Fireside poets

Thoreau had the dickens of a time getting his works published, and to add insult to injury, James Russell Lowell wrote a poem lambasting the Transcendentalists, A Fable For Critics. Mocking their lack of popularity is funny because I've maybe heard of Lowell before, but I don't remember him. I'm no poetry scholar. I wondered if he had a sense of how Thoreau would be the non-fiction hero of the Transcendentalists, thousands of books about him. Lowell even wrote to Howells about their disappearance. How popular they were perhaps also included their derivative nature on the English romantics. 

Thoreau could self publish if he would pay for it, but after staying with the Emersons to cover for Ralph's travels, he worked a lot to get money. He was a handyman, painter, gardner, construction and worked for the pencil factory. He went as far as New Jersey as a surveyor. 

Thoreau made an important step of going from giving free lectures to paid lectures.

Lowell is associated with the fireside poets: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The American poets who were the first popular poets in America. Before radio, Americans would gather by the fireside and read the anthologies of these poets. Sounds like a wonderful time to me. I once read a random poem by Robert Service on a camping trip by the fire, and my friend was really impressed. Poems by the fire can seem profound, or rather their profoundness is more available. 

In turn Twain made fun of them. 

I went online to find An American Anthology, 1787–1900 and it's over $30 for a hard copy. It's a weird book because it takes 72 pages to get to the first poem.

The first poet in the anthology is Philip Freneau (1752 –1832). "Freneau's close friend at Princeton was James Madison, a relationship that would later contribute to his establishment as the editor of the National Gazette. Freneau family tradition suggests that Madison became acquainted with and fell in love with the poet's sister, Mary, during visits to their home while he was studying at Princeton. While tradition has it that Mary rejected Madison's repeated marriage proposals, this anecdote is undocumented and unsupported by other evidence."

"Although he is not as generally well known as Ralph Waldo Emerson or James Fenimore Cooper, Freneau introduced many themes and images for which later authors became famous."

"Freneau's nature poem "The Wild Honey Suckle" (1786) was considered an early seed to the later Transcendentalist movement..."

"Romantic primitivism was anticipated by Freneau's poems "The Indian Burying Ground" and "Noble Savage.""

I've ordered a poetry book from my library. Still like the hard copies. Woof, not really into this, good to learn that.

Links:

Poetry Foundation

Poets

Wikipedia