Parlour Poetry

This is a really solid gem-quality collection of sentimental verse which may have peaked in 1810. From "Little Jim" childenized poetry through the drums and oaks of Wilcox, Scot and Kipling. [No Harding. Hmmm.] With interesting Biographies.

These are the poems memorized by our grandparents' parents, almost none of which are anthologized today. As the Industrial Age opened, disaster lurked around every corner, even for children -- "the hymning of moribund babies" [vi] was a lucrative poetic industry -- but a century and a half ago, God was in his heaven, and England and America enjoyed simple moral values universally accepted: courage, honesty, tenderness, devotion, temperance, charity, and above-all, hope! There was an unabashed show more certainty in the security of the spirit if not the body.

And these poems lived in an oral tradition, their themes deeply imbedded in action. And it was no less than our Ella Wheeler Wilcox who wrote, "...it is not Art, but Heart, which wins the wide world over."

The Parlour Poem was a form of popular Art which had not existed before, and "probably never will again" [ix]. It is the expression of an emergent middle class, fearful of Rabelaisian rabble, and shocked by amoral aristocracy, and seeking the shield and sword of a stern but comforting ethic for itself.

The moral ground of sentimentality had not yet been bent by those giant worms of hypocritical sentimentality, the Bavarian Beer Garden Nazis and their royal English (1917 House name changed) and Ford cousins. show less