I need to track that down! I just read about it in a longer article, in preparing to write about a Longfellow poem a few weeks ago, and can't remember any of them now --- only that they had wanted some kind of indigenous word, but wound up choosing "Idaho," which was completely erzatz.
The parallel that occurred to me at the time was the Ford Motor Company's inviting Marianne Moore to name their latest car model, but rejecting her massive list of possibilities (which is easy to find online, and included "Atomic Turtletop") in favor of "Edsel," which just says "Buy me," doesn't it? But it seems proportional, somehow --- the 19th century vs. the 20th, Longfellow's fame vs. Moore's, that he would be asked to name a state, and she would be asked to name a car.
I’d love to learn more about that. I looked in a few Longfellow biographies, but couldn’t find anything about it. I did read that the actual word “Idaho” has no definite etymology. It’s just fascinating that a poet could that level of celebrity.
If you ever do track that down, I promise to write something amusing!
I think what I read was some kind of online document, maybe from the state of Idaho, about its history. Longfellow was incidental, if I remember correctly (and I might not remember correctly --- the one major cognitive feature I share with Flannery O'Connor is total non-retention).
I love these kind of literary adventures. I'm on it! (And your mention of Flannery prompts me to recommend some recent posts I did about the recent FOC film, Wildcat. Please check them out if you have a minute.
Great post. Hipsters may scoff at the Fireside Poets, but they did yeoman's service in helping create American Literature, now taken for granted. A fav prof of mine once taught a course, "Popular Poetry in America": he was more than equipped to teach The Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, and the most abstruse of Wallace Stevens, but he appreciated "Casey at the Bat" and others like it.
It's easy to forget how really famous they were, too, in their day --- Longfellow especially, who was mobbed by admirers on a tour of England in the 1860s, and, at home, asked to come up with a name for the state that became Idaho (not one of his suggestions).
Your comment got me to thinking about the poems that I used to know by heart. Here’s the list of the poems I believe I could recite from memory at one time or another. There’s nothing surprising here, perhaps, except the first poem. I memorized it in 1977 to pass the hours while sitting with my unconscious father-in-law in his hospital room. The list, in no particular order:
Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst”; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”; James Elroy Flecker, “The Old Ships”; John Donne’s holy sonnet, “At the round earth’s imagined corners” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”; Shakespeare’s sonnet 73; Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” “Dust of Snow”; Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”; W. B. Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” large sections of “The Tower” (I still know the stanza about Mrs. French and her obliging servant with the garden shears), “For Anne Gregory,” “Sailing to Byzantium”; Edgar Allan Poe, “To Helen”; A. E. Housman, “With rue my heart is laden”; John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; Samuel T. Coleridge, “Xanadu”; Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar”, “Ulysses”; George Herbert, “Love (III).” I knew bits and pieces of many other poems. Yesterday I made my wife giggle when out of the blue I recited, in mangled form, the first stanza of Suckling's "Song: Why so pale and wan fond lover."
I probably knew more at various times. I held tightly to the poems in the unhappiest period of my life, when my first marriage failed, but as I became happier I lost my grip on them.
Excellent list! So much of the dreck we’re offered now—if at all—is barely readable, let alone worth memorizing. Nothing today is going to make me silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Because I am mostly in love with the Romantic and Victorian poetry of Britain, I often forget about the American poets that I love as well. Thanks for this wonderfully stirring lament and your commentary on it. And now I have to go read "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" to celebrate the day!
It would be interesting --- and has probably been done a million times already, and I'm just late to the party --- to set Longfellow beside Tennyson, as a study in parallels. I think even at the time people thought of them as counterparts, and Longfellow's meeting with Tennyson, on his late-1860s transatlantic tour, was huge news at the time. When I was writing about Longfellow's "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" some weeks ago, what struck me about the poem was its sense of being a response to, or a poem "after," Tennyson's much earlier "Break, Break, Break."
I think ultimately Tennyson is the greater poet, I suppose in part because he seems better able to elevate whatever moralizing he wants to do to the level of art (which I realize is a phrase I probably need a whole essay to qualify), and Longfellow's great deficit is that he didn't resist the urge to make morals, and seems to have been satisfied with that. (ETA: what I think I mean here is, for example, that Tennyson could write about grief without telling people how they should grieve, while Longfellow too often did not resist the impulse to make prescriptions.) But each was writing to a reading audience and, I think, more conscious of doing so, and of shaping popular culture, than poets often are today, and these distinctions might have as much to do with that awareness as with each poet's native gift.
All that to say that I've learned to find the transatlantic conversation of that period really interesting on both sides.
That is fascinating, Sally. I've spent so little time studying much American poetry -- I've read lots of it, but not _studied_ it -- that I've not often noticed parallels so much as differences. Thanks for these thoughts, which will make me look at least at these two poets a little more deeply, looking for those traits you suggest.
A joyful rendition our history reminded our literature recalled . Many gratitudes
That would be a great poem itself: a list of Longfellow’s rejected names!
I need to track that down! I just read about it in a longer article, in preparing to write about a Longfellow poem a few weeks ago, and can't remember any of them now --- only that they had wanted some kind of indigenous word, but wound up choosing "Idaho," which was completely erzatz.
The parallel that occurred to me at the time was the Ford Motor Company's inviting Marianne Moore to name their latest car model, but rejecting her massive list of possibilities (which is easy to find online, and included "Atomic Turtletop") in favor of "Edsel," which just says "Buy me," doesn't it? But it seems proportional, somehow --- the 19th century vs. the 20th, Longfellow's fame vs. Moore's, that he would be asked to name a state, and she would be asked to name a car.
I’d love to learn more about that. I looked in a few Longfellow biographies, but couldn’t find anything about it. I did read that the actual word “Idaho” has no definite etymology. It’s just fascinating that a poet could that level of celebrity.
If you ever do track that down, I promise to write something amusing!
I think what I read was some kind of online document, maybe from the state of Idaho, about its history. Longfellow was incidental, if I remember correctly (and I might not remember correctly --- the one major cognitive feature I share with Flannery O'Connor is total non-retention).
I love these kind of literary adventures. I'm on it! (And your mention of Flannery prompts me to recommend some recent posts I did about the recent FOC film, Wildcat. Please check them out if you have a minute.
Will do. I'd really like to see that film, though I don't know when/if it will show in my area.
Great post. Hipsters may scoff at the Fireside Poets, but they did yeoman's service in helping create American Literature, now taken for granted. A fav prof of mine once taught a course, "Popular Poetry in America": he was more than equipped to teach The Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, and the most abstruse of Wallace Stevens, but he appreciated "Casey at the Bat" and others like it.
It's easy to forget how really famous they were, too, in their day --- Longfellow especially, who was mobbed by admirers on a tour of England in the 1860s, and, at home, asked to come up with a name for the state that became Idaho (not one of his suggestions).
The ship retains a contemporary role. Our small boat club
fires its cannon at sunset and respectfully lowers "the colors" only after the Constitution has fired hers. Happy Fourth to all!
Thanks for a reminder of poems I knew as a child. A somewhat similar poem, Emerson's "Concord Hymn," was once part of my stock of memorized poems.
Wasn't it great to memorize poems? I can still rattle off "Concord Hymn."
Your comment got me to thinking about the poems that I used to know by heart. Here’s the list of the poems I believe I could recite from memory at one time or another. There’s nothing surprising here, perhaps, except the first poem. I memorized it in 1977 to pass the hours while sitting with my unconscious father-in-law in his hospital room. The list, in no particular order:
Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst”; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”; James Elroy Flecker, “The Old Ships”; John Donne’s holy sonnet, “At the round earth’s imagined corners” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”; Shakespeare’s sonnet 73; Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” “Dust of Snow”; Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”; W. B. Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” large sections of “The Tower” (I still know the stanza about Mrs. French and her obliging servant with the garden shears), “For Anne Gregory,” “Sailing to Byzantium”; Edgar Allan Poe, “To Helen”; A. E. Housman, “With rue my heart is laden”; John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; Samuel T. Coleridge, “Xanadu”; Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar”, “Ulysses”; George Herbert, “Love (III).” I knew bits and pieces of many other poems. Yesterday I made my wife giggle when out of the blue I recited, in mangled form, the first stanza of Suckling's "Song: Why so pale and wan fond lover."
I probably knew more at various times. I held tightly to the poems in the unhappiest period of my life, when my first marriage failed, but as I became happier I lost my grip on them.
Excellent list! So much of the dreck we’re offered now—if at all—is barely readable, let alone worth memorizing. Nothing today is going to make me silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Because I am mostly in love with the Romantic and Victorian poetry of Britain, I often forget about the American poets that I love as well. Thanks for this wonderfully stirring lament and your commentary on it. And now I have to go read "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" to celebrate the day!
It would be interesting --- and has probably been done a million times already, and I'm just late to the party --- to set Longfellow beside Tennyson, as a study in parallels. I think even at the time people thought of them as counterparts, and Longfellow's meeting with Tennyson, on his late-1860s transatlantic tour, was huge news at the time. When I was writing about Longfellow's "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" some weeks ago, what struck me about the poem was its sense of being a response to, or a poem "after," Tennyson's much earlier "Break, Break, Break."
I think ultimately Tennyson is the greater poet, I suppose in part because he seems better able to elevate whatever moralizing he wants to do to the level of art (which I realize is a phrase I probably need a whole essay to qualify), and Longfellow's great deficit is that he didn't resist the urge to make morals, and seems to have been satisfied with that. (ETA: what I think I mean here is, for example, that Tennyson could write about grief without telling people how they should grieve, while Longfellow too often did not resist the impulse to make prescriptions.) But each was writing to a reading audience and, I think, more conscious of doing so, and of shaping popular culture, than poets often are today, and these distinctions might have as much to do with that awareness as with each poet's native gift.
All that to say that I've learned to find the transatlantic conversation of that period really interesting on both sides.
That is fascinating, Sally. I've spent so little time studying much American poetry -- I've read lots of it, but not _studied_ it -- that I've not often noticed parallels so much as differences. Thanks for these thoughts, which will make me look at least at these two poets a little more deeply, looking for those traits you suggest.