Poetry Thoughts 2018: James Russell Lowell's "A Fable for Critics"

Poems stereotypically deal with weighty topics like love, death, transience, time, art, nature, humanity…and yet, sometimes poems are simply writing that rhymes. Sometimes poems are even funny—and I’m not just talking bawdy limericks, but witty satires. A Fable for Critics is basically a compendium of literary criticism of some of the other poets contained in The Oxford Book of American Verse, which makes James Russell Lowell’s work rather “meta.” And, considering he’s a poet criticizing his peers (perhaps betters?), it can come across as varied tones of tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, passive-aggressive jealousy, and sometimes just plain mudslinging. I loved it.

Emerson:

• A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range / Has Olympus for one pole, for t’other the Exchange.
• ‘Tis refreshing to old-fashioned people like me / To meet such a primitive Pagan as he
• He has imitators in scores, who omit / No part of the man but his wisdom and wit

Whittier (whom I spoke about in a recent post):

…his failures arise (though he seem not to know it)

From the very same cause that has made him a poet,--

A fervor of mind which knows separation

‘Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration.

• …his grammar’s not always correct, nor his rhymes, / And he’s prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes.

Poe:

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, / Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge.

J.R. doesn’t confine himself just to poetry, however. He soon expands to other writers, particularly James Fennimore Cooper.

Cooper was, as Lowell half-jokingly says, “The American [Sir Walter] Scott.” Super-popular and famous in his time, the years have not been kind to Cooper, who is best known now for The Last of the Mohicans. This novel is a the actually ast of a series of books called The Leatherstocking Tales starring his most famous creation, the Daniel Boone-like Natty Bumppo AKA Hawkeye, AKA La Longue Carabine (“The Long Rifle”), AKA Straight-Tongue, AKA Lap-Ear, AKA The Pigeon…whew this guy has almost as many nicknames as Gandalf!

Anywayyyy, despite his glory having faded with time, to his contemporaries Cooper was one of the first Americans to gain recognition as a legitimate novelist. Like Scott, Cooper was famous for his historical epics, and like Scott his writing was the sort of floral, romantic, overdramatic stuff that was an easy target for satire.

Lowell’s main issue with Cooper, however, was that “on manners he lectures his countrymen” and that Cooper seemed to be encouraging Americans to be more like the English:

You steal Englishmen’s books and think Englishmen’s thought,

With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;

Your literature suits its each whisper and motion

To what will be thought of it over the ocean

Maybe he took after Sir Walter a little TOO much?

And I thought this couplet was just hilarious:

“…the women he draws from one model don’t vary / All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.”

Lowell ends with a critique on himself, which I didn’t consider his best of the group, which perhaps is suspicious, considering the subject matter…