Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/77

Middle Western Poets 59 the flowery fields now white, now orange or sea-blue, the great redwood forest dreaming in silence disturbed only by the sob of a distant dove, and overhead, by night, the clear stars that he loved because they made him, as he said, victor over time and space. In these poems we come to know the Western scene, not as it appeals to a man of action and large, blunt emotion, but as it rouses the feeling of a temperament subtly aesthetic and spiritual. Harte, Miller, and Sill were bom far from the Pacific coast region with which they are associated; the case is otherwise with the leading poets of the Middle West, — the Piatts, Carle- ton, Riley, and Moody. "The wedded poets," John James Piatt (1835-19 1 7), bom in Indiana, and Sarah Morgan Piatt (1836-1912), bom in Kentucky, together produced a large number of volumes of verse, little of which has survived its age. They used conventional forms, and wrote with care and skill ; today, however, what interest they still have depends on the themes of their Western poems, such as The Mower in Ohio and Fires in Illinois. With the Piatts may be named Madison Cawein (1865-1915), of Kentucky, notable for his delicately fanciful sense of the camaraderie of nature. Will Carleton (1845-1912), born in Michigan and brought up on a farm, be- came a journalist, first in the West and later in the East, and a popular reader of his own work. In 1873 ^^ pubHshed Farm Ballads, a group of crudely sentimental pieces directed at the common heart of humanity; forty thousand copies were sold within a year and a half. Poems like Out 0} the Old House, Nancy, and Gone with a Handsomer Man were not too good for anybody. Carleton's success foreshadows the still greater success of another journaHst and pubHc reader of his own verse, the ' ' People's Laureate, ' ' James Whitcomb Riley. Of Pennsylvania Dutch and Irish stock, the latter predominating, he was bora in 1849 in the country town of Greenfield, Indiana, where his father had attained a considerable local reputation as a lawyer and orator. In his boyhood Riley was, as he says, "always ready to declaim and took natively to anything dramatic or theatrical." He was fond of poetry before he could read it, carrying a copy of Quarles's Divine Emblems about with him for the sake of its "feel." In later years his favourite authors