Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Group

Irving and the Knickerbocker Group 179
York. And now New York must compete with the South,
the Southwest, the Northwest, the Pacific Coast. Here is a
paradox: As government becomes more centralized, litera-
ture becomes more regional. The latter trend is wholesome,
the former dubious.

There were flashes of literary art in early America; a
handsome eulogy of John Smith by Richard Pots, winsome
descriptions of New England by Thomas Morton, some
genuine personal poetry by Ann Bradstreet, Franklin’s fluent
pregnant prose, Thomas Paine’s flashing epigrams, Jeffer-
son’s lucent political analyses. Such things, however, were
casual or secondary to weightier purposes. As the eighteenth
century was merging into the nineteenth Brockden Brown
envisioned an Americanized literature, but young, star-
crossed, broken in health, his achievement was less than his
aspiration; his novels are crude, his models British, in espe-
cial Horace Walpole and William Godwin. Thus the gen-
eralization stands : The Knickerbockers practically origi-
nated artistic literature of pleasure.

The Knickerbocker group is a less cohesive designation
than the New England school, between whose members were
organic filaments, personal companionships, intellectual
affiliations, a heritage of New England history and legend,
Puritanism latent or manifest, anti-slavery views, in some
cases transcendentalism.

The Knickerbockers merely happened to live in New
York, sporadically or habitually. Excepting Cooper, the
most “American” of them, they looked to England for in-
spiration and guidance, and even Cooper was touched by
Sir Walter Scott’s wand, though much of his best work
was set in the American forest. He and Bryant were
tangentially of the Knickerbocker group. Bryant wrote many
poems, two imperishable, Thanatopsis and To A Water

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