ABSTRACT

Although Ambrose Bierce wrote poetry prolifi cally throughout his career, publishing approximately eight hundred poems between 1867 and 1912, critics have largely ignored this part of his oeuvre in favor of his fi ction and journalism. 1 In nearly a century of Bierce studies, fewer than a dozen books and articles have done more than mention his poetry in passing; since 1980, only three works have given it sustained attention – Donald Sidney-Fryer’s and Mary E. Grenander’s introductions to the only two new collections of Bierce’s poetry issued in this three-decade span, and Roy Morris’s 1995 biography of Bierce, Alone in Bad Company . To some extent, this neglect is understandable. Many scholars have likely taken their cue from Bierce himself, who, despite – or perhaps because of – his estimation of “great” poetry as “the highest, ripest, richest fruit of the human intellect,” 2 often disparaged his own efforts in this vein, as when he recalled in the March 9, 1878, issue of the Argonaut that “when I was in my twenties, I concluded one day that I was not a poet. It was the bitterest moment of my life.” 3 And, indeed, some of Bierce’s poetry warrants this negative self-assessment, particularly the earliest pieces, which Roy Morris justifi ably characterized as “[d]erivative, mawkish, and overwrought.” 4 While much of Bierce’s later verse is considerably more accomplished, its critical disregard is partly explicable by its form: Bierce’s most frequent poetic mode was satire, usually directed, as Donald Sidney-Fryer said, at “persons who were once celebrities of the West Coast but who are now nonentities except to the specialist in Californian history and literature.” 5 Mary E. Grenander paraphrased Bierce’s own view, articulated in his preface to his collection Black Beetles in Amber, that “it was the satire itself that would have lasting signifi cance, not its objects. . . . Even if the subjects of satire were obscure, they would achieve a kind of permanence if the verse in which they were pilloried had literary merit,” 6 as is the case with the satires of Juvenal, Pope, and Swift. However, the general critical judgment is that Bierce falls short in terms of such merit. Morris rated the majority of Bierce’s satire as being as “forgettable” as its subjects, 7 while SidneyFryer stated that “read infrequently and at the rate of a few pieces at a time, this satirical verse is apt and amusing; but read in a large quantity, it rapidly becomes tiresome, if not downright unbearable.” 8

Nevertheless, all three of these critics aver that Bierce wrote a considerable number of poems that transcend such harsh judgments. Grenander provided the

fullest analysis of the sophisticated poetic theory that Bierce developed in a dozen incisive, discerning critical essays; his wide-ranging and well-absorbed infl uences; and his sure hand with several challenging verse forms – all of which led her to conclude that “if he was not by his own standards a great poet, he was nevertheless a good one.” 9 Morris argued that, in some instances, Bierce’s poetry bears favorable comparison with Thomas Hardy’s, and that many of his satirical aphorisms are equal to those of his “revered master, Alexander Pope.” 10 After noting the tedium of much of Bierce’s satire, Sidney-Fryer asserted that “a modicum remains of real poetry, compact, imaginative, and powerful; or – quite unexpectedly – tender.” 11 Whether the small clutch of poems Bierce devoted to issues related to the Civil War constitute part of this modicum is open to debate; I believe and hope to show that most of them do meet Sidney-Fryer’s description, and I further believe that if I am correct in this regard then to ignore these poems is to ignore a body of work that adds depth to our conventional understanding of Bierce’s outlook and artistry.