Percy H. Boynton

Name: The Cambridge History of American Literature
Author: Percy H. Boynton

The Cambridge History of American Literature (1921)

Summary

“The Cambridge History of American Literature”, published in 1921, is a work by Percy H. Boynton. It explores elements such as song, melody and tune.

Quotes from The Cambridge History of American Literature (Percy H. Boynton)

Percy H. Boynton, The Cambridge History of American Literature (1921)

“ Here are three types, the common factor being that the music always provided the pattern for the words. Yankee Doodle was a sort of ballad, loaded on a music vehicle which has rolled through the decades without its burden. Hail Columbia, written for a march tune, was made public in propitious circumstances and achieved an immediate vogue, but is seldom sung today except to fill out a program. The Star Spangled Banner, set to an old convivial song, with a range that demands the exhilaration of the cup, has been granted long life on account of its official recognition ”

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Source: Wikisource

Percy H. Boynton, The Cambridge History of American Literature (1921)

“ ALTHOUGH Americans have been a relatively untuneful people, popular song has never been inaudible since the beginning of our national life. Out of the steady succession of jaunty or sentimental melodies a few have been saved through their appropriation for patriotic ends. A larger body of hymns has survived in the traditions of public worship and through the conserving influence of the hymnals. A common religious feeling makes the appeal for the religious lyric; the corresponding motive for secular song is a wave of community enthusiasm ”

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Source: Wikisource

Percy H. Boynton, The Cambridge History of American Literature (1921)

“ Words and music of To Anacreon in Heaven, constitutional song of the Anacreontic Society in London, were published in 1771. They became so beloved of all convivial souls that the words (with or without the music) were reprinted in twenty-one known magazines and song collections in England between 1780 and 1804, and the melody (with the original or adapted words) was printed no less than thirty times in America between 1796 and 1813. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Percy H. Boynton, The Cambridge History of American Literature (1921)

“ The answers to these questions do not supply the material for any compact formula; they prove rather that the ages do not exhaust, nor custom limit, the variety of ways for satisfying popular taste.
Yankee Doodle, for example, is full of surprises, inconsistencies, paradoxes in its career. It is not really a song, but it is a band tune which no existing adult audience has ever sung together. The single stanza known to everyone is not a part of the Revolutionary War ballad, but belongs to an earlier period in its history. The music is unheroic ”

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Source: Wikisource

Percy H. Boynton, The Cambridge History of American Literature (1921)

“ Fanny J. Crosby's attempt to regain the tune for the North with her "On ye patriots to the battle" was wholly unsuccessful; the other Southern variants died away; Pike's version is now a literary memory; but Emmett's original words and music still bring people to their feet as no other song in America does. They stand in deference to the tradition of The Star Spangled Banner, but they rise to Dixie itself. The melody for The Battle Hymn oj the Republic has had quite the most varied career in the history of American patri- otic song. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Percy H. Boynton, The Cambridge History of American Literature (1921)

“ In time, however, the words lost interest for all but antiquarians, so that the stanza in The Songster's MuseumDwas literally true in 1826 as it is to-day:
Yankee Doodle is the tune
Americans delight in. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Percy H. Boynton, The Cambridge History of American Literature (1921)

“ Not until the Civil War was it widely accepted as a national anthem, and then came two more paraphrases in St. George Tucker's attempt to requisition it for the Confederacy in The Southern Cross and in Oliver Wendell Holmes's added stanza. ”

Percy H. Boynton

Summary

Quotes from The Cambridge History of American Literature (Percy H. Boynton)

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