The James Russell Lowell Bicentennial

Born 200 years ago today, the great American man of affairs and letters, James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). Lowell is one of the less remembered of the so-called Fireside Poets, the clique that included Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, and sometimes Emerson. But today, nobody reads books, let alone works by those poets, so perhaps it may impress you to know that Lowell was the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly (1857-1861), U.S. Minister to Spain (1877-1880), Minister to England (1880-85), Virginia Woolf’s Godfather, and the man whose 1845 poem “The Present Crisis” inspired the name of the NAACP’s newsletter The Crisis. He was a prominent Abolitionist in his day; Martin Luther King quoted him often.

Better remembered than Lowell himself perhaps is his family. The Lowells (originally rendered “Lowle” had lived in Massachusetts since 1639. Dozens of their family were notable and accomplished people, including Francis Cabot Lowell (for whom Lowell, Massachusetts is named), astronomer Percival Lowell (founder of Lowell Observatory and author of the influential but incorrect theory that were canals on Mars), Civil War hero Charles Russell Lowell (James’ nephew, killed in action), John Lowell Jr (founder of the Lowell Institute, parent organization of WGBH in Boston), and award winning poets Amy Lowell and Robert Lowell.

James Russell’s father Charles Lowell (1782-1861) was a Unitarian minister. The family lived in a Cambridge estate called Elmwood which had played a role in the American Revolution. (The house still stands and is used as the residence of the President of Harvard University.) James was the baby of the family and a rebellious student as a Harvard undergrad. For a time, Lowell lived and studied in Concord, where he first met Emerson. He went on to study law, though his aspiration was always to become a poet. His works began to be published in the 1840s. He is known for The Biglow Papers, a humorous work written in Yankee dialect (influential on Mark Twain,Willian Dean Howells, H.L. Mencken, and others), and A Fable for Critics, which satirizes many of his literary contemporaries. Both works were written in 1848. There were numerous other books of poetry and essays over a period of nearly five decades. He taught at Harvard for 20 years, and turned down a professorship at Oxford.

Some of Lowell’s rhyme schemes remind me of hip-hop. Case in in point, this 1865 poem in memory of the lately fallen Abraham Lincoln. February is the season for such sentiments, after all:

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief, Whom late the Nation he had led, With ashes on her head, Wept with the passion of an angry grief: Forgive me, if from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn.       Nature, they say, doth dote,       And cannot make a man       Save on some worn-out plan,       Repeating us by rote: For him her Old World moulds aside she threw,   And, choosing sweet clay from the breast       Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.       How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,       Not lured by any cheat of birth,       But by his clear-grained human worth, And brave old wisdom of sincerity!       They knew that outward grace is dust;       They could not choose but trust In that sure-footed mind’s unfaltering skill,       And supple-tempered will That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.   His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,   Thrusting to thin air o’er our cloudy bars,   A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind,   Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,   Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.       Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,          Ere any names of Serf and Peer       Could Nature’s equal scheme deface;       Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch’s men talked with us face to face.       I praise him not; it were too late; And some innative weakness there must be In him who condescends to victory Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait,       Safe in himself as in a fate.          So always firmly he:          He knew to bide his time,          And can his fame abide, Still patient in his simple faith sublime,          Till the wise years decide.   Great captains, with their guns and drums,       Disturb our judgment for the hour,          But at last silence comes;   These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,   Our children shall behold his fame,          The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,   Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,       New birth of our new soil, the first American.