The Poet's Holy Craft

Matthew C. Brennan

Description

A thorough reexamination of Simms as a pioneering voice in American poetry

The Poet's Holy Craft represents the first full-length analysis and interpretation of William Gilmore Simms's poetry. Matthew C. Brennan demonstrates the comprehensiveness of Simms's romanticism by examining Simms's poetics, his experimental sonnets, and his deep affinity to William Wordsworth, which especially shows in Simms's pioneering attitudes toward nature and ecology.

The poetic career of antebellum Charleston writer William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) constitutes a cautionary tale of how ambition worthy of John Keats and talent comparable to any American poet before Walt Whitman could not alone guarantee a toehold in the literary canon. Although praised in his lifetime by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and William Cullen Bryant, Simms as a poet faced virtual erasure until a recent revival of scholarship. Building on the work of James Everett Kibler, Brennan argues that Simms exhibits the influence of British romanticism earlier than do his canonic contemporaries Henry W. Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Brennan's reappraisal maps Simms's early imitation of neoclassicism and George Lord Byron, and his slightly later absorption of Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Gothicism. Through study of Simms's letters, reviews, extant lectures, manuscripts, and drafts, Brennan delineates his subject's romantic poetics and offers new insights into his revision process. Brennan finds in Simms an interest in experimentation with the forms and themes of the romantic sonnet that supersedes that of even the British romantics. Noting Simms's deep affinity to Wordsworth, and to a lesser degree Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Brennan portrays Simms as remarkably in advance of Thoreau, although from a Southern context, in the environmental concerns that present themselves in his contemplative poetry and in his life and work at his home, Woodlands plantation.

In short The Poet's Holy Craft offers a corrective that rescues Simms from the long shadow cast on his literary legacy by his Confederate affiliations and illumines his original contributions to the romantic verse tradition.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• HISTORY
• Religious Musings
• A Thing of Beauty
• Sonnet 73
• Picturesque
• Georgics
• Poetic diction
• Romantic poetry
• An Essay on Criticism
• Byronic hero
• Narrative poetry
• Dorothy Wordsworth
• Shakespeare's sonnets
• English poetry
• Spirituality
• History of the Americas
• Poetry
• Lyrical Ballads
• United States
• FL
• KY
• LA
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• VA
• William Wordsworth
• GA
• Edgar Allan Poe

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 10 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172256
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE POET’S HOLY CRAFT
William Gilmore Simms, portrait by William Edward West (1844). From a copy, courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

© 2010 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Brennan, Matthew, 1955–
The poet's holy craft : William Gilmore Simms and romantic verse tradition / Matthew C. Brennan ; foreword by John Caldwell Guilds.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-888-4 (alk. paper)
1. Simms, William Gilmore, 1806–1870 Criticism and interpretation.
2. Simms, William Gilmore, 1806–1870 Poetic works. 3. Ecology in literature. 4. Romanticism. I. Title.
PS2853.B68 2010
811'.3–dc22
2009042200
ISBN 978-1-61117-225-6 (ebook)
To Beverley with love
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword
John Caldwell Guilds
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
ONE From Classic to Romantic
TWO Romantic Theory and Practice
THREE The Romantic Sonnet
FOUR “Worshipper of Nature”: The Wordsworth of Woodlands
FIVE Romantic American Ecology
Appendix 1
Sample of Sonnets by
William Gilmore Simms
Appendix 2
Sonnets in “Progress in America”
by William Gilmore Simms
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Portrait of Simms by William Edward West frontispiece
Washington Irving and His Friends
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Manuscript of “The Indian Village”
Woodlands residence
Woodlands study
Foreword
Elegant literary criticism at its theoretical best, The Poet’s Holy Craft: William Gilmore Simms and Romantic Verse Tradition lends substantial support to two important movements: the restoration of Simms’s high reputation at the outbreak of the American Civil War and the reentry of Simms to the canon of mainstream American letters. Matthew Brennan hits exactly the right chord and tackles exactly the right issues. In doing so, he avoids ruffling many minds, including my own, by not specifically challenging the prevailing concept that the novel is Simms’s highest achievement. Nevertheless, without bravado and with much convincing evidence, Brennan makes his case: Simms himself believed poetry to be his “holy craft” and wished it to be recognized as his major work. As a practicing poet, he was sometimes innovative but usually traditional in pursuing the goals of British romantic poetry.
It is particularly significant that of all the Simms scholarship since my Simms: A Literary Life came out in 1992 (the year before the founding of the Simms Society), The Poet’s Holy Craft is the only book-length treatise to focus critically on a single genre of the multitalented, multicultural author. This is surprising because there is great need for books of extended literary criticism on Simms’s opus of novels and short stories, generally considered his most accomplished, as well as his most popular, genre. Yet it is only Brennan’s The Poet’s Holy Craft that has come to the forefront. Before reading Brennan’s discerning exegesis of Simms’s poetry as a whole, I had assumed that James Kib -ler had done the maximum for Simms as a poet in his monumental Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms , with its highly informative, perspicacious commentary on individual poems.
The scholar, let it be recognized, who deserves the most credit for the rediscovery of Simms the poet is not Matthew Brennan, but James E. Kibler. Kibler not only edited the only scholarly edition of Simms’s poetry, documenting many previously unknown poems with hard-to-find factual information, but also he has in addition served as a vocal and written advocate of the underrated merit of Simms as poet. As Brennan himself graciously recognizes and fully acknowledges, he could not have written The Poet’s Holy Craft without Kibler’s groundbreaking work. Nevertheless much credit goes to Brennan, for he has impeccably done what Kibler wisely left undone after ploughing the field and sowing the seed so that the eventual crop could be culled and cultivated. If it truly can be said that without Kibler, Brennan’s book would not exist, then it can also be said that without Brennan, Kibler’s lifelong research project could not have achieved its cherished goal. While Simms scholars and readers rejoice in the publication of The Poet’s Holy Craft , they can look to another day of jubilee this year when a revised, ex panded edition of Kibler’s Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms is published by the University of South Carolina Press.
The book now in hand before us, however, is so exquisitely written and superbly articulated that it is a glory to its author. Making full use of Kibler’s invaluable work, Brennan is first to assess Simms’s poetry critically as a whole and place it front and center in the mainstream of nineteenth-century American romantic poetry. A poet himself, Brennan sees in Simms remarkable strains of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats that Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson, Lowell, and the others did not capture. Before any other American poet, Simms duplicated those characteristics in his own verse, thereby melding British romanticism with its American counterpart and thereby influencing the drift of American poetry. Brennan is very specific in his explications, providing convincing examples that Simms now excluded from every academic anthology of American letters indeed belongs not only as a writer of fiction but also as a poet. Whatever the nonliterary reasons for dropping Simms from the American canon, his exclusion is a disgrace to American literary scholarship, which has prided itself for thoroughness, ob -jectivity, and accuracy.
Brennan’s book should be helpful in several ways in negating the false assumptions that bind Simms to obscurity. First of all, that Brennan demonstrates Simms’s credibility as a major poet provides convincing ammunition to Simms adherents themselves some of whom had expressed doubts about Simms’s poetic achievement while at the same time accepting his high ac -complishment as novelist and writer of short fiction. The doubting Thomases recognized that documentation of Simms’s worth as a poet adds validity to their outrage about the preclusion of Simms from classroom anthologies throughout the United States. This seemingly unpardonable injustice means that Simms is not read by most American undergraduates, even many En -glish majors. It is one of the most puzzling enigmas in our cultural history how a writer of Simms’s stature could fail to qualify for place in our literary canon a canon that embraces numerous writers of demonstrably less ability and performance than he.
When Simms is finally accorded the national reputation that he deserves and once held, and justice at last prevails, Matthew Brennan and The Poet’s Holy Craft will have played a significant role in erasing one of the most glaring and embarrassing oversights in American literary scholarship.
John Caldwell Guilds
Acknowledgments
All scholarship builds on the shoulders of those who come before, but this study of Simms’s poetry literally could not have even been started without the heroic work of James E. Kibler Jr., whose lifelong devotion to Simms the poet has rescued this side of his career from virtual oblivion. As my notes show I am indebted to Jim from beginning to end. I am also grateful to some of the other great scholars who have been central to the renaissance in Simms studies: Jack Guilds, the late Jim Meriwether, and Miriam Shillings -burg, who all supplied moral support. Similarly other younger members of the Simms Society have provided encouragement and camaraderie: Colin Pearce, Kevin Collins, David Newton, Nick Meriwether, John Miller, and Jason Johnson; as have Simms family members of the Simms Society, especially, Connie and Hal Cooper, Carroll Hartman, and Katie Counts. I am thankful too to David Aiken, who warmly inspired me early on. Equally deserv ing of thanks are my editors at the University of South Carolina Press, Project Editor Karen Rood and Acquisitions Editor Alexander Moore, who among other things tipped me toward some unpublished Simms sonnets at the Charleston Library Society. Allen Stokes and his generous staff at the South Caroliniana Library hosted me as a Simms research professor in 2007, and Dr. Stokes has kindly granted permission to reproduce photographs and to quote from the library’s holdings. I also am grateful to Indiana State Uni -versity for a summer research grant, and to the editors of the following journals for permission to reprint parts of chapters 3 , 4 , and 5 : Mississippi Quarterly, South Carolina Review , and the Southern Quarterly (“Simms, Words -worth, and ‘The Mysterious Teachings of the Natural World,’” 41, no. 2 [Win ter 2003]: 37–47). I am especially appreciative of the inspiriting words of Mrs. Mary Simms Oliphant Furman, who graciously has allowed reproduction of the West portrait of her great-grandfather.
Most of all I owe the inspiration for this book to first the late Doris Simms, my mother-in-law, whose keen interest in Simms alerted me to his past importance and to the burgeoning enterprise working to recover his place in the canon. And second the greatest debt goes to my wife, Beverley, Simms’s great-granddaughter, who first opened my eyes to Simms and his work.
Abbreviations A Areytos (1860) BL Biographia Literaria CCSC Charles Carroll Simms Collection DF Donna Florida EL Early