Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963)

I was curious to read this book, an early recipient of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, because it was dedicated to legendary Scribners editor Max Perkins, Brooks’ childhood friend.
Brooks addresses why Boston and its environs dominated the first phase of a recognizably American literary culture, both in quantity and quality—a position it maintained for most of the nineteenth century. He framed his answer in terms borrowed from Oswald Spengler, a fashionable historian at the time: it was a culture cycle, with all the phases that belonged to it, albeit compressed in a shorter time frame than those described by Spengler.
When Brooks wrote the book, every schoolchild could recite “The Ride of Paul Revere.” I came along later, but even in my childhood, Longfellow and poetry were synonymous. I doubt this is still the case, so I wonder who the prospective reader of this book might be today. Brooks offers neither a straightforward history nor incisive literary analysis; it is a social history of literary production. His style is heavily allusive, but a reader who isn’t up on these writers will miss that.
His judgments, when he offers them, are often spoken as dicta. For instance, writing of Longfellow’s “The Spanish Student,” Brooks remarks: “The first of several poems in dramatic form without a dramatic moment” (306). Yet, Brooks speaks positively of Longfellow’s imagination and cadences in other places. In fact, Brooks takes pains to single out praiseworthy aspects of writers he criticizes, such as James Russell Lowell. And he vindicates Harriet Beecher Stowe as a great writer when her reputation had already sunk.
Brooks composes word pictures to convey a feeling for the figures who populate his book. He often crams much detail into his sentences. The result, read eighty years on, seems old-fashioned. However, there are rewards for readers who bring the necessary patience, for his narrative style is often entertaining. He refers to works by a multitude of authors. I readily believe he has read all of that and more—not just the remarkables (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Margaret Fuller) and those whose reputation, once aglow, was already dimming by the 1930s (Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier) but even those little heard of today, such as William Austin and Sylvester Judd.
I borrowed the copy I read from the library, and it showed every sign of having been frequently used. But nevertheless, the paper knife had not yet been applied in two places.… (more)