Excelsior! Inspirational Verse, the Victorian Working-Class Poet, and the Case of Longfellow

Abstract

Excelsior! Inspirational Verse, the Victorian Working-Class Poet, and the Case of Longfellow Kirstie Blair (bio) Even though Ronan was snarling and Noah was sighing and Adam was hesitating, he didn't turn to verify that they were coming. He knew they were. In three different ways, he'd earned them all days or weeks or months before, and when it came to it, they'd all follow him anywhere. "Excelsior," said Gansey, and shut the door behind them."Excelsior," Gansey said bleakly.Blue asked, "What does that even mean?" Maggie Stiefvater, from The Raven Boys The shades of night were falling fastAs through an Alpine village passedA youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,A banner with the strange device, Excelsior! Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from "Excelsior" In Stiefvater's popular young adult fantasy sequence, The Raven Cycle, "Excelsior" is a catchphrase used repeatedly and superstitiously by the protagonist, Richard Gansey III, whose quest for a lost Welsh king buried in rural Virginia shapes the four-book narrative. "Excelsior," roughly meaning "ever higher," was a term popularized in the nineteenth century by Longfellow's eponymous poem, in which a mysterious youth climbs onwards and upwards into the Alps, ignoring various warnings, and is then found frozen to death in the final stanza. For Gansey to cite it at the outset of new adventures or when entering a magical location is entirely appropriate. Like Longfellow's hero, he is on a lonely, [End Page 1] self-appointed, and grimly determined mission, likely to end in his death. In addition, Gansey's "Excelsior" is a signifier of his excessive white male privilege. His elite private education, his wealth, his family's standing, are thematically central to the series. That he is familiar with a poem by Longfellow, a highly educated, cosmopolitan, white male Harvard professor with a love of all things European (while Blue, a working-class woman, is unfamiliar with it) is not at all surprising. "Excelsior" signals Gansey's resolve to venture into the unknown and strength to keep going in the face of danger and despair. However, since none of the other characters in The Raven Cycle recognize the allusion, referencing Longfellow also signifies something unusual for the twenty-first century; a young American hero who not only knows his poetic canon but is in many ways attuned to perceived nineteenth-century ideals of duty and perseverance. Longfellow's poetry, as this example suggests, still has a ghostly inspirational presence in contemporary literature. I select this particular instance because it shows how far Longfellow's "Excelsior"—and indeed our perception of Longfellow—has traveled since the poem's mass circulation in the Victorian period. From being common property, in all the senses of the word "common," "Excelsior" is now a symbol of eccentricity and high-class education. From being arguably the popular poet, the poet of the people, Longfellow is now the poet for a privileged few. This article considers Longfellow's vital importance for British working-class poets and readers in the mid-late Victorian period, and suggests that he is the single most important contemporary influence on their work, and possibly the second most important literary influence more broadly, after Robert Burns. Yet I also seek to use Longfellow as a means to frame the highly neglected genre of inspirational verse, to offer a brief taxonomy of this genre, and to suggest the complex ways in which it operates, and how it can be deployed for political and indeed radical ends. While "Excelsior" is hardly a positive poem, since the youth is dead at its close, his motives and his cause a mystery, the term "Excelsior!" became Victorian shorthand for being inspired to persist against all odds. As the Star of Freedom (formerly the Chartist Northern Star) suggested in 1852: "Excelsior" is the battle-anthem of all who combat for freedom and right! Excelsior, exclaims the martyr, even though friends should fail, and the night gather darkly around. "Excelsior," shouts the patriot, though the scaffold loom ominously in his way, though the axe gleam, and his next step be the death-plunge into the grave.1 From the Excelsior manuscript magazine of an unknown...