The 19th Century American Literature: Major Works

 Rebecca Harding Davis

 Walt Whitman

 Emily Dickinson

 Upton Sinclair

 Filippo Marinetti

 Sinclair Lewis

 Vachel Lindsay

from "Life in the Iron Mills"

"The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,--clinging on a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upwardfrom the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,--almost worn out, I think. "

Iron Mills full text:
http://www.samford.edu/schools/artsci/english/lasseter/editiron.htm

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 Walt Whitman

from "To a Locomotive in Winter":

. . . Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,

Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating,

shuttling at thy sides,

Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,

Thy great protruding head-light fix'd in front,

Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,

The dense and murky clouds out-belching thy smoke-stack,

Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves. . .

Type of the modern\emdash emblem of motion and power--pulse of the continent. . . .

Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,

(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)

Launch'd o'er the prairies wide, across the lakes,

To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

full text: http://www.bartleby.com/142/260.html

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[585] (1862)

I like to see it* lap the Miles--

And lick the Valleys up--

And stop to feed itself at Tanks--

And then--prodigious step

Around a Pile of Mountains--

And supercilious peer

In Shanties--by the sides of Roads--

And then a Quarry pare

To fit its Ribs

And crawl between

Complaining all the while

In horrid--hooting stanza

Then chase itself down Hill--

And neigh like Boanerges--

Then--punctual as a Star

Stop--docile and omnipotent

At its own stable door.

*a train

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 Upton Sinclair

from The Jungle

Jurgis Rudkus and his family have immigrated from Lithuania to Chicago, where he finds work in the stockyards where livestock are butchered and packed:

". . . They sat and stared out of the window. They were on a street that seemed to go on forever, mile after mile--thirty four of them, if they had known it--and each side of one uninterrupted row of wretched little two-story fram buildings. Down every side street they could see, it was the same,--never a hill and never a hollow, but always the same endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings. Here and there would be a bridge crossing a filthy creek, with hard-baked mud shores and dingy sheds and docks along it; here and there would be a railroad crossing, with a tangle of switches, and locomotives puffing, and rattling freight-cars filing by; here and there would be a great factory, a dingy building with innumerable windows in it, a making filthy the earth beneath. But after each of these interruptions, th e desolate procession would begin again--the procession of dreary little buildings."

In the packing and canning processes, the meat companies chemically doctored and processed the meat. For example, sausage:

". . . There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected and was mouldy and white--it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in the rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in those storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. . . and the man who did the shovelling would not trouble to lift out a rat when he saw one--there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. . . . "

Upton Sinclair, from The Jungle, full text,
> http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Sinclair/TheJungle/ (By chapters)

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[Marinetti was an Italian poet and leader of Futurism, one of the modernist movements (along with Fauvism, Post-Impresionism, Cubism, Expressionism, De Stijl, and Surrealism) in painting and literature.]

Futurist Manifesto

1. We will sing of the love of danger, the habits of energy and temerity.

2. Courage, audacity, revolt shall be essential elements of our poetry. . . .

4. We assert that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing car with its bonnet [hood] draped in enormous pipes like fire-spitting serpents. . .a roaring racing car that goes like a machine gun is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace [a famous Greek statue]. . . .

9. We will glorify war, the only hygiene of the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gestures of anarchists. . . contempt of women.

10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, and academies of every kind, and will combat moralism, feminism, and all vile opportunist utilitarianism.

Filippo Marinetti: Futurist Manifesto, full text,
> http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html

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from Babbit (1922)

"The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.

The mist took pity on the fretted structures of the earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minerets of hulking old houses. . . .The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes--they seemed--for laughter and tranquility.

Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. . . . Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of polished steel leaped into the glare.

In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. . . . Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out . . . honest wares. . . . The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of labor in a city built--it seemed--for giants."

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"Factory Windows Are Always Broken"

Factory windows are always broken.

Somebody's always throwing bricks,

Somebody's always heaving cinders,

Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.

Factory windows are always broken.

Other windows are let alone.

No one throws through the chapel-window

The bitter, snarling stone.

Factory windows are always broken.

Something or other is going wrong.

Something is rotten--I think, in Denmark.

End of the factory-window song.

Vachel Lindsay:"Factory Windows Are Always Broken", full text> http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/lindsay/factory.shtml

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