CRITICAL APPRECIATIONS

“The proportion of his poetry that can be so called is small.  But a great deal of it is very fine, very noble, and at times very beautiful, and it discloses the distinctly poetic faculty of which rhythmic and figurative is native expression.  It is impressionable rather than imaginative in the large sense; it is felicitous in detail rather than in design; and of a general rather than individual, a representative rather than original, inspiration.  There is a field of poetry, assuredly not the highest, but ample and admirable—­in which these qualities, more or less unsatisfactory in prose, are legitimately and fruitfully exercised.  All poetry is in the realm of feeling, and thus less exclusively dependent on the thought that is the sole reliance of prose.  Being genuine poetry, Lowell’s profits by this advantage.  Feeling is fitly, genuinely, its inspiration.  Its range and limitations correspond to the character of his susceptibility, as those of his prose do to that of his thought.  The fusion of the two in the crucible of the imagination is infrequent with him, because with him it is the fancy rather than the imagination that is luxuriant and highly developed.  For the architectonics of poetry he had not the requisite reach and grasp, the comprehensive and constructing vision.  Nothing of his has any large design or effective interdependent proportions.  In a technical way an exception should be noted in his skilful building of the ode—­a form in which he was extremely successful and for which he evidently had a native aptitude ...  Lowell’s constitutes, on the whole, the most admirable American contribution to the nature poetry of English literature—­far beyond that of Bryant, Whittier, or Longfellow, I think, and only occasionally excelled here and there by the magic touch of Emerson.”—­W.  C. Brownell, in Scribner’s Magazine, February, 1907.

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“Lowell is a poet who seems to represent New England more variously than either of his comrades.  We find in his work, as in theirs, her loyalty and moral purpose.  She has been at cost for his training, and he in turn has read her heart, honoring her as a mother before the world, and seeing beauty in her common garb and speech....  If Lowell be not first of all an original genius, I know not where to look for one.  Judged by his personal bearing, who is brighter, more persuasive, more equal to the occasion than himself,—­less open to Doudan’s stricture upon writers who hoard and store up their thoughts for the betterment of their printed works?  Lowell’s treasury can stand the drafts of both speech and composition.  Judged by his works, as a poet in the end must be, he is one who might gain by revision and compression.  But think, as is his due, upon the high-water marks of his abundant tide, and see how enviable the record of a poet who is our most brilliant and learned critic, and who has given us our best native idyll, our best and most complete work in dialectic verse, and the noblest heroic ode that America has produced—­each and all ranking with the first of their kinds in English literature of the modern time.”—­Edmund Clarence Stedman.