Edmund Clarence Stedman

Stedman, Edmund Clarence (8 Oct. 1833-18 Jan. 1908), poet, critic, and stockbroker, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Edmund Burke Stedman, a lumber merchant, and Elizabeth Clementine Dodge, a poet. Stedman was two when his father died, forcing his mother to move with her two sons to the Plainfield, New Jersey, home of her parents. Her father, David Low Dodge, was reputedly the founder of the world's first peace society, but he ran his home with an iron fist. In 1839 "Ned" was sent to the Norwich, Connecticut, home of his great-uncle, James Stedman, a lawyer and classicist, who operated a boarding school in his home to supplement his income. Stedman desperately hoped that his mother's marriage in 1841 to William Burnet Kinney, editor of the Newark Daily Advertiser, would enable her to reunite the family, but Kinney rejected the plan. In 1875 Stedman wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson that he had grown up in the "Calvinistic back-country, where I was injured for life, and almost perished of repression and atrophy."

In 1850 the sight of his mother, Kinney, and two half sisters sailing for Italy, where Kinney would become chargé at Turin, brought deep pain to Stedman, who recalled in 1871 that when he returned for his sophomore year at Yale, "from utter loneliness, trouble, and inexperience I fell into the dissipation that drew me from my proper studies." Rusticated to Northampton, Massachusetts, he and a friend, billing themselves as "THE WELL-KNOWN TRAGEDIAN, ALFRED WILLOUGHBY, and his sister, Miss AGNES WILLOUGHBY," presented Shakespearean programs in Springfield, leading to Stedman's expulsion from Yale.

Supporting himself as editor-proprietor of several rural Connecticut newspapers, Stedman in 1853 eloped with Laura Woodworth, a seamstress; their marriage lasted until her death in 1905. Publishing the Tennysonian poem "Amavi" in Putnam's in 1854, Stedman moved to New York, where he worked in various businesses. The couple's two children were born at this time. In 1859 Stedman gained notoriety when he published the satirical "The Diamond Wedding" in the Daily Tribune. Becoming a journalist, he formed strong alliances with Bayard Taylor, Richard Henry Stoddard, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and other young New York writers. In an 1885 letter to Aldrich, he recalled that Stoddard's Songs of Summer (1855) had initiated a movement among them of "poetry for poetry's sake." Rejecting what in Poets of America (1885) he called "the ethical and polemical fervor [of] . . . their predecessors," these poets "meditated the muse for simple love of beauty and song" (p. 439). In June 1860 Harper's Monthly commented that Stedman's Poems, Lyrical and Idyllic promised a "brilliant future" for a poet with a decided gift for the "expression of melody."

Early in the Civil War Stedman became a war correspondent for the New York World, but his doubts about the paper's financial health and disapproval of its Copperhead leanings prompted him in 1862 to accept a government clerkship in Washington, D.C. He returned to New York the next year to work for a bank and in 1864 opened his own brokerage firm, becoming the "Pan in Wall Street" of his 1867 Atlantic Monthly poem.

Discovering in himself a strong critical faculty, he explored in several essays the parallels between the contemporary British situation and that of the Alexandrian age, a time notable for learning but not artistic creativity. Their success led to a series on contemporary British poets for Scribner's Monthly. Influenced by the ideas of French critic Hippolyte Taine, Stedman brought a scientific rigor to American criticism. Praised in both England and America when it appeared in 1875, Victorian Poets, as Jerome Buckley wrote in Victorian Poets: A Guide to Research (1968), was the "first substantial critique [written] without special bias," one that related "Victorian poetry to the context of an analytical age and emphasize[d] a problem still too often neglected by the scholar: the problem of style."

The pressures of completing this book while working on Wall Street brought Stedman in 1874 to the verge of a nervous breakdown. A Caribbean vacation provided some respite, but the news that he had missed a market turn upset him. Forced to divide his time between business and art, Stedman's life was "consecrated to poetry, yet not devoted to it," to use a phrase from his essay on Bayard Taylor, whose premature death in 1878 prompted Stedman to begin a revaluation of American poetry in a series for Scribner's. He first recognized the achievements of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, each then held in disrepute, and then wrote critical assessments of venerated figures such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. The concluding "Twilight of the Poets" (1885) characterizes the age as a time "if not of decadence, at least a poetic interregnum." Poets of America, as Kermit Vanderbilt has written in American Literature and the Academy (1986), is a "milestone," the "first serious overview of American poetry."

In the early 1880s Stedman, with the aid of his elder son, Frederick, achieved substantial success on Wall Street, but in 1883 he learned that Frederick had embezzled large sums from the firm. Borrowing to avoid bankruptcy, Stedman redoubled his efforts in business and also undertook a succession of ambitious literary projects. The eleven-volume Library of American Literature (1888-1890), edited with Ellen M. Hutchinson, offered an inclusive definition of the national literature by incorporating travel writings, political documents, spirituals, sermons, folk sayings, and other vernacular writings. The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892) defends poetry in an age of prose fiction. With George E. Woodberry, Stedman edited The Works of Edgar Allan Poe in ten volumes (1894-1895). Both A Victorian Anthology (1895) and An American Anthology (1900) were critical and commercial successes. The sale of his seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1900 enabled Stedman to pay off his loans, but he had no source of income other than his pen.

Stedman regularly published lyrics in the leading magazines and was in demand as a poet for public occasions. His collections were greeted respectfully, but acute reviewers recognized that, as the Nation wrote on 1 April 1869, for all its "outward elegance of finish," his verse lacked depth: "It is not especially for coherent and forcible conception nor for strong thinking that we look to Mr. Stedman, but for . . . a pretty fancy, for an outward elegance of finish, and . . . an occasional delicate expression of genuine, common sympathies." Aware of his limitations, Stedman confessed in the 1897 "Proem to 'Poems Now First Collected' " that he had "strayed" from the muse, whom "I yet loved . . . most of all." But it was too late for him to take his own advice in Poets of America that to escape the poetic "twilight" poets should follow the lead of those novelists who portray "Life as it is, though rarely as yet in its intenser phases."

During a long career in which he came to be recognized as the leading critic of American poetry, the popular Stedman worked tirelessly to advance the cause of authorship, serving, for instance, as president of the American Copyright League. In 1904 the membership of the National Institute of Arts and Letters selected him, along with William Dean Howells, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Hay, John Lafarge, Edwin McDowell, and Mark Twain, as the first seven of the fifty-member American Academy of Arts and Letters, an organization whose creation Stedman had proposed. Termed by Harriet Monroe in A Poet's Life (1938) the "dean of American poets, the friend and helper of young aspirants," Stedman encouraged such younger poets as Edwin Arlington Robinson, William Vaughn Moody, and Percy MacKaye, who, he was confident, would lead the way out of the poetic twilight. MacKaye recalled that to spend time with Stedman, even in his seventies, "was to be reanimated with the vigor, the enthusiasm, the impressionable receptivity of a young man's vision of life." Stedman died in New York.

Bibliography

The most important repository of Stedman materials is at Columbia University. Because he corresponded with virtually every important American writer during his long literary career, his letters are in numerous libraries, particularly the Houghton at Harvard. The Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. Laura Stedman and George M. Gould (2 vols., 1910), contains a complete primary bibliography and is an invaluable source. The Poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman (1908) is the standard collection. Since Stedman's editorial and critical works sold well, they are widely available. Margaret Fuller, A New England Childhood (1916), is an appreciative account of Stedman's early life in Norwich. The most complete modern treatment is Robert J. Scholnick, Edmund Clarence Stedman (1977). An obituary is in the New York Times, 19 Jan. 1908.

Robert J. Scholnick

Source:

Robert J. Scholnick. "Stedman, Edmund Clarence";

http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-01556.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

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