Before Modernism by Virginia Jackson;

Author:Virginia Jackson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

“Thy solitary way”

My emphasis on Bryant’s creation of a poetics of whiteness is hardly a new idea. Jason Rudy has discovered that in 1828, when the first anthology of English-language poetry was published in South Africa, “the opening poem of this volume was written not by an English-speaking emigrant to Britain’s Cape Colony but by the American poet William Cullen Bryant.”27 “To a Waterfowl,” first published in the North American Review in 1818, “was mistaken as an original of the Cape Colony … thereby establishing Bryant, anonymously, as the first anthologized writer of English poetry in the South African colony” (48). The truth is that “To a Waterfowl” circulated so extensively in the Anglophone world that its appearance in South Africa is unsurprising (though it is somewhat surprising that it was not recognized as Bryant’s), but as Rudy goes on to point out, it is also not surprising that “Bryant reads as a colonial poet because his poems are generic congeries” (49). Perhaps Bryant also “reads as a colonial poet” because he followed British prosodic and stanzaic models to the letter. While Bryant’s colonial genericism and mimetic prosody got him demoted in modern literary histories that valued formal originality, enthusiastic early reviewers recognized the poem’s stanzaic structure as Robert Southey’s. Yet by 1845, H. T. Tuckerman could write in an essay on “The Poetry of Bryant” for The United States Magazine and Democratic Review that “the very rhythm of the stanzas ‘to a Waterfowl,’ gives the impression of its flight. Like the bird’s sweeping wing, they float with a calm, a majestic cadence to the ear.”28 Apparently, in ten years, “To a Waterfowl” had not only become every White Anglophone emigrant’s poem (Rudy also traces publications in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada), but in less than thirty years, it had left its British model behind and was considered its own expressive mimetic form. One of Bryant’s most recent biographers goes as far as to call “To a Waterfowl” “a meditative lyric” characterized by “the innovative form” of each quatrain’s “alternating tetrameter and pentameter lines.”29 In 1990, Barbara Packer, in trying to make a case for nineteenth-century American landscape poetry as worthy of Romanticists’ attention, wrote that “what is new about the poem, what made it seem so fresh and original to its first readers, lies … in its form, which manages to break free of the addictive cadences of the blank-verse line or the elegiac quatrain.”30 Yet Bryant’s quatrains remain exactly Southey’s quatrains, which frame two pentameter lines by a trimeter line at the beginning and another trimeter line at the end of each stanza. Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl” begins,

Whither, ’midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,

Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

Thy solitary way?31

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