USA > New York > Nassau County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume II > Part 39
USA > New York > Suffolk County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume II > Part 39
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In a large measure nothing has changed in our waters with the exception of localized pollution. Those basic conditions which pro- duced the tremendous numbers of fish in the days of the early settlers still exist. The one obstacle to the progressive return of increased fisheries is a planned program of management whereby man can ade- quately regulate the take. As is usual in progressive steps, man's stupidity, selfishness, and ignorance erect barriers along the way.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Long Island Poets and Painters JAMES G. MURRAY Adelphi College
T HERE is a first principle in aesthetics, long familiar to historians yet frequently forgotten by critics, that art is depend- ent upon locale for its substance. For a work of art to assume masterful proportions it is necessary that the artist conceive his piece sensually, then project it in real terms. Both the conception and the projection derive from actual sights, sounds and colors, people, places and things-in a word, from the artist's entire environment. In the finest art forms even that which is most ethereal is earth-bound. Because of the truth of these notions it is usually said that a certain physical place, with all of its significant associations, is productive of an artist's creations.
Some locales tend to inspire more than do others. The location may present more natural beauty. People who dwell there may offer more interest and variety. The folklore, legends, local tradi- tions and historical connections may be more abundant. The kind of fertile background so necessary to the productive artist must have all or most of these qualities. Long Island offers such a back- ground, and has, therefore, always been able to provide the artist with substantiating locale. The land and its waters, the variety of its people, the unusual occupations, the rich fullness of its lore have nourished many poets and painters. And, in return, the Island has been celebrated by them. For this reason the present chapter might have been called "Long Island in Words and Paint".
One studying the history of the finer arts on the Island is readily assured that the poets and painters have been impressed by the locale. Most of them have possessed a sense of awareness which has prohibited their seclusion in towers of ivory. They seemed, generally, to compose not out of mind but out of surroundings. Their culture, therefore, seems to have been a natural rather than an artificial one. They possessed a common consciousness of the "matter" of Long Island. Paradoxically, however, if their art forms were Island inspired, their work was not artistically insular. For the culture which the Island produced, and which was produced on the Island, has ramified in many directions and to distant places.
In examining the arts on Long Island the historian uses the same principles of selection which he would use in studying the art of any other country or area of that country. Some artists are cited because of purely historical interests; they happened to be "firsts". Others are important because they were typical, or "genre" writers. A part of them are mentioned because they were in the tradition of the country and the times, another part because they were individual-
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istically out of the main stream of culture. Many of them the historian finds significant because, while small and only relatively important, they brought art to their area; a few of them he remembers because, large and objectively important, as native sons they brought Long Island art to the attention of the world.
The early days of Long Island history bring to light two poets who vie for the distinctive position of first literary artist in the region. The earliest known verse seems to have been written by a Dutchman, one Jacob Steendam, whose Complaint of New Amsterdam tells in mournful tones (and somewhat mournful metres) of the troubles between the Hollanders and the British in 1652. Following this political diatribe in doggrel, appears the work of the English- man, Richard Steere-purportedly the first in native tongue to be produced on the Island. Born in England, Steere lived the last part of his life in Southold. Between the years 1680 and 1713 he versified some historical events of unusual interest. One of his titles is a remarkable example of the quaint wordiness of the period: "A Monumental Memorial of Marine Mercy, being an acknowledg- ment of an High Hand of Divine Deliverance on the Deep in Time of distress in a late voyage from Boston, in New England, to London, anno 1683. In a poem by R. Steere. To which is added another, occasioned by Several Remarkable Passages happening at the Birth of a male child on Board the Same Ship in her voyage Returning 1684, by the same author." Another of Steere's extant works tells. quite typically, about the Life of Daniel in ninety-two pages of strained but highly descriptive verse.
A third historic "first" is found in the poetry of a certain Jupiter Hammon, first Negro poet in the country. His work, produced around 1760 on Lloyd's Neck near Huntington where Hammon was attached a's a slave to the old Lloyd family, pre-dates by a few years that of Phyllis Wheately, great Negress and poetess of New England. In Hammon's An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penetential Cries we find a rhymed and metred broadside which sometimes resembles scriptural lamentations in the style of the early Puritan Divines, sometimes the preciousness of the Seventeenth Century Metaphysical poets. The Bible and the Hymnal seem to be his sources of education in general as well as of subject matter and style. His charming Poem for Children, With a Thought on Death shows a simple mind and a deep faith in poignant, sincere, ballad-like lines. In them Long Island can claim the beginning of a distinguished tradition of American Negro poetry.
The first successful American opera was also a first for the Setauket writer, Micah Hawkins, whose family line has played and still plays an historically important part in the history of the locale. His Sawmill, or a Yankee Trick was produced in 1824. The plot is happily slapstick, the characters typically buffoon, and the songs rather good patter in the manner of John Gay. Two copies of the original libretto are still in existence. Unfortunately, however, the music and stage notes have disappeared.
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Micah Hawkins began the tradition of Long Island singers of song; but he never achieved the universality and longevity of Payne, Bland and Penn. John Howard Payne was born in East Hampton, in 1791. As a young man he moved to England where, because of his theatrical talents, he early established Drury Lane connections. His first success was an operetta produced at Covent Garden, May 8, 1823, entitled, after the name of the author's beloved cousin who died on Long Island as a young girl, Clari, Maid of Milan. The work as a whole has long since faded from memory, but a certain aria
"Home, Sweet Home" at East Hampton, Which Inspired the Famous Song of that Name by John Howard Payne
seems to have evaded forgetfulness-the lovely Home, Sweet Home. This song was written in France where, poverty stricken and longing for friends and home-town associations, the author was reminded by a group of singing children of his own happy childhood days in East Hampton. The tune, based on an old Italian folk-air, was instantly popular, and has ever remained so. That Payne had had his early homestead in mind when composing the words is fairly certain, as can be noted in a letter he wrote to his brother sometime after Clari's production :
It is nearly twenty years since I left my native country. I left it full of hope, with youthful faith, some resources and every encouragement to anticipate fortune and distinction. The twenty years of absence have only been prolific in experi- ence. If my resources are diminished my value for wealth has diminished with them. If I have gained no renown, I have gained what is better, a disregard for the sort of renown of which I was in ardent pursuit; if I go back to the home of my ancestors almost like a prodigal, I go with the certainty of a prodigal's welcome and with the treasure of a prodigal's wisdom.
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The United State Government thought enough of this prodigal to move his body from Tunis, where he died, to Oak Hill Cemetery in Rock Creek Park, Washington, in 1883, while the Old Homestead at East Hampton, so dear to the composer and intimate with the song, has become a national shrine.
James A. Bland, born October 22, 1854 in Flushing, was the second of the famous Island composers. The compositions of this Negro balladeer and minstrel, Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny and Dem Golden Slippers, have become American art songs, precipitating the author's quick rise to fame, and endearing him to lovers of song wherever the simple is appreciated.
The last of the trio was Arthur A. Penn of Bayside, who in 1918 published the justly renowned Smilin' Through. The song has an interesting background. It was written on a Long Island Rail Road train commuting between Penn Station and Bayside. The author, by profession a librettist for musical comedies and operettas, was attracted to a road-side advertisement of a white cottage, in front of which stood a girl waiting for her loved one, her smile "shining thru" the vine-covered gate.
No regional study is representative without reference to the "native son" or "grass root" bards of the area. The work of such writers need not be and usually is not artistically outstanding; local- color writing has its own raison d'etre. What a soil-poet lacks in high inspiration and sophisticated polish, he generally repays in real imagery, living language and human interest.
Bloodgood Cutter, who was born in 1817, was one of the first typically Long Island folk-singers. From his home in Prospect Hill overlooking Little Neck Bay, this self-styled "Long Island Farmer Poet" produced many pages of verse. Some were pen pictures of local figures, whether historically prominent or rurally characteristic. Some were occasional odes written to celebrate events of local interest, such as births, deaths, husking bees, school graduations and county fairs. One of his better-known pieces in this style was an account of the Voyage of the Quaker City in an Excursion to Palestine-which incident Mark Twain made famous in his Innocents Abroad. Like much of the writing of the period, Cutter's verse depended on the Bible for rudiments as well as for style, and delightfully possessed the anecdotal touch, natural and common only to native-son poets.
Much later appeared the work of Simon Sigmund Tanhauser. Frequently termed the poet laureate of Long Island, he first chanted the Rhymes of the Sunrise Trail in 1929. When he says "I bring to ve only the breath of the Land of the Sunrise", he is trying to convey in descriptive verse and amiable metres the various physical and social aspects of the Island he seemed to enjoy so well. Whether noticing the sands on the South Shore or the cliffs on the North, the scrub pine or the farms, fishermen on jetties or families by firelight, old mills or new roads, he is realistic, natural, imaginative and colorful. He took seriously his role of Island skald, and was a folk singer of folk themes in the best tradition.
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Purely native poetry, however, appears far more frequently in local journals than it does in collected volumes. Indeed, some of the best Island poetry is anthologized in village newspapers. For example, between the years 1780 and 1800 Selleck Osborne conducted and frequently contributed to the "Poet's Corner" in the Sag Harbor paper. These columns abounded in tuneful opposites, from laments for departed cats to humorous lines on such subjects as wharf crickets and gas lights. The Farmer's Museum of around 1800 specialized in the rousing ballad form, with such verses as "Squeak the fife and beat the drum; Independence Day is come". Then in 1825 appeared Huntington's Long Island Journal of Philosophy and Cabinet of Variety. It was edited by a Samuel Fleet, "assisted by a number of Literary Gentlemen", most of whom excelled in the art of occasional verse, satire and local elegy. Orville Terry's verse in the 1850 papers of Orient Point were mostly seascapes and ship songs. Even today local-color poems, like Paul Bailey's splendid ballad of Treading Clams, are found in the issues of the Long Island Forum, thus becoming part of Long Island anthologies of native verse.
Island poetry has never been lacking in humor; it is quite possible, moreover, that the ability to laugh in song (so to make others laugh) has been one of the most characteristic traits of the literature. There is humor in the chit-verse of the local news- papers; in the rollicking native ballads; in the anecdotes and character sketches so common to the post-revolution period; in the satires and broadsides of the days before the Revolution; and most certainly in the vers de societé which has been characteristic of all of the Island's poetic cycles.
One of the earliest humorists was William P. Hawes. His Political Parodies, written under the penname of J. Cypress, Jr., was published in 1842. The book, sometimes in doggerel, sometimes in Drydenlike, smoothly subtle satires, always extremely clever, has been made famous by lines to Nicholas Biddle, the closing of whose bank by Andrew Jackson in 1837 prompted: "Fallen is thy throne, o Nick-silence is o'er thy bank".
When Christopher (Kit) Morley moved to his "Green Retreat" in Roslyn nearly thirty years ago, Long Island became the home of one of the country's most brilliant wits. Writing in his hutch- like author's ivory tower on the grounds of his estate, Morley has produced many volumes of essays, stories, dramas and poems, even while editing the Saturday Review of Literature. Many of his distinguished parodies, puns and quips have appeared in letters to friends and in the pages of local magazines and newspapers. He tells, for example, how the "North Shore was once full of copses, now is full of cops." He has been known also to pay tribute to the Long Island clam as "that most admirable creature because so silent". One of Morley's most delightful pieces was the Wooing Song for Sir Toby Belch, written as an addition to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The character of his humor might well be epitomized
L. I .- II-25
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in his own line: "Let reason, like the night owl, pass and cast her feather on the grass."
Two women poets achieved a certain degree of prominence in the Island's poetic life during the years of sentiment, 1800-1848. They are worthy of mention inasmuch as they illustrate that local poets, while physically removed from centers of culture, could never- theless be within the literary tradition of the time. If they could not create a new art form or reproduce native forms, at least it was quite possible for them to conform charmingly, successfully and inimitably to existing standards.
A Miss Elizabeth Bogard is typical of the point in question. An Islander by birth and choice of habitation, many miles separated from the 1800 literary centers of Philadelphia and Boston, she nevertheless could exemplify the sentimental lyricism of that period. One song, called He Came Too Late, is more than a little known because of the attention paid to it by Edgar Allan Poe. Though his praise, by present day standards, may be a kiss of death, the poem still bears his threefold tribute of "verve, dignity and finish".
Then there was the fabulous Elizabeth Oakes-Smith, who was writing out of Patchogue in the middle of the last century. Rich, domineering, famous in her home town, she was on friendly terms with the leading artistic figures of the era: Bryant, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Stephen Foster. She was somewhat of a Swedenborgian mystic, and enjoyed a spiritual communion with the Boston Trans- cendental school, then prominent but seemingly confined to Back Bay. Not highly original but quite representative, her lyrics bear such typical titles as The Drowned Mariner, in the sentimental manner; The Sinless Child, in the mystic; and The Water, a highly descriptive nature lyric in the style of Thanatopsis.
Another poetess, who never wrote a stanza on the Island, seems, nevertheless, by an accident of fate, to have become an adopted daughter. She was Margaret Fuller, the Boston writer and critic, friend of Emerson, Hawthorne and Holmes, and priestess of the Transcendental sect, who with her husband and baby died in an 1850 shipwreck off Fire Island. In 1901 the Point O' Woods Associa- tion erected a memorial tablet which eulogizes the woman as "noble in thought and in character, eloquent of tongue and pen, who was an inspiration to many of her own time and whose uplifting influences abide with us."
It quite frequently happens, in the literary history of a region, that exchanges of artists are made with other countries. When such is the case, a foreign country can be said to benefit by local thinking, and local thinking by foreign art. An interesting example of each of these facts occurs in the last century.
The British journalist, William Cobbett, spent the years 1818-19 in New Hyde Park as a gentleman farmer. In enforced exile because of his somewhat scurrilous and vituperative exposés of frauds in the English government, Cobbett produced his Grammar of the English Language for Working People, Journal of Year's Residence in the United States, The American Garden, and Advice to Young Men
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while in this area. His style is homespun and abounds in witticisms and moralisms. Humorously, he is sometimes styled poet because of the poetic licences he took so often in his thinking and writing, although his frequent and successful use of original couplets and quatrains to clinch a point earns him the title in a truer sense. In any case he was most definitely an Island gain.
The poet Stuart Merrill, however, who was born in Hempstead in 1863, was educated in France. He learned the language of his adopted country so well, and became so proficient in the difficulties of French versification, that his major works seem far removed from the tongue of Long Island. His Les Gammes, of which there is a first edition in the Hempstead Library, earned him renown in 1887. Merrill's work was quite popular in the French capital. As a poet he was an extremely clever versifier in the French lyric tradition, and an early forerunner of impressionism. If Cobbett brought the international scene to Long Island, Merrill carried at least the name of his birthplace abroad.
In addition to producing genre writers and those who follow the literary trends of their own age, Long Island has also nurtured poets who are "out of space", in the sense that they are not inhibited by region, and "out of time", in that they are ahead of their time in literary matter and form.
One such poet was the darkling enfant terrible of Sag Harbor. George Sterling. Born in 1869, he lived the first eighteen years of his tragic life in that village. As a boy he was a mischief-maker, and as such has become the center of many local legends. His nature was sometimes almost recklessly wild, other times merely whimsical, quite frequently pessimistic. Sterling's early poems took the form of local-color ballads about the sea and whaling, and are characterized by wonderment, movement and boisterousness. Although at times he approached a kind of humor, even his puns were cynical and his laughs had a bitterness about them.
The young poet moved to California where he quickly made a strong friendship with Jack London, a man of quite his own tempera- ment. Indeed, he appears in Martin Eden, London's autobiographical novel, as the Californian's only friend, "a magnificently ugly man". "intense", "mad", "a hard liver and a hard drinker". He began to write in earnest, producing, generally speaking, two types of poetry. One was the sea ballad, with such titles as Master Mariner and Ballad of Swabs. They are utterly realistic, large and blunt. In them the sea has caused a brooding in the same way it affected Herman Melville, Robinson Jeffers and Hart Crane. The other type was the bitter, disillusioned sonnet. These poems suffer the loss of a departing world. Sterling, a romantic like "Miniver Cheevy", appeared here as one unable to get along with life (nor was life able to get along with him although California made him her poet laureate). In these sonnets, filled with contradictory feelings and changing moods, Sterling asked such questions as "Shall we give up our morning to murder and our noon to eternal sleep?" A final question, "Has man the right to die and disappear when
MR. BRYANT'S LIBRARY AT CEDARMERE.
Drem not the framing of a deathless lai The pasttime of a rowdy Surmer-day.
Where, at Roslyn, William Cullen Bryant Wrote Many Famous Poems
(Photo Courtesy of F. Kull)
"Cedarmere," Home of William Cullen Bryant, Roslyn
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he has lost the fight?" he did answer-by suicide. Sterling's poetry, years ahead of its time in thought and style, was typical only of itself, and, like its author, was brilliant and shocking, strong but tragic.
Another kind of poet, yet equally brilliant and quite as original, was John Hall Wheelock. He was born, 1886, in Far Rockaway, studied at Harvard, took a European Ph.D. degree, then became a successful business man with the publishing house of Scribner. As a student he produced his first volume, Verses by Two Undergraduates, his collaborator having been the learned critic, Van Wyck Brooks. Works which followed were Human Fantasy (1911), Beloved Adven- ture (1912), Love and Liberation (1913), Dust and Light (1919), The Black Panther (1922), Bright Doom (1927), and the Collected Poems (1936). It is interesting to note that many of his pieces were composed mentally while the poet walked for hours along deserted beaches in the Rockaways. His work is highly individualistic and spontaneous. His lyrics are sometimes ethereally mystic, sometimes frenzied with a lush beauty. Wheelock possesses the gifts of con- templation, awareness and passion in colorful blends, and is best described by his own ecstatic lines: "The eternal passion stretches me apart, and I lie silent-but my body shakes."
A poet of unusual interest is Nathalia Crane. Brooklyn born, she created a critical stir by producing her first volume, Janitor's Boy, at the age of eleven. Such diverse authorities as W. R. Benet, Louis Untermeyer, Nunnally Johnson and James Hart highly praised this initial work for its bright imagery, easy rhythms and quite mature thinking. For subject matter she has relied almost entirely on Island people and themes, casting over both, as one critic put it, "a clairvoyant illumination". Four volumes have followed the first, each with unusual insights and original approaches which make Nathalia Crane inimitably different.
But there is yet a higher difference. Some poets are so gifted that not only are they apart from the regular tradition, they are far above it. Loyal historians must do battle over such men; for the world demands them. If the region which produced them produced no others, that place could still claim motherhood to genius, nurse- hood to culture's finest flowers.
Long Island proudly claims both titles. William Cullen Bryant, the American Wordsworth and one of literature's great romanticists, she harbored for thirty-three of his most fertile years; Walt Whitman, first realist, founder of one of the most powerful schools of poetry in modern literature, and true genius among men and poets, she mothered in both a physical and artistic sense.
If world literature has granted high place to Bryant and Whitman on Mount Parnassus, what can Islanders do but acclaim in like manner? One thing more-while praising these literary giants, recognize that part of the largeness of each of these men was distinctly small, their own Island village; part of the inter- national sweep of their work was uniquely local, because of their Island backgrounds; and that part of the supposedly heaven-sent inspiration of each poet was both inimitable and earth-bound.
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Bryant came down from Vermont in 1825, a poet writing Byronic poetry and a lawyer practicing Websterian law, to edit the New York Review, then the United States Review, and finally the New York Post. He remained with the last for the rest of his life, becom- ing one of the nation's most distinguished journalists. But while living in the city he began to lose the poetic touch which, for him, had always been merely pleasing enough, although never either original or strong. Then in 1845 he moved out to "Cedarmere", in Roslyn, where he lived until his death in 1878. It was in this charming home and exquisite country that the character of Bryant's poetry underwent important changes. From superficial sentimentality it matured into the richest kind of Romanticism. What before was borrowed now became in and per se. The rhetoric of the earlier style changed into the eloquence of the later. And, most important, the abstract descriptions once founded on purely mental concepts appeared now as concrete imagery, unquestionably based upon immediate surroundings.
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