The Dover Anthology of American Literature Volume II (2 page)

    
Spring Strains (1917)

    
To a Solitary Disciple (1917)

    
Dedication for a Plot of Ground (1917)

    
Le Médicin Malgré Lui (1918)

    
To Mark Anthony in Heaven (1920)

    
To Waken an Old Lady (1921)

    
Complaint (1921)

    
Complete Destruction (1921)

    
The Widow's Lament in Springtime (1921)

    
The Lonely Street (1921)

    
The Great Figure (1921)

Theodore Dreiser

    
The Lost Phœbe (1916)

Robert Frost

    
The Road Not Taken (1916)

    
Meeting and Passing (1916)

    
Birches (1916)

    
A Time to Talk (1916)

    
The Line-Gang (1916)

    
The Sound of the Trees (1916)

    
Fragmentary Blue (1920)

    
Place for a Third (1920)

    
Fire and Ice (1920)

Rose Cohen

    
From
Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Sid
e (1918)

Willa Cather

    
Paul's Case (1920)

Sherwood Anderson

    
The Egg (1921)

    
The Other Woman (1921)

Edna St. Vincent Millay

    
Thursday (1921)

    
To the Not Impossible Him (1921)

    
Exiled (1921)

    
Travel (1921)

Langston Hughes

    
The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)

Gertrude Stein

    
Every Afternoon: A Dialogue (1922)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

    
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (1922)

Index of Authors

NOTE

T
HIS SECOND VOLUME
of the anthology begins with the end of the Civil War (1861–1865), a catastrophe that devastated and necessarily recast the nation. One of the ways in which the states became united again was through literature. With universal education the rule, America became super-literate; reading was the great technology. Readers hungered for printed words, so books, magazines, and newspapers proliferated. The unofficially crowned prince and princess of American literature, Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson, helped change what the nation and the world thought of as peculiarly
American
writing. That is, it was colloquial, quick, irreverent. There was nothing and no one like Dickinson or Twain anywhere else.

Notwithstanding Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson is certainly the highlight of nineteenth-century American poetry; she sang of herself all the way to the other side of the spectrum from Whitman's “Song of Myself.” It sometimes seems his colossal ego needed the weight of all mankind to balance himself. Whitman's formula for success was the opposite of Dickinson's quiet self-scrutinizing reserve, and so it's appropriate we start with her poetry and with her letters that tentatively reached out to a Civil War hero (Thomas W. Higginson, an outstanding writer himself, who helped bring Dickinson's work to light after her death in 1886). The first of a number of selections by Mark Twain begins with his comic recollections of how he started his writing career in a newspaper office in Nevada mining-country. The last selection of Twain's work is a speech; public speaking was a comic sideline he carried on all over the world.

One story of the development of American literature is that it discovered itself by going overseas to Europe; Twain himself was
hugely
popular in England and he trotted the globe lecturing, learning, and looking for material. Henry James, on the other hand, is America's novelist of its European expatriate communities. But America didn't discover as much about itself from those Americans writing home from Europe as it did from European immigrants. The tremendous influx of immigrants continually enlivened the language and complicated and deepened the nation's psychology. Immigrants then and now reminded America of what it was, is and ought to be. We also see in fiction and in selections from memoirs (e.g. Rose Cohen's) the rapid effects of America on individuals and cultures. Admittedly, all of the contributors but one, the great Sioux chief Sitting Bull, are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Sitting Bull tells us in eloquent speeches how Native Americans saw their lands disappear as European Americans swept across the country and the U.S. government claimed natives' territory or broke treaties.

By the end of the nineteenth century, literature by African American authors found multiple audiences; their writing helped unite black Americans in literary and educational communities. Fiction by Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar appeared in major magazines while nonfiction by social reformers, among them the controversial Booker T. Washington, challenged white Americans to reconsider thoughtless prejudices and legal inequalities.

Though Emily Dickinson was shy about publication of her work, many other women authors of her time weren't. We present several masterful short stories by, among others, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin and Willa Cather. Gertrude Stein, arguably the most influential experimental American writer of the twentieth century, contributes an amusing and characteristically intriguing “dialogue.”

Memoirs and autobiographies were among the popular American genres, as they are today, and we have included excerpts from a few, most notably Helen Keller's and Ulysses S. Grant's. Blind and deaf, Keller tells of learning how to speak, read, and write; her story was and is amazing and inspiring. The former President and Civil War general Grant's remarkable plainspoken memoirs were only written under duress at the end of his life, but were immediately, immensely, deservedly popular.

Students and readers unfamiliar with American literature should remind themselves that much of the best of our writing
reads
colloquially,
in the lively common language of speech. Ever since Benjamin Franklin's first-person skits and sketches in the early eighteenth century, American literature (continuing into the twenty-first century in the work, for example, of the extraordinary Junot Díaz) has thrived on the voice of natural conversation. So if the American dialects in the work by Twain, Chesnutt, or Chopin, among others, seem challenging, read it
aloud!
You will
hear
the sense lift up off the page.

We have included three short novels, among the most captivating in American literature after Herman Melville's, namely
Daisy Miller
by Henry James,
The Call of the Wild
by Jack London, and
Ethan Frome
by Edith Wharton.

We have ordered the selections chronologically, after a fashion. That is, the first publication by a particular writer determines his or her works' chronological appearance; we bunch the other selected works (if any) by that author in chronological order after the first one. This somewhat loose arrangement allows us to watch the procession of works and writers as they make their entrances on the literary scene. We witness Langston Hughes, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, get his start in 1921, as a nineteen-year-old, with the acclaimed “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The chronological arrangement also lets us be struck by the unprecedented and never again equaled florescence of American poetry in the 1910s: in that decade, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and Carl Sandburg wrote so many great poems that we're reminded or freshly persuaded that there really are golden ages in the arts.

We conclude this volume (Volume III is on its way) with the dazzling F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose life and career seemed to have mimicked the arc of many of his fictional works. Famous, though slight, Fitzgerald's “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” reverses time in somewhat the manner in which we look over our shoulders at American literature. We can start in the old days of Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain and then read our way back to the present. The editor acknowledges that there are works unrepresented here that, after all,
should
have been; he also acknowledges that there are no doubt choices of works we
have
included that will bewilder some readers. The best solution to this frustration? Keep reading beyond these covers.

For their help with this compilation, I wish to thank two friends, the poet John Wilson, for selecting the poems by William
Carlos
Williams and Ezra Pound, and the critic Kia Penso, for her guidance in selecting Wallace Stevens's poems. Finally, let me thank Dover editor Susan L. Rattiner for her help in organizing, correcting and focusing this volume and senior editor John Grafton for proposing and spearheading
The Dover Anthology of American Literature
.

—
B
OB
B
LAISDELL

New York City

February 2014

EMILY
DICKINSON

As radically original and private a poet as Walt Whitman was radically original and public, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, and attended college at Mount Holyoke for a year. When she was thirty-one years old, she initiated a correspondence with the writer and activist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. We present seven of Dickinson's letters after an assemblage of twenty-two of her nearly 1,800 poems (only ten poems of hers were published in her lifetime). Our selection of poems spans probably two decades. The best source of dates of original composition (usually only approximate) is
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, n.d. (c. 1960). The dates provided here are based on Johnson's research. Dickinson did not as a rule title her poems, though Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, in preparing them for publication, added topical or thematic titles to some. We have bracketed those titles or quoted the first line as a title guide.

[
Escape]
(c. 1859)

                    
I never hear the word “escape”

                    
Without a quicker blood,

                    
A sudden expectation,

                    
A flying attitude.

                    
I never hear of prisons broad

                    
By soldiers battered down,

                    
But I tug childish at my bars,—

                    
Only to fail again!

S
OURCE:
Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson.
Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

[
Compensation]
(c. 1859)

                    
For each ecstatic instant

                    
We must an anguish pay

                    
In keen and quivering ratio

                    
To the ecstasy.

                    
For each beloved hour

                    
Sharp pittances of years,

                    
Bitter contested farthings

                    
And coffers heaped with tears.

S
OURCE:
Poems by Emily Dickinson: Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson.
Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.

“
A wounded deer leaps highest”
(c. 1860)

                    
A wounded deer leaps highest,

                    
I've heard the hunter tell;

                    
'T is but the ecstasy of death,

                    
And then the brake is still.

                    
The smitten rock that gushes,

                    
The trampled steel that springs:

                    
A cheek is always redder

                    
Just where the hectic stings!

                    
Mirth is the mail of anguish,

                    
In which it caution arm,

                    
Lest anybody spy the blood

                    
And “You're hurt” exclaim!