James Whitcomb Riley

• Born: October 7, 1849
• Birthplace: Greenfield, Indiana
• Died: July 22, 1916
• Place of death: Indianapolis, Indiana

Other literary forms

Above all, James Whitcomb Riley was a poet; he did, however, try his hand (apparently with little success) at other literary forms. His second book, The Boss Girl, a Christmas Story, and Other Sketches, published in 1886, was a collection of prose pieces that went largely unnoticed. Reprinted in 1891 under the title of Sketches in Prose and Occasional Verses, it still attracted no appreciable attention. Other prose sketches were included in his Pipes o’ Pan at Zekesbury. As Riley’s commentator, Peter Revell (James Whitcomb Riley, 1970), points out, these “abortive” efforts at prose show Riley experimenting in an amateurish fashion with various forms of social and psychological realism. Riley also wrote one verse drama in three acts, The Flying Islands of the Night (pb. 1891), which his publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, advertised as “a weird and grotesque drama in verse.” Apparently begun in the 1870’s, The Flying Islands of the Night is a fantastic amalgam of fairy tales, Maurice Maeterlinck, and William Shakespeare. Although Riley was already an established, enormously popular writer by the time The Flying Islands of the Night was published, the drama was quite ignored. Finally, with humorist Bill Nye, Riley coauthored Nye and Riley’s Railway Guide (1888).

Achievements

Although his nickname, the Hoosier Poet, would suggest that he was writing for and about only Indianans, James Whitcomb Riley was probably the most popular poet in the United States during the late 1880’s, the 1890’s, and throughout the early years of the twentieth century. In addition to several honorary degrees at institutions of higher education, he received many significant honors: membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters among them. In 1911, the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him the Gold Medal for Poetry. Attesting to his great popularity were the public celebrations of his birthday, and in 1915, the National Committee of Education institutionalized this practice by directing that his birthday be observed by all public, private, and parochial schools in the United States.

His more than one thousand poems were eagerly purchased, read, and treasured not only by the rural midwesterners for whom he ostensibly wrote but also by the increasingly large numbers of Americans living in urban centers on the east and west coasts. Many of his poems were memorized by several generations of schoolchildren, and Riley so perfectly captured and expressed the pastoral myth of the American Eden that a number of his poems have become a permanent part of the collective American psyche.

Indeed, it would probably come as a surprise to many Americans that the now largely forgotten Riley was responsible for such familiar phrases and images as “When the frost is on the punkin,” “Little orphant Annie,” and “the old swimmin’-hole.” Although these fragments of Riley’s work have endured and probably will continue to do so, it is nevertheless also true that, a century after his death, Riley is, for all intents and purposes, no longer read.

Part of the problem is that the very qualities of his verse that made him so beloved by the readers of several generations ago make him unappealing to contemporary readers. Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska are essentially correct in maintaining that Riley wrote poems “that would not depress his audiences, nor strike too deeply into the darkness of their fears and doubts. He had a great dread of the darker places of the soul, and of the sinister or complicated recesses of the mind” (A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940, 1946). Riley’s brand of sanguine, superficial verse was ideally suited to a nation self-conscious about its new status as a world power and sufficiently prosperous, settled, and urbanized that it could afford to indulge in nostalgia about its “simple” rural origins. In fact, in the poems of “Sunny Jim,” Riley tapped the same portion of the American mind that so enjoyed the best-selling novels of Riley’s era: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1901), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903).

Riley’s poems, be they of the “Hoosier” type (written in midwestern dialect) or of the “Lockerbie” type (in standard English), are of even less interest to critics than they are to modern readers. As Peter Revell has noted in the preface of his study of Riley, the meanings of Riley’s poems are readily apparent (although occasionally the dialect makes them a little difficult to decipher); he chose not to be “literary,” studiously avoiding references to classical and contemporary writers and their works. He is not, except perhaps for the dialect, of any technical interest; and his work—so limited in subject, treatment, and style as to be virtually formulaic—shows little apparent development.

Even so, literary historians cannot afford to ignore Riley: His very popularity—not only among rural midwesterners but also with such well-established literary figures as Mark Twain, James Russell Lowell, Hamlin Garland, and Rudyard Kipling—attests that one cannot fully appreciate the American literary and social scene at the turn of the twentieth century without having some understanding of Riley’s life and work.

Biography

James Whitcomb Riley was born on October 7, 1849 (some sources erroneously list the year as 1853), in the village of Greenfield in Hancock County, Indiana. Although is was small (it had a population of three hundred in 1844), Greenfield had some cultural pretensions, and in Riley’s youth, it saw the establishment of several schools, a library, and a dramatic society. This is important to bear in mind, for although Riley cultivated a public image as a sort of folksy cracker-barrel sage, he would scarcely qualify as one of the rural types whom he depicted so frequently in his verse and for whom he ostensibly wrote. Similarly, his father Reuben (or Reubin) Alexander Riley, far from being a farmer, was a prosperous attorney who had hoped that James (the third child of six, and the second son) would pursue a career in law.

A Pennsylvanian of Dutch ancestry, Reuben had established himself as a leading citizen of Greenfield virtually from the town’s founding. He edited Greenfield’s local newspaper in 1847 and even became its first mayor in 1852. Politically astute and evidently ambitious, he named his second son for Governor James Whitcomb, under whom Reuben served as a member of the Indiana State Legislature beginning in 1844.

Not surprisingly, his father had little patience with James, a frail, sensitive boy who did rather poorly in school and who evinced no inclination toward any sort of professional or business career. The boy apparently was temperamentally much closer to his mother, Elizabeth Marine Riley, who enjoyed music and published her poems in local newspapers, and to Captain Lee O. Harris, a teacher who reportedly abandoned all efforts to teach arithmetic to young Riley and instead encouraged his interests in reading and acting—two skills that in the nineteenth century were frequently combined in the form of “declaiming”: the memorization and dramatic recitation of passages of literature.

Captain Harris’s encouragement proved fruitful in more ways than he could foresee, for through his reading, Riley came to emulate such writers as Robert Burns and Charles Dickens, who shared with him an awareness of the literary potentialities of “humble” people. He apparently was especially impressed with The Biglow Papers (1848) of James Russell Lowell, a work that may well have inspired those attempts at the recording of Hoosier dialect that ultimately became his poetic trademark, and his talents in declaiming eventually led to his remarkably successful career as a poet/entertainer on the lecture circuit throughout the United States. Captain Harris, however, who was to become his lifelong friend, was unable to nurture in young Riley an appreciation for formal education, and at sixteen, Riley left school to engage in such inauspicious pursuits as clerking in a shoe store and selling Bibles.

In 1870, Riley’s mother died, and in September of that year, he published in the Greenfield Commercial “The Same Old Story Told Again,” the first of several poems to be printed in local newspapers during this period of uncertainty about his future. At this time, his concerned father apprenticed him to a house and sign painter, an experience that provided a temporary outlet for young Riley’s creativity and that led to his forming a partnership with two other youths. Collectively known as the Graphics, they traveled throughout Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio painting signs. The experience was an ideal one for the future Hoosier Poet, for it exposed him to the rural types and dialect that he would incorporate into his verse. So, too, with his experience as an assistant to a traveling vendor of patent medicines, for whom he painted signs and enlivened the “medical lectures” by playing his banjo and reciting dialect poems of his own composition.

It was during this period (approximately 1872-1875) that Riley seemed to be actively embarking on a career as a professional actor. He performed solo as a “humorist” throughout central Indiana, as well as with the Adelphian Society, the local dramatic club of Greenfield. In 1875, Riley’s alarmed father managed to pressure him into studying law, but the son, now in his late twenties, could tolerate the law for only one year. By 1876, he was on the road again, this time with the Wizard Oil Company, another patent medicine business, and the peripatetic Riley came to realize that, with his success as a “recitationist,” actor, and packager and seller of products (be they patent medicines or his own poems), he could make a career out of publishing and reciting poetry.

Back in Greenfield early in 1877, he became associated with the local paper as well as with the Anderson Democrat, the circulation of which Riley is credited with increasing sixfold by virtue of his commercial jingles, comic renderings of local news, and such regular features as the column he dubbed “The Rhyme-Wagon.” Feeling more confident about his abilities as a writer, Riley began to make serious efforts to publish his poems in local newspapers, but his verses were not always well received. In a rather spiteful response to this cool reception, he decided in the summer of 1877 to prove his point that any poem would become successful and popular if the author were assumed to be “a genius known to fame” by perpetrating a literary hoax: He wrote a poem he titled “Leonainie,” signed it with the initials E.A.P., concocted the story that this was a long-lost poem by Poe newly discovered on the flyleaf of a dictionary owned by a local gentleman, and arranged for it to be printed in the Kokomo Dispatch.

The hoax, which he apparently had envisioned as causing only a local flurry of excitement, generated a nationwide controversy, and Riley was exposed as a fraud within the month. Riley’s discomfited editor dismissed him from his job on the Greenfield newspaper, and the incident would be a source of embarrassment for Riley for the rest of his life. It did, however, earn him some local fame and led to a job with the Indianapolis Journal, under the editorship of Judge E. B. Martindale. The move proved to be a fortunate one, for his association with the Indianapolis Journal from 1877 to 1888 coincided with the period of his greatest creativity, and pleasant Indianapolis would be his home for the rest of his life.

By 1881, Riley’s local reputation as a poet had grown to the point where he signed on with Redpath Lyceum Bureau Circuit, an association that led to his appearances as a poet/entertainer throughout the Midwest, and occasionally in Boston. In June of 1882, Riley published in the Indianapolis Journal the first of his poems ostensibly written by a local farmer, “Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone, the Hoosier Poet,” a series that proved to be so successful that he felt ready to collect and publish them in book form in 1883. The first edition of The Old Swimmin’-Hole, and ’Leven More Poems was financed by George C. Hitt, the business manager of the Indianapolis Journal; but the second edition was brought out by Merrill, Meigs, & Co., and so began the mutually beneficial business relationship between Riley and the Indianapolis publishing house which has come to be known as Bobbs-Merrill. According to Revell, Bobbs-Merrill published some ninety titles by Riley; as of 1949, the number of Riley books sold by Bobbs-Merrill was well beyond three million, although the exact number can never be determined since the sales records prior to 1893 evidently were destroyed.

That phrase “ninety titles” is, however, rather misleading, for Riley tended simply to rearrange and reprint his old, tried-and-true poems, many of them having appeared originally in Indiana newspapers. He also would take a single, especially popular poem, have it lavishly illustrated, and sell it as a hardcover book. Indeed, part of Riley’s enormous popularity may be attributed to his two illustrators, Will Vawter and Howard Chandler Christy. Christy in particular was adept at evoking the genteel atmosphere of the twilight of the Victorian era, his illustrations being attractively tinted. The bindings featured lettering in gold (see, for example, the lavish When She Was About Sixteen, published in 1911).

At the same time that Riley was consolidating his highly lucrative publishing arrangement with Bobbs-Merrill, he was also furthering the remarkably successful career as a poet/entertainer that he had begun in the 1870’s and that had received such impetus from his association with Redpath beginning in 1881. His career on the lecture circuit should not be dismissed lightly, for it is clear that it not only made him wealthy, was a form of self-advertisement, and appealed to his strong innate sense of histrionics, but also helps to explain his great popularity and, moreover, was a major factor in the crystallization of the distinctive Riley poetic style. Evidently Riley, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a charismatic speaker: Having developed a striking stage presence, Riley could slip in and out of Hoosier dialect at will, and he had so perfectly rehearsed his comic commentaries on his own poems that they seemed to be the spontaneous remarks of an unusually witty, genial man of the soil. The Riley-the-poet whom thousands flocked to see and hear was in fact a character or persona created by Riley-the-actor, with every gesture, aside, and intonation meticulously prepared in advance. As Riley himself noted with surprising candor,

In my readings I had an opportunity to study and find out for myself what the public wants, and afterward I would endeavor to use the knowledge gained in my writing. . . . While on the lecture platform I watched the effect that my readings had on the audience very closely and whenever anybody left the hall I knew that my recitation was at fault and tried to find out why. . . . Thus, I learned to judge and value my verses by their effect on the public.

The subject matter, the treatment, even the dialect in his poems had been established and polished by years of experience on the lecture circuit, and Louis Untermeyer is probably correct in maintaining that Riley is “patently the most artificial of those poets who claim to give us the stuff of the soil” (A Critical Anthology: Modern American Poetry [and] Modern British Poetry, 1936).

Artificial or not, Riley was so notoriously successful on the lecture circuit throughout the Midwest that in 1887 it was arranged for him to appear at a literary gala at New York City’s Chickering Hall on behalf of the International Copyright League. Sharing the spotlight with such luminaries as Mark Twain, James Russell Lowell, George Washington Cable, William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, Frank Stockton, and Edward Eggleston, Riley was the least-known writer in attendance, and yet so overwhelming was the impression he made during his recitation on the first day of the two-day affair that he was asked to speak again. In Riley’s official biographical sketch is the familiar comment by Lowell, reportedly made in the course of reintroducing Riley to the sophisticated New York audience on the triumphant second day of the conference, that in Riley’s verse he had found “so much of high worth and tender quality that I deeply regret I had not long before made acquaintance with his work.” Lowell went on to call him a “true poet,” and such an enthusiastic response from one of the most noted literary figures of the day served only to enhance Riley’s career as a lecturer, and he began to appear throughout the United States, often accompanied by fellow-poet Eugene Field or the humorist Edgar W. (“Bill”) Nye.

Riley continued to publish volumes of poetry with singular regularity, and in 1891, he paid a triumphant visit to the British Isles, where he was honored with a dinner at the Savoy in London. In 1893, he began his residence on Lockerbie Street in Indianapolis, where he was a boarder in the pleasant brick home of Major Charles L. Holstein. He also acquired the “Old Homestead” in Greenfield, which became his summer residence (in his old age he wintered in Miami). Riley also received numerous honorary degrees, including an M.A. from Yale University (1902) and doctorates from the University of Philadelphia (1904) and Indiana University (1907). He was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1908 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1911. Probably the honors he most valued, however, were the public celebrations of his birthday.

In 1911, the schools of Indiana and New York City held commemorative programs in his honor on his birthday, and in 1915, the National Committee of Education directed that his birthday be observed by all public, private, and parochial schools in the United States. Upon his death from heat prostration in 1916 (he already had become a semi-invalid because of a series of paralytic strokes), Riley was so well known as a public figure in Indiana that thirty-five thousand people filed past his body lying in state at the capitol building in Indianapolis. His name had become a household word throughout the United States. His reputation as a poet declined dramatically after his death, perhaps because his poems needed the commanding presence of the genial Riley himself to compensate for their obvious deficiencies. However, although Riley is now virtually forgotten by the reading public, it is probably true that he will always hold a place in American literary history by virtue of his truly extraordinary popularity at the turn of the twentieth century.

Analysis

Ordinarily one would be ill-advised to attempt to offer a broad statement concerning 1,044 poems. In James Whitcomb Riley’s case, however, his poetic undertakings were so limited in subject, treatment, and style that it is indeed possible to make generalizations about them. Most of his poems fall into one or more of the following categories: pastoralized treatments of life in rural America, sentimentalized renderings of the relationships between family members or friends, and equally sentimentalized evocations of childhood. As illustrations of these three categories, one might consider “When the Frost Is on the Punkin,” “Knee-Deep in June,” “Nothin’ to Say,” “The Old Man and Jim,” “The Raggedy Man,” “Little Orphant Annie,” and “The Old Swimmin’-Hole.”

“When the Frost Is on the Punkin”

In an age when many Americans have never seen frost on a pumpkin—or, for that matter, pumpkin not in a pie—it is rather remarkable that the title of Riley’s “When the Frost Is on the Punkin” is still in circulation, even if the poem itself is largely forgotten. Clearly working within the venerable tradition of the harvest poem (John Keats’s “To Autumn” is a sterling example), Riley has so generalized and so de-emotionalized the potentially rich subject of the country autumn that the poem is strikingly charmless. Predictably, the air is “appetizin’” and the morning is “crisp and sunny”; the obligatory rooster crows his obligatory “hallylooyer”; and the requisite apples are “poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps,” dutifully ready to be made into cider and applesauce. Vague catalogs of stock autumnal delights, however, together with the overdone repetition of “When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,” and the patently sentimental conclusion that any “Angels wantin’ boardin’” would be more than happy to live in the country at harvest-time, simply cannot salvage the poem. To a nation that was still essentially rural—or, more important, which perceived itself as such—the bland catalogs probably struck deep emotional chords, but to modern readers, all that remains of one of Riley’s most famous poems is the fundamentally meaningless title.

“Knee-Deep in June”

Not all Riley’s poems feature the flurry of farm activity depicted in “When the Frost Is on the Punkin.” The other side of Riley’s brand of rural American life—the “mild Bohemianism” and “fatuousness” that Donald Pizer has cited as characteristic of Riley’s verse (American Thought and Writing: The 1890’s, 1972)—are perhaps nowhere more apparent than in “Knee-Deep in June,” originally published in the Indianapolis Journal in 1885. Overlong at eight stanzas, it enjoins one to find an orchard and “Lay out there and try to see/ Jes’ how lazy you kin be!—” Although the persona explains in the first stanza that he engages in this sort of activity (or lack thereof) only on “some afternoon[s],” it is nevertheless apparent that he could do this “stiddy fer a year er two,” if not for eternity; and the overall impression that one receives from “Knee-Deep in June” is that the Puritan work ethic has been rejected wholesale. Quite typical of Riley’s verse are the poem’s vague renderings of the details of a country landscape (“Hear the old hen squawk, and squat/ Over ever’ chick she’s got”), the domestic metaphors (the shadows are “thick and soft/ As the kivvers on the bed/ Mother fixes in the loft/ Allus, when they’s company!”), and the strained attempts at quaint humor (“Mr. Bluejay, full o’ sass,/ In them base-ball clothes o’ his”). Even the reference to death is carefully sentimentalized to contribute to the aura of lassitude:

Thinkin’ of old chums ’at’s dead,Maybe, smilin’ back at youIn betwixt the beautifulClouds o’ gold and white and blue!

In keeping with the theme of the poem, “Knee-Deep in June” is spread out in leisurely fashion over seven pages of the volume Songs of Summer and features three illustrations by Will Vawter, including a full-page picture of a man “Sprawl[ed] out len’thways on the grass.”

“Nothin’ to Say”

The sentimentality so characteristic of “When the Frost Is on the Punkin” and “Knee-Deep in June” is also evident in the Riley poems that focus on interpersonal relationships rather than on farm life as such. “Nothin’ to Say,” which was accepted for publication by the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1883 but which did not appear until August of 1887, was an immensely popular poem in its day. It is a dramatic monologue in which a father speaks to his daughter, who has declared her intention of getting married on her next birthday. The girl’s mother is dead, having left her baby daughter a “little Bible” with “yer name acrost the page” and some earrings; and, as might well be anticipated, the daughter, in looks and size, is much like the mother. To complete the mother/daughter analogy, the father notes that “It’ll ’most seem like you was dead like her!”; but, faced with the inevitability of his child marrying and moving away, the helpless father “hain’t got nothin’ to say!”

“The Old Man and Jim”

A poem equally predictable and sentimental is “The Old Man and Jim,” one of Riley’s most successful platform pieces. The unidentified narrator records the relationship between an old farmer and his favorite son Jim, “the wildest boy he had.” Constitutionally ill-suited to farming, Jim enlists in the Army for three months at the outbreak of the Civil War and his father, who is “jes’ wrapped up in him,” sends him off to the service with the words “’Well, good-by, Jim:/ Take keer of yourse’f!’” Those parting words become the refrain of the poem, as Jim distinguishes himself in battle, reenlists, and dies of his wounds. A woeful tale, “The Old Man and Jim” must have had quite an impact when dramatically recited by Riley.

“The Raggedy Man”

Considerably less depressing is the sentimentalized rendering of the relationship between a hired man and children in “The Raggedy Man,” one of the best known of the poems Riley wrote depicting child life. Published in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in December, 1890, the poem obviously stirred much interest, for Riley felt compelled to explain that “The Raggedy Man was not a tramp, nor was he so ragged as people usually seem to think. He was just a farmer boy from some neighboring family.” Perhaps this was literally so, but the poem is told from the point of view of a child, and as a result that farmer boy emerges as a sort of combination hired man and oversized playmate. In the first two stanzas, the Raggedy Man embodies the world of adult labor that is so alien to the child-persona, and in that respect, he serves to represent the parental figures who are most prominent in any child’s formative years. In the third stanza, the poem begins to slip into the more imaginative aspects of child life, as the Raggedy Man tells how he picked roasted apples from a tree. This playful motif continues in subsequent stanzas, as the child recounts how the Raggedy Man plays “horsey” with him, tells him about giants and elves, pretends to shoot escaped pigs with his hoe (the “Old Bear-shooter”), reveals that the child is actually a prince whose real father has “gone/ To git more money,” and “steals” the child and hides him in a “cave” (actually the haymow).

This heavily folkloric rendering of child life in rural America comes to an abrupt end in the final stanza, wherein the Raggedy Man asks whether the child wishes to become “a rich merchunt” like his father. The child predictably responds “’I’m ist go’ to be a nice Raggedy Man!’”; but however appropriately “cute” that answer may be, the fact remains that there is an undercurrent in “The Raggedy Man” that is at odds with the folksy, childlike atmosphere it superficially creates. There is a world of difference between the hired man in his insistently “raggedy” attire (that adjective appears some forty-seven times in the eighty-three-line poem) and the persona’s father in his “fine clothes”—a difference that is most apparent in the simple fact that the father, although he owns a farm, must hire the Raggedy Man to handle the decidedly nonpastoral, physically demanding chores associated with farm life. In the America that had once proudly proclaimed itself to be a nation of farmer-citizens, there had arisen by Riley’s era a dichotomy between the rural poor and those prosperous urbanites who were quite willing to pastoralize their country roots as long as others would (literally) handle the dirty work. It is difficult to believe that Riley, himself a wealthy urbanite who had enjoyed a comfortable early life, was unaware of the tension generated in the poem by the child’s double emotional allegiance to his wealthy, oddly remote father and to the poor, hardworking, fun-loving hired man whom the father employs, but Riley, true to form, does not develop the social consciousness that glimmers so faintly in “The Raggedy Man,” and the poem remains essentially an evocation of childhood.

“Little Orphant Annie”

An equally well-known rendering of child life is “Little Orphant Annie.” Originally titled “The Elf Child” and published in the Indianapolis Journal in 1885, it proved to be so popular that Riley was able to sell the little poem (four eight-line stanzas) as the lavishly illustrated Orphant Annie Book. Annie (or “Allie,” as she was originally named) was based on a real person, an orphan who had lived briefly with the Riley children (she apparently has nothing in common with the saucer-eyed comic strip heroine of the same name). In Riley’s poem, she was to “earn her board-an’-keep” by doing housework for the persona’s family, but she was of special interest to the children because of her knowledge of witches, “Gobble-uns,” and “Black Things.” She entertains the family’s children with her stories of little boys and girls being carried off by these supernatural creatures as punishment for being ill-behaved:

You better mind yer parunts an’ yer teachers fond an’ dear,An’ churish them ’at loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear,An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ’at clusters all about,Er the Gobble-uns’ll git youEf you Don’tWatchOut!

Peter Revell is correct in maintaining that the overt didacticism of “Little Orphant Annie” is atypical of Riley’s verse, but he probably underestimates Riley’s inclination to introduce such dark elements into “the usually sunny world of Hoosierdom.” This element of darkness in Riley’s poetry is especially apparent in one of his earliest efforts, “The Old Swimmin’-Hole.”

“The Old Swimmin’-Hole”

Originally published in Indianapolis Journal on June 17, 1882, and reprinted as the title poem in Riley’s first book, “The Old Swimmin’-Hole” proved to be one of the best-loved poems of the 1880’s and 1890’s, and it is easy to see why. It draws on that universal tendency to long for a happier, simpler, and ostensibly problem-free past, whether that past be personal or national. In Riley’s poem, the highly sentimentalized past is embodied in the controlling image of the swimming-hole, something that would be alien to the experience of most modern readers, but which in Riley’s day would be readily acceptable as the vivid symbol of a carefree, self-indulgent youth. Riley’s persona—an “old man” from whom “old Time’s tuck his toll”—seems to strike a precarious mental balance between smiling nostalgia and acute depression, something that is quite uncharacteristic of Riley’s work. The persona recalls that the “gurgle” of the “baby-river” of his boyhood sounded “like the laugh of something we onc’t ust to know/ Before we could remember anything but the eyes/ Of the angels lookin’ out as we left Paradise.” This is an atypically profound way for a Riley poem to begin, and it takes an even more atypical turn as the potentially rich Wordsworthian concept of a prenatal existence is dropped in favor of a narcissistic interpretation of the attractions of the swimming-hole.

Perhaps sensing that he was moving rather too close to the psychological implications of the swimming hole, Riley does not pursue the poetic possibilities of the water imagery and instead has the persona recall playing hooky to go swimming. Immediately, however, the element of depression that so striates this poem becomes overt. After a typically Rileyan catalog of vague country delights, the final stanza makes explicit the connection between the mind of the persona and the swimming hole: “When I last saw the place,/ The scenes was all changed, like a change in my face,” and his response to those twin facts is not at all what one would expect in a poem by Riley. “I wish in my sorrow I could strip to the soul,/ And dive off in my grave like the old swimmin’-hole.” A Riley persona with suicidal tendencies? Incredible as this may sound, the words on the page, taken at face value, would certainly suggest that the persona is reacting to his aging and the changes in his environment less with cheery nostalgia than with desires for oblivion, even self-destruction.

Riley’s contemporary readers evidently chose not to acknowledge the blatant darker aspects of “The Old Swimmin’-Hole,” aspects that may reflect the carefully nonpublicized side of the poet (offstage, “Sunny Jim” Riley drank heavily and suffered from exhaustion and depression), or which may reflect the angst-ridden modern person living in a world of isolation and extraordinary change. Much as the speaker in Riley’s “Griggsby’s Station” yearns to return to “where we ust to be so happy and so pore,” far from “the city! city! city!” where there is “none that neighbors with us, or we want to go and see,” so too the persona in “The Old Swimmin’-Hole” longs to escape from the miseries of his adult life but realizes that there can be no turning back. Unquestionably there was a dark side to sunny Hoosierdom, but it was a side that neither Riley nor his millions of readers cared to probe. For better or for worse, he will go down in literary history as “Sunny Jim” Riley.

Bibliography

Brooks, Van Wyck. The Confident Years, 1885-1915. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952. Riley played an important role in the time covered here. In the Midwest, where later writers would describe darker visions, Riley and Lewis Wallace expressed “smiling aspects.” More important writers than Riley himself had a great liking for Riley’s writing, including Eugene Field and Theodore Dreiser. Supplemented by footnotes and an index.

Crowder, Richard. Those Innocent Years: The Legacy and Inheritance of a Hero of the Victorian Era, James Whitcomb Riley. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957. Crowder asserts that the significance of Riley transcends his Indiana reputation. The author narrates the poet’s career in eleven chapters. From the “westward movement” beginning in 1819, through recognition by 1885, to the “apotheosis” of his death at the age of sixty-seven, Riley is described not only as heroic but also godlike.

George, Philip Brandt. “’An the Gobble-uns’ll Git You.’” American History 40, no. 4 (October, 2005): 68-70. This profile of Riley looks at his life and the poem “Little Orphant Annie,” describing the actual orphan girl who lived with the Riley family.

Kindilien, Carlin T. American Poetry in the Eighteen Nineties. Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1956. This study is based on a special collection of verse in the Brown University library, but it is a complete and generous assessment of the works of the period. Riley’s contributions are closely analyzed, particularly as they are made to the development of what Kindilien calls “sentimental humor.” Contains notes and an index.

Nolan, Jeannette Covert, Horace Gregory, and James T. Farrell. Poet of the People: An Evaluation of James Whitcomb Riley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951. In three brief, appreciative essays, Riley’s work is examined as a contribution to children’s poetry, as an expression of Victorian values, and as a product of frontier culture in the Midwest. His work therefore compares, sometimes favorably, with the achievements of William Dean Howells and Mark Twain.

Revell, Peter. James Whitcomb Riley. New York: Twayne, 1970. The first three chapters examine Riley as a popular poet then review his background and early writing. Three chapters present Riley as a Victorian poet, children’s poet, and Hoosier poet. The last three chapters focus on his pastorals, his humor, and the significance of his popularity. Complemented by a chronology, notes, a select bibliography, and an index.

Van Allen, Elizabeth J. James Whitcomb Riley: A Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Legends and rumors either elevate Riley as a hero who gave Hoosiers pride of place, or denigrate him as a drunken author of Victorian doggerel. Van Allen sifts facts from fiction to paint the truest portrait of this controversial poet.

Williams, Thomas E. Q. James Whitcomb Riley: The Poet as Flying Islands of the Night. Greenfield, Ind.: Coiny, 1997. Williams’s premise is that the poem “The Flying Islands of the Night” reveals the multifaceted personality of Riley. A valuable resource for anecdotes about Riley and his friends.