (Letters 3:431). And so could the readers of his poem. The triumphant entry of the blazing fire into the shivering world of Whittier's household changes the scenery both outside and inside. Whittier's speaker watches with fascination how the fire indoors, through the reflection in the window, seems to create its own mirror image outside, thus instantly giving life to the wintry landscape that had seemed so forbidding to the child. Never mind that the characters he imagines congregating out there are witches. Normally scary creatures in fairy tales, they are here shown engaged in a rather mundane activity, "making tea." (If Whittier had chosen the perhaps more appropriate verb "brewing," rather than "making," the scene might have had a different and perhaps more sinister effect.) Remembering an (unidentified) "old rhyme" the child is able to give sense, shape and meaning to the snowy world outside. At a crucial moment in the narrative, then, the child has become a reader:

. . . radiant with a mimic flame

Outside the sparkling drift became,

And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree

Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free.

The crane and pendent trammels showed,

The Turks' head on the andirons glowed;

While childish fancy, prompt to tell

The meaning of the miracle,

Whispered the old rhyme: "Under the tree,

When fire outdoors burns merrily,

There the witches are making tea."

(Complete Poetical Works, p. 490)

The "tropic heat" generated by the fire allows the members of Whittier's family and their guests to entertain each other with stories and games. Whittier does not fail to remind us that all the members of the original household, with the exception of the poet and his brother, have since passed away: "The voices of the hearth are still; / Look where we may, the wide earth o'er, / Those lighted faces smile no more" (p. 490).

But Snow-Bound is not simply an autobiographical poem (the pronoun "I" appears only fifteen times in 759 lines). Nor is it merely nostalgic. In the poet's imagination, the easygoing companionship in front of the flickering fire hints at the possibility of another form of togetherness that seems particularly relevant now that the Civil War's "bloody trail" has ended. Just as the indoor fire has provided the speaker with a useful image (that other, "mimic fire," that will overcome, at least in the speaker's imagination, the separation of the world indoors from the world outside), so the harmonious gathering of the poet's family before their hearth-fire prefigures a time when the "hell / Of prison-torture" has ended, the chains from "limb and spirit" have been struck and there will be no more differences between black and white, North and South (p. 495). To such harmony of the races the abolitionist Whittier—who was mobbed and stoned for his anti-slavery views in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1835—had devoted most of his life.

ASHES TO ASHES

Obviously, the Fireside Poets did not limit themselves to pleasant chats in front of the domestic hearth. Their poems may be provocatively political (viz Longfellow's early Poems on Slavery [1842] and Lowell's Biglow Papers [1848]), acidly satirical (Lowell's Fable for Critics [1848]), darkly elegiac (Longfellow's "Hawthorne" [1864] and "Three Friends of Mine" [1874], or Lowell's ode on the death of the scientist Louis Agassiz [1873]), or just plain silly (see Holmes's "The Height of the Ridiculous," 1830, in which the poet vows never to write anything funny again after some lines he wrote while in a "merry mood" have "tumbled [his servant] in a fit" [p. 14]). Much of Holmes's poetry seems hopelessly ephemeral today—as the twentieth-century poet Alfred Kreymborg once put it, every other poem seems to be the result of an invitation to dinner—but when he talks about science, for example, he does so with a clear-sightedness we do not, as a rule, find in Emerson. Holmes's most famous poem, "The Chambered Nautilus" (1858), evokes a curious shellfish, a relative of the octopus, which builds its own shell and spends its life adding new chambers to it. In Holmes's hands, in a move reminiscent of metaphysical poetry, the shellfish becomes a metaphor for the self that constantly outgrows the definitions it creates for itself over the course of a life. Holmes routinely warned his medical students that they should not look at their patients the way Agassiz, the dissecting knife in his hand, would look at a fish ("The Morning Visit," in Poetical Works, p. 59). But "The Chambered Nautilus," which begins with the speaker raptly gazing at a nautilus's beautiful shell, is based on the provocative premise that there is not much indeed that seems to separate the human from the mollusk: "Build thee more stately mansions," the speaker exhorts the human shellfish, "as the swift seasons roll!" (p. 149).

Such self-deprecation was part of a fireside poet's standard repertoire. Holmes called his poems "toys" in his "Prologue" to Songs in Many Keys (1861; Holmes, p. 72) and in "For Whittier's Seventieth Birthday" jokingly compared himself, the author of 1,001 poems, to Scheherazade, but without the threat of death hanging over him to justify his productivity: "I believe that the copies of verses I've spun, / Like Scheherezade's tales, are a thousand and one; / You remember the story,—those mornings in bed,—/ 'T was the turn of a copper,—a tale or a head" (p. 250). Lowell shared Holmes's reluctance to engage in self-aggrandizement. Asked for an autograph in Venice, he gave free rein to his feelings of embarrassment: "In this grave presence to record my name / Something within me hangs the head and shirks" (Complete Poetical Works, p. 543). For him, as for the rest of the firesiders, poetry was a means to an end, and that end had nothing to do with the kind of self-elevation they found in the writings of the transcendentalists, where, as Holmes unkindly put it in "An After-Dinner Poem" (1843), "Self-inspection sucks its little thumb" (p. 57).

The fire of poetry warms the reader as long as it is burning, but it will inevitably end, as our lives do, in a heap of ashes. For Holmes, the fireside in his old age had become a rather lonely place, where he would sit watching the glimmering fragments of his life, "the spoils of years gone by," as he wrote on 1 March 1888, in a poem titled "At My Fireside." But even as the sun is setting on his career, Holmes looks up to see around him the breaking of yet another morning:

Alone, beneath the darkened sky, 

With saddened heart and unstrung lyre,

I heap the spoils of years gone by,

And leave them with a long-drawn sigh,

Like drift-wood brands that glimmering lie, 

Before the ashes hide the fire.

Let not these slow declining days

The rosy light of dawn outlast;

Still round my lonely hearth it plays,

And gilds the east with borrowed rays,

While memory's mirrored sunset blaze

Flames on the windows of the past.

(P. 269)

Whittier, too, responded to Longfellow's drift-wood poem late in his life. In "Burning Drift-Wood" (1890), the wrecked ships that feed his dying fire are the poems he has written over a lifetime, "the wrecks of passion and desire, / The castles I no more rebuild" (Complete Poetical Works, p. 581). But all these losses ultimately do not count because the world has, on the whole, become a better place. Above all, slavery has come to an end. In full assurance of all the good that has happened and is yet to come, old Whittier folds his hands and waits, "as low my fires of drift-wood burn," for the peace which passeth—that much he knew—all poetry.

See alsoLyric Poetry; Popular Poetry; The Song of Hiawatha

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Roberts, Kate. "Fireside Tales to Fireside Chats: The Domestic Hearth." In The Arts and the American Home, 1890–1930, edited by Jessica H. Foy and Karal Ann Marling, pp. 44–61. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994.

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Christoph Irmscher