Text: Helen Lucile Watts, “A General Estimate of Hirst as a Writer,” Poe's The Life and Writings of Henry Beck Hirst of Philadelphia Story, Maters Thesis, 1925

[page 139:]

Probably the best thing that we can say of Henry B. Hirst as a writer of verse is that he was a master of versification. He used a very large number and assortment of metres, and almost always managed them well. His rhymes, however, are usually banal, and often forced. He was as careless about them as he was about his choice of words in general.

Hirst's defects are many and serious. The first of them is his lack of originality, on which we have had occasion to comment again and again throughout this criticism. Poe said all that remains to be said on this point when he said, in his second criticism of Hirst: “His chief sin is imitativeness, He never writes anything which does not immediately put us in mind of something that we have seen better written before.”

A second lack in Hirst was lack of industry. To be sure, he wrote a large amount of verse, but he wrote very carelessly. He allowed any number of errors in grammar, rhyme, and punctuation to be published which should never have been written and surely not sent out of his own hands. He did a considerable amount of revision on a few poems, but on many he seems to have done practically none. Except for his care for metre and alliteration, he exhibits lamentably poor workmanship.

The third great lack which we notice is the absence from his poems of any deep feeling which rings true. He wrote a great many poems to women, but scarcely any of them . has any deeper emotion than an interest in the prettiness [page 140:] which he foolishly flatters, or an egotistic concern for what the lady will do for him. His poems about the poet have no lofty yearnings. He wrote of sadness and tragedy, but his grief is never sincere enough to Arouse in the reader any real impulse to share it. And yet, because lyric poetry requires some expression of feeling, he has given voice to a shallow and artificial idealism — the idealism of the women writers and women's magazines of his day — which had, so far as we know from the facts of his life, no close relation with the aims of the real Henry (or “Harry”) Hirst.

He treated of some classical subjects, in his re-telling of old legends, but these narrative poems of his have..none of “the glory that was Greeoe” nor of “ the grandeur that was Rome”.

Most of his subjects come from that strange realm of sentimentalism which has little or no connection either with actual life nor with the higher worlds of imagination and spirit.

Henry B. Hirst was surely not born great. He did not, achieve greatness, because he had not the intimate communion with nature and with common life which characterized Wordsworth, nor the keen sense of beauty in specific manifestations which has immortalized Keats, nor the pure insight to give him entrance into the higher realms of the spirit where Poe and Shelley were most at home. For a while only, some greatness of a sort was thrust upon Hirst, and that he has deservedly lost.