Poems on Man

Poems on Man, in His Various Aspects under the American Republic is a collection of poems by Cornelius Mathews, the American writer who lived from 1817 to 1889 and who was one of the central figures of the Young America literary movement of the 1840s. The collection was first published in 1843 and represents Mathews’s effort to produce a distinctively American body of poetry treating the various types and conditions of human life in the new American republic.

The organizing principle of the collection is the gallery of types. Each poem in the volume takes a particular American social or occupational type as its subject and attempts to render that type in verse. There are poems on the Citizen, the Mechanic, the Reformer, the Editor, the Statesman, the Poet, the Sailor, the Farmer, the Soldier, and various other figures who together would compose, in Mathews’s vision, a representative portrait of American social life under the republican institutions of the period.

The project belongs to the broader Young America literary program. Mathews and his colleagues believed that American writers needed to develop subjects and forms appropriate to the new democratic society rather than imitating the aristocratic conventions of European literature. A gallery of American types in verse seemed to offer the right combination of formal poetry and democratic content. The collection was meant to demonstrate by example what a distinctively American poetry might look like and to encourage other writers to pursue similar projects.

The individual poems are uneven in quality. Mathews was a competent verse writer rather than a major poet, and the various types he treats are sometimes handled with insight and sometimes with the kind of generic generality that the form encouraged. The poems on more familiar American figures, particularly the Mechanic and the Farmer, are generally stronger than those on more abstract types like the Reformer or the Statesman. The collection as a whole has the slightly programmatic quality that came with its origin in a self conscious literary movement.

The book is short and reads in a single sitting. Like Mathews’s other work, it has not stayed in the active canon of American poetry but is of interest now as a document of the Young America movement and of mid nineteenth century American literary nationalism. It pairs naturally with Wakondah, the Master of Life and with the other Young America publications of the 1840s.