Prologue

Summary

The American literary culture that Frost, Stevens, Eliot, and Pound grew to know, and despise, as young men of great literary ambition was dominated by values that hostile commentators characterize as “genteel.” The names of the genteel literary powers are now mostly forgotten: R. H. Stoddard, Bayard Taylor, G. H. Boker, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, E. C. Stedman, Richard Watson Gilder (Boston, Philadelphia, but mainly New York); at Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton, the academic reflectors G. E. Woodberry, Barrett Wendell, Henry Van Dyke. These were the men who shaped and ruled the literary culture of modernism's American scene of emergence. They represented, in their prime, the idea of poetry and true literary value. What Willard Thorp said about them more than forty years ago still cuts to the heart of this matter of literary politics: “As the years went by, connections which the group formed with magazines and publishing houses multiplied until their names were spoken and seen everywhere, and they formed a kind of literary interlocking directorate.” In other words, they policed Parnassus by capturing and controlling the modes of literary publication. And not only did they “represent” the idea of poetry (“represent” is too weak, and they would have said the ideal of poetry): they enforced that representation from the 1880s through the first decade or so of the twentieth century; in particular, they enforced it by editing, in those pre-little magazine times, the period's dominant magazines of culture – Scribner's, the Atlantic, and Century.

America's looming genteel directorate unleashed a culture-saturating wave of literature and criticism: appreciations, recollections, histories of English and American poetry, numerous volumes of their own verse, some novels, one major translation (Taylor's of Goethe), travel books of considerable popularity, social reflections and criticism, decisive taste-making anthologies of American literature, coffee-table books of photos, illustrations, and light essays on great American writers “at home,” including one such volume featuring one of the group's own, E. C. Stedman.