page_title: Fireside poets
section_title: Recognition and decline
hierarchical_section_title: Fireside poets / Recognition and decline
caption_attribution_description: Scan of the frontispiece of An American Anthology (1787-1900) by Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. Houghton, Mifflin and Company.Pictured: center: William Cullen Bryant; clockwise from top: Poe, Whitman, Holmes, Lanier, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow.
context_page_description: The fireside poets – also known as the schoolroom or household poets – were a group of 19th-century American poets associated with New England. These poets were very popular among readers and critics both in the United States and overseas. Their domestic themes and messages of morality presented in conventional poetic forms deeply shaped their era until their decline in popularity at the beginning of the 20th century.
context_section_description: In 1901, Emerson and Longfellow were inducted as inaugural members of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, which added Lowell and Whittier in 1905 and Holmes and Bryant in 1910. Longfellow was commemorated with a bust in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey in London; he was the first non-British writer honored this way and remains the only American poet represented with a bust. Even before the end of the century, however, Lowell acknowledged a change in the poetic climate and feared the erasure of gentlemanly gentility in emerging poetry. He wrote to William Dean Howells: "The danger of our literature... seems to me to be lawlessness & want of scholarly refinement. This is the rock I see ahead just now, & I fear we may go to pieces on it if we don't look sharp." Holmes died in 1894, the last of the fireside poets, and one literary magazine called it "the closing of an era in American literature".
  Critics, meanwhile, began re-examining the role of these poets in the canon and distinguishing between popularity and aesthetics. As the twentieth century began, academics began to turn to poets such as Walt Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost. Anthologist Edmund Clarence Stedman released his exhaustive An American Anthology, 1787–1900, and the frontispiece artwork featured the fireside poets sharing space with Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sidney Lanier, which visually emphasized the canonical shift.
  Fireside poets were soon regarded as old-fashioned. In 1904, for example, The Dial noted, "The message of our older poets, it is true, has lost something of its timeliness with the lapse of years, and they have not found the successors that we could have wished; but we doubt greatly if a new Longfellow or a new Lowell could now become a real force in our national life". Professor Lawrence Buell wrote that modern scholars "value [them] less than the nineteenth century did but still regard [them] as the mainstream of nineteenth-century New England verse." Their work was increasingly emphasized in the classroom, so many of these poets were dismissed merely as children's poets, as noted by a 20th-century scholar who asked, "Who, except wretched schoolchildren, now reads Longfellow?" Longfellow was particularly criticized. Literary scholar Kermit Vanderbilt noted, "Increasingly rare is the scholar who braves ridicule to justify the art of Longfellow's popular rhymings." Twentieth-century poet Lewis Turco called Longfellow a minor and derivative poet who was "nothing more than a hack imitator of the English Romantics." Holmes, according to one modern scholar, is now the least likely of the Fireside Poets to be anthologized.
  Many of the new and emerging poets displayed resentment towards America's poetic past, including T. S. Eliot. An exception was Robert Frost, who named his first book A Boy's Will after a line by Longfellow. Wallace Stevens was a student at Harvard College when the fireside poets were at their height; he recalled that "it was commonplace to say that all the poetry had been written". Whitman was a contemporary of the fireside poets who complained that they were too focused on reflecting English styles and themes in American poetry: "Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake".
  Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes are featured in the bestselling novel The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl, published in 2003.
caption: The addition of Sidney Lanier and Edgar Allan Poe to the frontispiece of Edmund Clarence Stedman's An American Anthology in 1900 indicated the beginning of a canonical shift away from the fireside poets.
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