She would
not mind this fate.
The poetry of the idea of Freedom and of the sectional struggle
which was necessary before that idea could be realized in
national policy is on the whole not commensurate with the
significance of the issue itself. Any collection of American
political verse produced during this period exhibits spirited and
sincere writing, but the combination of mature literary art and
impressive general ideas is comparatively rare. There are single
poems of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every test of
effective political and social verse, but the main body of
poetry, both sectional and national, written during the thirty
years ending with 1865 lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring.
The continental spaciousness and energy which foreign critics
thought they discovered in Whitman is not characteristic of our
poetry as a whole. Victor Hugo and Shelley and Swinburne have
written far more magnificent republican poetry than ours. The
passion for freedom has been very real upon this side of the
Atlantic; it pulsed in the local loyalty of the men who sang
"Dixie" as well as in their antagonists who chanted "John Brown's
Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic;" but this passion has
not yet lifted and ennobled any notable mass of American verse.
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