Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[51] were to disregard themselves; and in the third their problem was to be resolved. It was a tremendous theme, worthy of a poet of an ampler intellectual endowment than Hovey's. How high a flight he attempted may be seen in Taliesin: a masque (1900), the last play that he completed, a poet's poem which to some readers has been Hovey at his most exalted, while others have roundly condemned its exuberant fancy, imagination, and metaphysics. It is, at all events, a remarkable feat in rhythm-building, astonishing in the easy mastery with which the poet passes from one movement to another and in the variety of musical effects. The other plays are clearer and more substantial; in The marriage of Guenevere (1895), for example, the Queen is revealed with a definiteness unequalled in the Arthurian tradition, though it is by no means certain that the modem touch is in this respect an unmixed advantage. All the plays are deftly and fluently written, but they fail in sustained power. The note of the improvvisatore is never away.

This note is not so fatal in the lyric. Hovey's lyrics time will doubtless adjudge his best work. He has little weight, little insight of the profounder sort, but he has, on the other hand, unusual fervor and élan, and much insight of the merely subtle sort. Sensitive, tingling with life, he responds to the world with a gaiety not so much thoughtless as thought banishing, a gaiety alien to the dominant moods of modem life and hence always open to the suspicion of affectation. His quality is very evident in the three series of Songs from Vagabondia (1893, 1896, 1900) written collaboratively with Bliss Carman. They express impetuously, a little artificially at times, the vagabondage of the soul that runs like a gypsy thread through the romantic literature of the century. The wander-lovers, which sets its pace in the first line, ‘Down the world with Mama!’ is in its way a nearly perfect thing. In a distinct part of Hovey's work, his poems of masculine comradeship and college fraternity, this Bohemian mood is expressed in a really notable way. Spring, for instance, read at a fraternity convention in 1896, contains, in a charming natural setting, the lines beginning ‘Give a rouse, then, in the May-time’ which, set to music by Frederic Field Bullard, are familiar to college youth from coast to coast. This kind of thing Hovey could do better than any other of our poets.