James Whitcomb Riley Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Carlin T. Kindilien

Critical Essay by Carlin T. Kindilien

SOURCE: Kindilien, Carlin T. “The Continuing Tradition: Sentimental Humor.” In American Poetry of the Eighteen Nineties, pp. 56-9. Providence: Brown University Press, 1956.

In the following excerpt, Kindilien catalogues those attributes that make Riley's poetry sentimental, notes the enormous popularity of sentimental literature in the late Victorian era, and ultimately dismisses Riley's “hundreds of verses” as having “no claim to distinction as poetry.”

Most of the poetry of the Nineties was a sentimental expression. The successful poets had learned in newspaper offices that the sympathetic emotion could be marketed and they were willing to accentuate its place in literature. They had little reason to balk when they saw the success of Will Carleton and Jim Riley. Carleton had parlayed the emotional distortions of sentimentalism and cleaned the board when he turned up the old homestead. America's most popular poet of the Seventies, Will Carleton sold forty thousand copies of his...
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