Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 May 1899 — Most Popular American Poet. [ARTICLE]

Most Popular American Poet.

Ever since way back in 1881 or 1882 when James Whitcomb Riley published a slim little book entitled “The Ole Swimmin’ Hole,” and “Leven More Poems, by B F. Johnson of Boone,” he has been to Indianaians the most popular living American poet. Outside of his own state his fame has grown less rapidly but not less steadily, until now he is the most widely read of living American poets. In proof of this statement we give herewith, an extract from an article on “The New Poetry,” in the current number of the North American Review, from the pen of no less a literary authority than William Dean Howells, who is himself, now recognized as America’s greatest living “all around” writer. Following is the extract: Foremost of our poets who have spoken to and fqr the day which is not yet yesterday, I should say was James Whitcomb Riley, who has known how to endear himself to a wider range of American humanity than any other American poet. If his popularity were the sole proof of the enduring love of poetry among us it would be no weak proof. It might not imply that poetry generally was so much read as it once was, but it would imply that poetry of exquisite loveliness in whatever guise it wore had come home to the common heart as it had not before. Probably the most widely read American poems in their time were Longfellow’s /“Hiawatha” and Whittier’s “SnowBound;” but Mr. Riley’s poetry is much more widely read than either. It reaches the lettered as well as the unlettered; it has had the courage of the familiar, the homely, qualities which are the most widely- felt, and it is not because it is American (although we like it so), because it is human that it finds its way over the fruitful levels where men are all equal. I do not prize it less than the new English poetry in form or spirit, for I think Mr. Riley a very great artist, with insight as subtile as the best of the new English poets, and sympathy as generous. The Hoosier parlance which he has subdued to rhyme has not the consecration which time has given the Scottish dialect in Ramsay and Burns, but it says things as tenderly and as intimately, and on the lips of this master it is music. If he is above all others the American poet, his primacy is significant of a more entire liberation to our native genius than we have yet realized; at the least and lowest, here is a poet who could have come in no other time or place than ours; and quite so much could not] have been said of any American poet before. One feels this nqt only in his Hoosier verse, but in his poems in literary English; he is still essentially the poet of our common life; and perhaps hereafter the soul of that life may be divined best, in its sweetness and sincerity and purity, in the verse which is of such friendly familiarity that some may not yet prize it aright.