The 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora changed history. The year following the eruption, 1816 was known in England as the “Year without a Summer,” in New England as “18-hundred-and-froze-to-death”, and “L’annee de la misere” or “Das Hungerhjar” in Switzerland. Germans dubbed 1817 as “the year of the beggar.” The Chinese and Indians had no name for it but the years following the massive eruption were remembered as ones of intense and widespread suffering. Scientists are, only today, uncovering the historical impacts of this ecological disaster. Suddenly we have climatic data which have reshaped our understanding of the events of 1815 and the years that followed. Now it is historians’ job to explore the social, political, and cultural influence of this catastrophic event. All this and more today as we explore the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815.
Listen, download, watch on YouTube, or scroll down for the transcript.
Other Episodes of Interest:
Transcript of Mount Tambora and the Year Without a Summer
Researched and written by Marissa Rhodes
Produced by Marissa Rhodes and Averill Earls, PhD
Marissa: In 2004, Icelandic volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson was visiting Sumbawa, a medium-sized island in the Indonesian archipelago. The Sumbawa savannahs are ideally suited to the breeding of horses and cows. Its population, around 1.4 million people, work primarily in agriculture and mining. One of Sigurdsson’s local guides informed him of a small gully where locals had found old pottery and other goods. They called it “museum gully” and knew nothing more of it. They might have been surprised when Sigurdsson enthusiastically asked them to take him there.
Averill: The guides took Sigurdsson to museum gully. Using ground-penetrating radar, he and his team from the University of Rhode Island, uncovered the remains of a 19th century village frozen in time. They excavated one structure, a home which contained the carbonized remains of two people. The woman brandished a utility knife as if she was in the course of preparing a meal or performing an ordinary task around the house. The couple was surrounded by their belongings: furniture, iron tools, bronze bowls and pottery. Sigurdsson knew that this site had been preserved by history’s deadliest volcano, Mount Tambora, whose 1815 eruption changed history.
Marissa: The locals on Sumbawa knew little of this event which had occurred only 200 years ago on the island they call home. This is not, of course, because they were uneducated or disinterested. They knew nothing of the eruption because few who lived on the island, and no one who lived on the mountain at the time survived to tell the story. The Tambora people and their Rajah lived closest to the volcano before the eruption. One April evening, their culture, their language, and their lifestyle, became extinct within a matter of hours. The rest of the world was oblivious to the eruption for months. Even after news of the event reached the rest of the globe, they had no idea that they were already weathering its impact.
The year following the eruption, 1816 was known in England as the “Year without a Summer,” in New England as 18-hundred-and-froze-to-death, and “L’annee de la misere” or “Das Hungerhjar” in Switzerland. Germans dubbed 1817 as “the year of the beggar.” The Chinese and Indians had no name for it but the years following the massive eruption were remembered as ones of intense and widespread suffering. Scientists are, only today, uncovering the historical impacts of this ecological disaster. Suddenly we have climatic data which have reshaped our understanding of the events of 1815 and the years that followed. Now it is historians’ job to explore the social, political, and cultural influence of this catastrophic event. All this and more today as we explore the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815.
I’m Marissa Rhodes
And I’m Averill Earls
And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.
Averill: In the beginning of the 19th century, Mount Tambora had been considered extinct. No one alive at the time knew of any Tambora eruptions since the start of recorded history. We know now that before 1815, Mount Tambora had not erupted for over 5,000 years. Starting sometime in 1812, the villagers living on the mountain’s terraces and at its foot reported hearing occasional rumbling and seeing small eruptions of steam. These developments were interesting to the inhabitants of the mountain who spoke a now-extinct language related to Khmer, the language of Cambodia. They probably discussed it amongst themselves and with the traders and guides from the British and Dutch East India Companies who occasionally docked in Sumbawa’s primary port, called Bima. No one seemed particularly worried about Tambora’s awakening.
Marissa: This was, until April 5, 1815. A loud explosion was heard up to 620 miles away (1,000 km). A 15 mile-high column of hot ash and smoke shot out of the massive volcano. Over 10,000 residents were killed immediately in this initial eruption. Two entire principalities, Tambora, and Pekat had been vaporized. Others close by choked on poisonous gases or were buried in ash and pumice, where they stayed until American students began excavating their resting places 200 years later. On April 10, the volcano erupted again, this time the column of ash and fire thrown from the volcano reached 25 miles high. This second explosion was heard over 1,500 miles away in Sumatra. The entire top of the mountain, totaling about a mile high, was blown off entirely, changing Mount Tambora’s appearance forever. Much of the archipelago and its adjacent seas were plunged into darkness for days. Volcanic ash reached as far as 620 miles away from the site.
Averill: The Rajah of Sangarr, a small principality on Sumbawa survived the disaster and described the site of the eruption for posterity:
“[T]hree distinct columns of flame burst forth, near the top of Tomboro [sic] Mountain, all of them apparently within the verge of the crater; and after ascending separately to a very great height, their tops united in the air in a troubled confused manner. In a short time the whole mountain next [to] Saugar [sic] appeared like a body of liquid fire extending itself in every direction… Between nine and ten p.m. ashes began to fall, and soon after a violent whirlwind ensued, which blew down nearly every house in the village of Saugar, carrying the tops and light parts along with it… In the part of Saugar adjoining [Mount Tambora] its effects were much more violent, tearing up by the roots the largest trees and carrying them into the air together with men, houses, cattle, and whatever else came within its influence. This will account for the immense number of floating trees seen at sea… The sea rose nearly twelve feet higher than it had ever been known to be before, and completely spoiled the only small spots of rice lands in Saugar, sweeping away houses and every thing within its reach.”
Marissa: The Sumbawa people who did not die in either eruption suffered in the following weeks. They endured transplantation or homelessness as hot rivers of lava flowed over their villages. Thousands drowned in resultant tsunamis or suffered fatal injuries in volcanic wind gales. Tens of thousands died from thirst, hunger, disease or malnutrition over the following months because their rice crops and infrastructure were destroyed. Their water supply was also poisoned by ash, pyroclastic flows and the aerosolized gases it absorbed. Two weeks after the eruption, Lieutenant Owen Phillips was charged with delivering rice and drinking water to the island from stores on Java. He encountered a horrible scene. Few recognizable built structures still existed on the island and both land and sea were littered with uprooted trees and rotting corpses. [Philips was actually the person who recorded the Rajah’s eyewitness account we just read]
Averill: An estimated 117,000 people died as a direct result of the two April eruptions. Survivors who lived on the farther reaches of the island appeared to have emigrated en masse in the eruption’s aftermath. The islanders reached such depths of desperation that they started selling themselves as slaves to Sulawesi [SU-la-WEY-see] pirates as a survival strategy. Within a year of the event, half of Sumbawa’s population were dead or departed. Only years later did new groups arrive to repopulate and rebuild the island. Nearly all of Sumbawa’s buildings date to after 1815. At least two small kingdoms were lost entirely and we know very little about them. The Dutch and British East India companies, whose activities generated most if the documents we have about 19th-century Indonesia, knew little of the Tambora or Pekat people. Neither company had been successful at regulating trade in Sumbawa and other small islands in the archipelago by that time.
Marissa: The Dutch had been in Indonesia since 1603 but focused their efforts on Java which was closer to the mainland. Sailors had used Mount Tambora as a landmark and guide in their journeys but their contact with the people on Sumbawa was minimal compared to interactions in the bustling ports of Java. The nearby islands of Lombok, Bali and East Java suffered considerable crop damage after the eruption but news of their struggles did not travel far. Unlike the explosion of Krakatoa in the 1880s, this eruption went largely unreported. The telegraph had not yet been invented and the volcano’s immediate damage was confined to the lesser colonized islands which were still comparatively insular.
Averill: What’s more is that until the eruption of Krakatoa (70 years later), scientists were unsure of the climatic impact of volcanic eruptions. For this reason, studies on Tambora and its impacts are all fairly recent. First-hand documentation of its 1815 eruption are incredibly rare so its death toll, and its immediate consequences went undetermined for decades. Most of the accounts we have from the time are the recorded observations of British and Dutch sailors in the area. In the last few years, scientists are beginning to understand that the deposits of ash, pumice and solidified lava flows have completely reshaped the island’s topography. The Mount Tambora eruption has long since been identified as the cause of the “Year without a Summer” but in 1816, few people had any idea that such a cataclysmic event had passed and no one knew that it would wreak havoc all over the world for the next three years.
Marissa: First I want to make sure we give our listeners an idea of the scale of this eruption. Krakatoa, which is often used as an example of the quintessential natural disaster, flung 4.5 cubic miles of pumice, rock, ash and other debris into the atmosphere, no small amount. But when Mount Tambora erupted, it expelled 36 cubic miles of debris into the atmosphere. There’s no comparison. Those of us who have seen Dante’s Peak, starring Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton, might remember it was about the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helen’s in Washington state. Tambora’s eruption was 100 times the size of the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s. It’s nearly impossible to imagine the scale of this disaster, really. When something is so massive and devastating, it almost starts to mean nothing… just numbers, right?
Averill: One way we can measure Tambora’s destructiveness is by exploring its impact over the rest of the world in the following years. But keep in mind, at the time, no one knew that this eruption was to blame for the events that followed. The ash thrown up into the atmosphere by the violent explosion settled over the entire archipelago, blotting out the light for days after the event. This consequence was obviously perceived by people who were living at the time but what they could not have known was that the volcano had emitted 80 megatons (80 million metric tons) of sulphur dioxide which rose into the stratosphere, creating a band around the tropics. There, they oxidized into sulphate aerosol particles which were distributed globally over the next year. These aerosols were deposited on the ice covering both of the Earth’s poles, and these deposits continued for two years. Tambora’s emissions were preserved in ice, appearing as they did in the months after the eruption, and studied in ice cores extracted in 2009.
Marissa: These sulphate particles refract and absorb the sun’s light in such a way that it leads to a cooling effect on the ground. The world’s temperatures plummeted for the next 3 years. This, in addition to other weather anomalies triggered by the eruption, disrupted ecosystems all over the planet. I think we talked about proxies in the Little Ice Age episode? But a quick refresh: proxies are records of historical temperatures that still exist today. Scientists have used ice cores as we mentioned earlier, historical documentation by cultures all over the world, as well as dendrochronology — the reading of tree rings– to determine temperature patterns after the eruption. Being historians, we’re most interested in the document proxies, and to be honest, we’re hardly qualified to talk about the other more scientific ways of studying this phenomenon. You need to go over to Lady Science Pod for that.
Averill: In North America and Europe, 19th-century people had a nerdy habit of recording the temperature and other meteorological data every day. Thomas Jefferson was one of these nerds. Scholars have been able to use his records to prove Tambora’s impact on global temperatures. For example, on May 17, 1816, Jefferson wrote:
“[T]he spring has been unusually dry and cold. our average morning cold for the month of May in other years has been 63° of Farenheit. in the present month it has been to this day an average of 53° and one morning as low as 43°. repeated frosts have killed the early fruits and the crops of tobacco and wheat will be poor.” [Jefferson to David Baillie Warden, May 17, 1816, in PTJ:RS, 10:65.]
Two months later, New England experienced a summer snow storm that dropped 10 inches of snow on unsuspecting villages. Now just one document like this doesn’t mean much, but added to hundreds of other documents where people similarly record plummeting temperatures, they act as evidence that Tambora’s impact was far-reaching.
Marissa: The gazettes in Qing China reported the daily weather in enough detail that scholars have been able to measure Tambora’s impact on China’s weather between 1815 and 1819. They have also been able to use people’s personal diaries, etc to corroborate temperatures. During these years, China suffered from unseasonably cool and wet weather. Summer frosts and snow falls destroyed rice and buckwheat crops on such a scale that some areas, such as the southwestern Yunnan province, suffered severe famine. The Great Yunnan famine was the result of 3 successive crop failures. It was so severe that people were reportedly selling their children, committing murder-suicides, and eating clay in desperation.
Averill: Starvation and desperation in Yunnan killed many people. The survivors of the Yunnan famine were understandably scarred and resentful, and they sought ways to protect themselves from another such disaster. One way they did this was by turning to cash crops, specifically poppy. Poppy plants, used to produce opium, were hardy enough to withstand the temperature fluctuations resulting from Tambora. Even though they didn’t provide sustenance to those who grew them, they brought in cash which solved Yunnan’s food insecurity crisis at least temporarily. Farmers weren’t the only ones benefiting from this transition to cash crops. The state benefited as well because it was able to tax the lucrative crop and extract impressive revenue.
Marissa: What seemed like an innovative solution to famine at the time ended up having grave consequences. The famine contributed to the decline of the Qing dynasty and unfortunately coincided with the arrival of Western gun boats. Great Britain launched a strategy of gunboat diplomacy where it used intimidation in Chinese ports to force trade deals which unilaterally benefited them. Meanwhile, the opium problem worsened. Neither the farmers nor the state had any monetary incentive to stop growing poppy. Eventually the Yunnan province was entirely dedicated to the cultivation of poppy and was forced to import all of its grain from southeast Asia. So Yunnan was not producing any food at all… so much for increased food security! The opium-dependent population living in China’s ports bought foreign opium supplies in massive quantities which drained China of its silver (triggering the first and second Opium wars with Britain). It also created generations of Chinese people who struggled their entire lives with opium addiction. The Chinese state recognized widespread opium addiction as a national crisis as early as the 1830s.
Averill: This course of events is known in Chinese history as the Daoguang Depression. It was crucial to shaping China’s interactions with the West. In centuries past, China had enjoyed economic stability, population growth and competent, widespread political influence. Tambora’s impact on the climate made the Chinese vulnerable to Western exploitation and interference. This set China on a path toward deterioration: the decline of the Qing, the Opium Wars, and the Taiping Rebellion followed.
Marissa: Some of the modern world’s most dangerous pathogens also owe their strength to Tambora’s eruption. India’s monsoons were delayed in 1816 and 1817 by Tambora’s sulphate gases. The dramatic alteration in moisture content in Indian towns and cities resulted in a mutation to the cholera bacterium. This mutation triggered the deadliest cholera epidemic in history, known as the Bengal Cholera. In November 1817, this mutated cholera killed 5,000 people in 5 days. The disease quickly spread and became a pandemic lasting, in Asia, until 1821. Death tolls are staggeringly high and a total has never been calculated. We know 10,000 British soldiers stationed in India died of cholera but estimates of Indian deaths are projected to be in the hundreds of thousands. The bacterium did not become any less deadly as it traveled across Asia. Bangkok, for example, reported 30,000 cholera deaths. By 1823, the mutated strain reached Europe, and then North America shortly after. Worldwide, experts estimate that the cholera pandemic triggered by Tambora’s gases killed millions.
Averill: For centuries India has been regarded as the “Homeland of Cholera.” Public health officials and sometimes even historians accused the Indian government of neglecting sanitation, and the Indian people of unhygienic practices which transformed the country into a vector of the highly contagious disease. The British Empire used India’s susceptibility to cholera to justify their colonial activities there. The British were able to frame India as a third-world country incapable of ruling itself and Britain as the modern, civilized world power willing to influence the Indian state for the better. (Gandhi disagrees lol) The impact of British colonialism in India is still being felt today. Studies of Tambora’s impact have rectified this myth somewhat. There was little that India could have done to prevent the mutation and spread of the cholera bacteria in light of the monsoon failures they endured.
Marissa: Another indirect impact of Tambora are the riots that ensued across the globe in response to widespread famine and disease. In most modern societies, it’s not as easy to see the connections between agricultural output and food security. But at the time of Tambora’s eruption, the vast majority of the world was still engaged in subsistence agriculture. So variations in agricultural output had direct impacts on how much food made it to the table. One crop failure was serious. Two crop failures in a row was dire. Most regions would have used any food stores to supplement the first failure. Three crop failures in a row, as we saw with Hunnan province in China, was an emergency. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, author on a new book about Tambora, put it well: “For three years following Tambora’s explosion, to be alive, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry.” In many areas, food scarcity led to riots and other unrest, especially in Europe which was struggling with the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars during the Year without a Summer.
Averill: In 1816 Ireland, for example, it rained four times more than was typical. Crop failure was so severe that many were forced to sell their clothes and hair for food. Wearing rags in the cold and wet weather made the Irish susceptible to typhus, which added to their misery. Ireland’s Chief Secretary Charles Grant wrote: “In the years 1816 and 1817, the state of the weather was so moist and wet, that the lower orders in Ireland were almost deprived of fuel werewith to dry themselves, and of food whereon to subsist. They were obliged to feed on esculent plants such as mustard seeds, nettles, potato-tops, and potato-stalks- a diet which brought on a debility of body and encouraged the disease more than anything else could have done.” In Ballina (County Mayo), protests ensued over the export of oatmeal. The riot became so violent that the military was deployed to protect the town. Three rioters were killed and many more were seriously wounded.
Marissa: Bavarian towns such as Augsburg and Memmingen were in turmoil for similar reasons. Rumors were circulating that authorities were exporting corn to Switzerland. The local newspapers illustrate the levels of desperation felt by Bavarian villagers. They reported that: “thousands of men and women, [were] ripping chunks out of a living chestnut mare… They’re sending our corn out to Switzerland.” The rumors of export sparked several riots that shut down the small cities.
In England, the East Midlands also experienced unrest related to food insecurity. Villagers in Pentrich, Derbyshire suffered high grain prices, and post-war unemployment on a large-scale. They amassed weapons and marched on the village, killing one servant whose master refused to join the rising. A spy in their midst informed on them and so magistrates were able to neutralize the uprising fairly quickly but dozens of men were indicted on treason. Three of them were executed publicly to dissuade other hungry and disaffected groups from doing the same.
Averill: Many of these riots revolved around the export of food in towns where the local populations were near starvation. In the Bavarian cases Marissa mentioned, magistrates were trying to provide relief to Switzerland, where Tambora’s impact was particularly severe. There, the price of grain quadrupled between 1815 and 1817. As in other parts of the world, cold weather led to unripened crops and wet weather caused the rest to rot in the fields. Snow fell in record amounts for the two winters following the eruption and there was 80% more rainfall than in an average year. Residents reported having to heat their homes throughout the summer months. Unseasonably cold weather in the summer of 1816 prevented the annual melting of the Alpine ice caps so that when the cooling subsided in 1817, there was more ice than usual and the Swiss experienced unprecedented flooding. Switzerland may have been unequally affected by Tambora but it’s also the best-studied area because it was the setting of an important cultural milestone for English literature.
Marissa: England’s youngest and most promising authors gathered at Lake Geneva in the Summer of 1816. Among them were Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley), the novelist and daughter of the badass feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Lord Byron was escaping crushing debts and rumors of incest in England. [I just listened to the History Chicks episode on Ada Lovelace, who was Lord Byron’s daughter– so I have this family on my mind] But anyway, Byron was living in a villa on Lake Geneva. Mary, Percy, and Mary’s sister Claire visited Byron, intending to escape London’s dreary weather with a tour of Europe. But they were obviously unaware of Tambora’s impact on Europe’s climate. After witnessing the wet and wintry bleakness of a post-Tambora Swiss summer, Mary wrote “Never was a scene more awfully desolate.” The group holed up in a villa and challenged each other to pass the time by telling the best ghost stories. It was the only activity that seemed appropriate given the dreary weather. Several notable literary works emerged from this friendly storytelling competition. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, and the seeds of a novel about a blood-sucking man, which was used later by John William Polidori to write The Vampyre.
Averill: This story might have been dramatized somewhat. But only in recent decades have scholars connected the Tambora eruption to this semi-mythical origin story for the Gothic movement in art and literature. But English literature was not the only cultural consequence of Tambora’s climatic impact. In the Chinese province of Yunnan which we discussed earlier, a new genre called famine poetry developed among the residents of the province. One poet, Li Yuyang, was forced to return home to save his parents from bankruptcy during the famine. He watched his neighbors commit beastly acts such as infanticide, child sales and murder in hungry desperation. He barely survived himself. Suffering from malnutrition and mental illness after the famine, Li died ten years later at the age of 42. Here is an excerpt from one of his poems, translated into English:
“People rush from falling houses in their thousands …
(It) is worse than the work of thieves. Bricks crack. Walls fall.
In an instant, the house is gone. My child catches my coat
And cries out. I am running in the muddy road, then
Back to rescue my money and grains from the ruins.
What else to do? My loved ones must eat.
He writes of parents selling their children for food.
Still they know the price of a son
Is not enough to pay for their hunger.
And yet to watch him die is worse …
The little ones don’t understand, how could they?
But the older boys keep close, weeping.”
Marissa: Art historians have successfully correlated the post-Tambora optical aerosol depth with the 1816-1817 painting Greifswald in Moonlight by German painter Caspar David Friedrich. So we know with confidence that his painting would have been entirely different if it weren’t for Tambora’s eruption. English painter William Turner developed his painting style after observing the unique and spectacular sunsets of the Year Without a Summer. Ironically, his 1817 painting Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius is the best example of this influence even though Turner had no idea that he was witnessing volcanic skies himself.
Averill: Several inventions have also been connected to Tambora’s climatic impact. In 1817 German inventor Karl Drais patented the “walking machine” which is a walking bicycle.. so basically a bicycle without pedals. Drais perceived a need for alternate modes of transportation when the Year without a Summer made grain so expensive that few people could afford to feed horses anymore. During the heights of famine, many horses died of starvation or were killed for meat by their owners. People were in need of a device that would help them travel faster but one that they would not need to feed.
Marissa: This is interesting to me because it tells us that Drais, and his peers had no idea that this was going to pass. They might have thought this was the new normal… because they had no way of knowing that this was a temporary effect of a volcanic eruption.
I wonder how many people felt that way in Europe… that it was dark times and that it wasn’t going to improve. This mindset might have precipitated mass migration to America. The beginning of the first 19th-century wave of immigration to America coincides exactly with the eruption. And most people who came to America cited civil unrest and famine as their motivating factors for leaving Europe. The Irish and Swiss, and Germans made up a majority of this immigrant wave and those were areas that were particularly influenced by volcanic climate change.
Averill: There was also a lot of migration within North America. Land was becoming more scarce on the east coast and the crop failures following the Mount Tambora eruption sent settlers from the Eastern seaboard into the frontier in search of fertile land and resources. This westward movement triggered violent interactions with indigenous peoples which came to characterize the Wild West. So basically… without Tambora we would not have had Manifest Destiny and absolutely zero Spaghetti Westerns…. Just kidding… but really, this sequence of events illustrates how fragile our ecosystems really are. And that our ecosystems are interwoven with human systems in ways that we never realized in the past.
Marissa: We should mention that there was SOME idea that volcanic eruptions were related to weather patterns early on. Benjamin Franklin, for example, posited a correlation between volcanic emissions and weather anomalies. Swiss botanist Heinrich Zollinger was born a few years after Tambora erupted but in the 1830s he studied botany at the University of Geneva and became interested in volcanology. Ever since the Year without a Summer, Swiss scientists had suspected a correlation between the Tambora eruption and the following years’ weather anomalies. In the 1840s, Zollinger moved to Java and spent time studying Tambora. In 1847 he made a detailed drawing of the Tambora caldera and spoke with locals on the island, though he found it to still be depopulated. According to his report, Sumbawa communities were still recovering from the disaster even though it had been 30 years.
Averill: The Swiss never made any definitive connections between volcanic activity and climatic change but by the time of the Krakatoa eruption in 1883, the science community was eager to find such proof. This time, they were backed by a horrified and fascinated international press which turned the eruption into a global event. It helped that the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable had just been laid 17 years earlier. In 1815, it took 6 months for news of the Tambora eruption to reach Britain. When Krakatoa erupted, the entire world was notified within hours. Popular interest in the eruption encouraged geological studies and a public scientific discourse which led to the discovery of how volcanoes function and how they impact the atmosphere.
Marissa: It’s interesting to think of more subtle ways that inclement weather might have impacted culture. Were people generally more depressed for those few years? Was there an increase in mental illness? Vitamin D deficiency? Or even criminality and domestic violence? Does it have anything to do with the enthusiastic reception of Marxism decades later?
Sources and Further Reading:
Brönnimann, Stefan, and Daniel Krämer. Tambora and the “Year Without a Summer” of 1816: A Persepctive on Earth and Human Systems Science. 2016.
Broad, William J. “A Summer Without Sun.” New York Times April 25, 2015, D1.
Cao, Shuji, Yushang Li, and Bin Yang. 2012. “Mt. Tambora, Climatic Changes, and China’s Decline in the Nineteenth Century”. Journal of World History. 23, no. 3: 587-607.
Gao, Chaochao, Yujuan Gao, Qian Zhang, and Chunming Shi. 2017. “Climatic Aftermath of the 1815 Tambora Eruption in China”. Journal of Meteorological Research. 31, no. 1: 28-38.
Dennis, Matthew, and Munger, Michael. 1816: “The Mighty Operations of Nature”: An Environmental History of the Year Without a Summer. 1816: “The Mighty Operations of Nature”: An Environmental History of the Year Without a Summer. University of Oregon, n.d. <http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12417>.
Harington, Charles Richard. The Year Without a Summer? World Climate in 1816. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Nature, 1992.
Lebowitz, Rachel. Year of No Summer. Biblioasis, 2018.
Roach, John. “‘Lost Kingdom’ Discovered on Volcanic Island in Indonesia.” National Geographic News. February 27, 2006,
Sullivan, Michael. “Mount Tambora Eruption Hardly Known.” NPR. October 27, 2007.
“The Tambora Eruption and ‘The Year Without Summer’,” History in an Hour, http://www.historyinanhour.com/2012/11/16/tambora-eruption-1815/


Guide Prepared by Michael J. Cummings...©
is an epic about the adventures and character development of a young king
endowed with superhuman powers. It is similar to later epics such as Homer's
and Odyssey in several ways.
For example, Gilgamesh and the
Iliad each center on a hero
with extraordinary physical prowess. (In the Iliad, the superman
is Achilles). Moreover, in Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, each
main character fights monsters, crosses seas, and visits mysterious lands.
In all three epics, mythological gods play a major role, but the settings
are in real lands—Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia (in present-day Iraq),
the Iliad in and just outside the walled city of Troy (in present-day
Turkey), and the Odyssey in countries and islands in the Mediterranean
unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey—as well as many other epics—Gilgamesh
does not begin with an invocation
of goddesses called Muses. Instead, it begins with a prologue that
briefly provides background information and introduces Gilgamesh as a powerful
ruler. Also, unlike literary epics such as Dante's
Comedy and Milton's Paradise
Lost, Gilgamesh is not the product of a single author who relied
primarily on his imagination and poetic skills to create his narration.
indicates that Gilgamesh was a real-life king of Uruk, a city-state in
Mesopotamia, in about 2700 BC. (For geographical information about Uruk
and Mesopotamia, see Setting, above.) After his
death, unidentified authors and storytellers presented accounts of his
life that grew into legends that greatly exaggerated his powers—so much
so that he was described as two-thirds divine and one-third human. Over
the centuries, these accounts remained highly popular. Between 2100 BC
and 1600 BC, scribes etched the accounts into clay tablets in wedge-shaped
characters that made up a writing system called cuneiform,
used to record information in various languages in Mesopotamia. Most of
the information about Gilgamesh was in verse stories in the Akkadian language
(which derives its name from Akkad, a region in southern Mesopotamia).
Additional information appeared in five poems in the Sumerian language
(which derives its name from Sumer, also in southern Mesopotamia).
1400 and 1200 BC, an author of the priestly caste read the tablets about
Gilgamesh and compiled the stories about him, taken mostly from the Akkadian
accounts, into a single work. His name was Sin-leqi-unninni. Although he
retained much of the wording on the clay tablets, he made some revisions
and introduced original wording of his own. Sin-leqi-unninni's account
disappeared from later history but resurfaced in the 1840s, when British-led
archeolgical excavations near the present-day city of Mosul, Iraq, turned
up the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, as well as the library
maintained there by one of Assyria's greatest rulers, Ashurbanipal, who
ruled Assyria (in northern Mesopotamia) from 668 to 627 BC. (Mosul is about
225 miles northwest of Baghdad.) In the ruins of the library on this site
were the Gilgamesh tablets—which had been damaged—along with thousands
of other tablets on subjects unrelated to Gilgamesh. These tablets were
sent to the British Museum in London.
the second half of the nineteenth century, scholars deciphered the cuneiform
symbols on these tablets, symbols that represented syllables or entire
words. Through further research and detective work, they linked the cuneiform
symbols on the Nineveh tablets to two major languages, Sumerian and Akkadian,
as well as to dialects of these languages. In the 1870s, Sin-leqi-unninni's
account of the Gilgamesh story began to emerge. Because of the damaged
cuneiform tablets that Sin-leqi-unninni used for his Akkadian account of
the deeds of Gilgamesh, gaps existed in the story. But there was enough
information in his account to form the basis of The Gilgamesh Epic
that we know today. Since the nineteenth century, writers and scholars
have used Sin-leqi-unninni's account, along with new research and additional
Gilgamesh tablets found at various archeological sites, to piece together
their own versions of the Gilgamesh story.
time is circa 2700 BC in Mesopotamia, a region between the Mediterranean
Sea and the Persian Gulf incorporating much of present-day Iraq and portions
of southeastern Turkey, eastern Syria, and southwestern Iran. The action
takes place in the Mesopotamian city-state of Uruk, just east of the Euphrates
River and north of the Persian Gulf; in forests and plains; on waterways;
and in the domain of mythological gods. The modern town of Tall
al-Warka', about 155 miles southeast of Baghdad, is on the site of
ancient Uruk. In the Bible, Uruk is referred to as Erech (Genesis 10:10).
For detailed information on Mesopotamia,
king of ancient Uruq (in present-day Iraq) in 2700 BC. Over the centuries,
legends grew about this king (probably a real historical figure) that attributed
to him superhuman powers. He was said to be two-thirds divine and one-third
human. However, he was regarded as a man and thus was told he had to suffer
the ultimate fate of all men, death. The young Gilgamesh of the epic is
a headstrong ruler who takes advantage of his subjects and itches for challenges
and adventures to prove his prowess and enhance his reputation. In this
respect, he may be compared with military leaders of later centuries who
sought glory on the battlefield, such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon
Bonaparte, and General George Patton. He may also be compared with present-day
presidents, prime ministers, and dictators who recklessly wage war to demonstrate
their resolve and win popular approval. Eventually, Gilgamesh tames his
wilder instincts and achieves a measure of wisdom after undergoing deep
depression and suffering prompted by the death of his friend, Enkindu,
another hero with superhuman powers.
Powerful hero created by the gods to offset the unbridled power of Gligamesh.
He first lives in the wilds grazing among the animals, for he has no knowledge
of man and his ways. After a prostitute named Shamhat from the temple of
the goddess of love seduces him, he begins to learn the ways of man with
the help of Shamhat, and the animals reject him. Believing himself superior
to Gilgamesh, he travels to Uruk to confront him. The two clash in a raging
struggle but end up becoming inseparable friends. After Gilgamesh and Enkindu
kill the monstrous guardian of the cedar forests, Humbaba, and slay the
Bull of Heaven, the angry gods decree that one of the men must die--Enkidu.
Anu: Father of the
gods. He is the personification of heaven.
Aruru: Goddess of
creation. She fashions Enkidu from clay.
Ninsun: Goddess and
mother of Gilgamesh.
king of Uruk and father of Gilgamesh.
Ishtar: Goddess of
love. Gilgamesh refuses her proposal that they marry.
Enlil: God of the
winds and earth. It was he who made Humbaba guardian of the cedar forest.
Tammuz: God of fertility
and vegetation. He is one of the many lovers of Ishtar whom she punished
Ninurta: God of war.
Trapper: Man who
traps animals in the wilds occupied by Enkidu.
in Ishtar's temple who seduces Enkidu.
that guards the cedar forest.
Shamash: Sun god.
He approves Gilgamesh's plan to enter the cedar forest and kill Humbaba.
Scorpion Man: A half-man
and half-scorpion. He guards the cedar forest.
Scorpion Man's Mate
Utnapishtim the Faraway:
Survivor of the Great Flood upon whom the gods conferred immortality. Gilgamesh
hopes to learn from him the secret to eternal life.
Wife of Utnapishtim:
She also received the gift of immortality after surviving the Great Flood.
She pities Gilgamesh and implores her husband to tell him about a secret
plant that immortalizes those who eat of it.
of the gods. She lives in a beautiful garden near the sea. Although she
advises Gilgamesh that his quest for eternal life will fail, she provides
him directions to the abode of Utnapishtim, the one man who may be able
to provide Gilgamesh the answers he is seeking.
who ferries Gilgamesh to Utnapishtim's abode.
Ea: God of wisdom
Gilgamesh Epic opens with a short introduction (or prologue) in first-person
point of view that attests to the great deeds of Gilgamesh. The main story
is in omniscient third-person point of view. The narrator remains impartial
during the main story, although he praises Gilgamesh in the introduction.
main story is a flashback that presents the details of the story outlined
in the introduction.
Michael J. Cummings..©
the gods created Gilgamesh, they made him two-thirds divine and one-third
human and endowed him with extraordinary size, strength, and good looks.
Like his father before him, Lugulbanda, he became king of Uruk, a city-state
between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (in present-day Iraq). Thirsty
for adventure, he crossed seas and roamed many lands. When he returned
to Uruk, he carved into stone the story of his adventures.
was renowned as a the greatest of kings and as the builder of Uruk's temples
and the city's gigantic walls. Here is his story.
the young king of Uruk, Gilgamesh is the protector of his people. But in
time he takes advantage of his powers, oppressing the people and freely
using any woman to satisfy his desires. His subjects complain to the heavens.
In response, the mother goddess Aruru makes a new creature, Enkidu, who
rivals Gilgamesh in size and good looks. Ninurta, the god of war, gives
him the gift of great strength. With no knowledge of earth and its creatures,
Enkidu grazes with gazelles and other wild animals and drinks with them
at water holes. He protects the beasts, freeing them from snares set by
a trapper. His enormous size terrifies the trapper.
trapper’s father advises his son to go to Uruk to seek the help of Gilgamesh.
In particular, he tells his son to ask Gilgamesh for a sultry harlot from
the temple of Ishtar, the goddess of love, to tempt
the wild man away from the animals. The trapper will then be able to resume
his livelihood. After he goes to Uruk and states his request, Gilgamesh
provides him a woman called Shamhat..
the trapper returns to the wilds with her, she displays herself to Enkidu.
So enchanted is he that he spends a week at her side before he can tear
himself away and return to the animals. But the animals reject him now,
for they realize he is not really one of them. He is a human. When he returns
to the woman, she invites him to go with her to Uruk to meet Gilgamesh,
the mightiest of men. Enkidu agrees to the proposal, for he wants to make
the acquaintance of someone like himself, a comrade. And he wants to prove
that he is superior to Gilgamesh.
Uruk, Gilgamesh has a dream that alerts him to the coming of Enkidu. His
mother, the goddess Ninsun, interprets the dream for him, describing Enkidu
and telling Gilgamesh that he and Enkidu will become inseparable companions.
on their way to Uruk, the harlot takes Enkidu to shepherds, who provide
him bread and wine. He lives with them for a time and improves their lot
by killing lions and wolves that prey on their herds.
Enkidu arrives in Uruk, the people gather around to admire him, remarking
that he is certainly the equal of Gilgamesh. At this time, Gilgamesh is
planning to invade the bed of a new bride even before her husband has a
chance to be with her for the first time. At night, as she waits for her
husband, Gilgamesh approaches the house. However, Enkidu sees him in the
street and, eager to prove himself, blocks his access to the gate of the
house. They fight like to raging animals. The posts of doors break as they
struggle for advantage. Walls shake. Finally, Gilgamesh throws Enkidu to
the ground. But rather than continuing to fight, Enkidu compliments Gilgamesh
on his strength, saying there is no other like him on earth. They embrace
and become the best of friends.
time, Enkidu languishes for lack of activity to maintain his strength.
So Gilgamesh proposes that they go into the vast cedar forest and kill
Humbaba, the giant whom the god of the winds and earth, Enlil, had made
protector of the trees. But Enkidu tells Gilgamesh that he is wary of the
scheme. Having lived in the wilds, he well knows that Humbaba has incredible
strength. Even the breath he exhales is a windstorm. But Gilgamesh says
they must live life to the fullest, not letting fear stand in the way of
their exploits. Even if Humbaba kills him, Gilgamesh says, his name will
live on in history for having had the courage to fight the monster.
petitions the sun god, Shamash, for permission to undertake his and Enkidu’s
adventure, promising to erect in the forest a monument to the gods. If
he returns safely, he says, he will offer gifts to Shamash and glorify
his name. Shamash grants the request. In addition, he orders great winds
to assist the two friends in their struggle. Then Gilgamesh directs armorers
to fashion huge axes, bows and arrows, and swords for them.
counselors of Uruk warn him against fighting the terrible Humbaba, Gilgamesh
ignores their advice. The counselors then give him their blessing and implore
Shamash to protect the adventurers.
just a few days, Gilgamesh and Enkidu walk a distance that would take ordinary
men six weeks to traverse. After entering the forest of Humbaba, Gilgamesh
cuts down one of the tall cedars. Far off in the forest, Humbaba—who never
sleeps—hears the tree strike the ground. Enkidu is afraid and wants to
turn back, but Gilgamesh heartens him with brave words. When Humbaba approaches,
Gilgamesh calls upon Shamash for assistance, and the sun god sends the
winds—eight of them in all, some blazing hot, some icy cold. They close
in on Humbaba from different directions and prevent him from moving. Humbaba
pleads for his life. Gilgamesh feels pity for him and is ready to release
him, but Enkidu goads him on. Gilgamesh then drives his sword into Humbaba’s
neck, and Enkidu strikes a second blow. After they finish him, Enlil curses
Gilgamesh and Enkidu return in glory, the goddess of love, Ishtar, proposes
marriage to Gilgamesh. If he consents, she will shower him with many gifts,
including a wondrous golden chariot studded with lapus lazuli, and will
cause the mightiest rulers to kneel at his feet and pay him homage. But
Gilgamesh refuses the proposal, telling her that he could not abide the
infidelity for which she is famous. He recites for her a list of the lovers
she enticed and then rejected. She turned one of them into a mole, another
into a wolf. Deeply insulted, she petitions her father, the god Anu, to
loose the great Bull of Heaven against Gilgamesh. Though Anu is well aware
of his daughter’s wanton ways, he gives in to her request after she threatens
to break into hell and release the dead to work havoc among the living.
Anu sends down the Bull of Heaven, Ishtar leads it to Uruk. When it snorts,
it opens a gaping fissure in the earth into which a hundred men fall. When
it snorts again, it opens another fissure. Two hundred men fall into it.
With a third snort, it knocks down Enkidu, but he recovers and mounts it,
grasping it by its horns. Gilgamesh then drives his sword into it and kills
it. The two comrades remove its heart as a gift for Shamash, and they take
its horns as a trophy. In the palace of Gilgamesh, they celebrate their
victory with a great feast.
the night, Enkidu dreams that the gods convene and, against the protest
of Shamash, decide to avenge the deaths of Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven.
One of the heroes must die—Enkidu. After telling Gilgamesh of his dream,
Enkidu falls ill and suffers for many days as the sickness drains his strength
and, finally, stops his heart.
sorrow for the loss of his beloved companion overwhelms Gilgamesh. Moreover,
Enkidu’s death awakens a fear of death in Gilgamesh. His terrible sorrow
and his new fear linger on and on; he can find no relief from them. At
length, he decides to set out for the land of Utnapishtim the Faraway,
who survived the Great Flood with his wife. (Although some researchers
conjecture that this was the same flood that prompted the bibilical Noah
to build his ark, evidence is lacking to prove this theory or to make a
claim that the biblical account was a retelling of the Gilgamesh
account.) They were the only mortals to whom the gods granted immortality.
Surely, Utnapishtim will know the secret to eternal life, Gilgamesh believes.
travels through the wild and across waters and vast plains. At night while
sleeping, he awakens to find lions closing in. With his axe and sword,
he kills several and drives the rest off. He sets out again and eventually
arrives at the foot of a great mountain, Mashu, with two peaks. The sun
rises on one side and sets on the other. Between the two peaks is a vast
plain of darkness leading to Utnapishtim’s abode. At a gate opening into
the plain are a scorpion man and his mate. The scorpion man can kill with
the mere glare of his eyes. He greets Gilgamesh and asks him why he has
come to this place. Gilgamesh, who is able to withstand the deadly gaze,
tells the gatekeeper about Enkidu's death and explains why he wishes to
speak with Utnapishtim. The gatekeeper lets him pass.
travels through twelve leagues (about thirty-six miles) of total darkness
until light returns and he enters a wondrous garden in which the plants
bear pearls, carnelian, lapis lazuli, and other precious gems. It is the
garden of the gods. In a vineyard near the sea is a veiled woman, Siduri,
who makes the wine of the gods. After Gilgamesh tells her his story, she
warns him that he cannot find eternal life on earth. Immortality is reserved
for the gods alone. She advises him to go back and make the most of his
limited life with feasting and merriment and with a wife and children.
When Gilgamesh tells her he is determined to press on, she directs him
to a ferryman, Urshanabi, who takes Gilgamesh across a sea and the waters
of death to the abode of Utnapishtim.
Gilgamesh recounts his tale of woe. Utnapishtim then tells him that houses
are not made to stand forever. Nor is man. The gods have decreed that man
is mortal, but the day of his death they keep secret. Then why is it, asks
Gilgamesh, that Utnapishtim—himself a man—will live forever?
ago, Utnapishtim says, the world abounded with human life. As men went
about their activities, they made a great noise that rose to the heavens
and disturbed the sleep of the gods. At the instigation of Enlil, they
approved a plan to annihilate humankind. However, the god Ea warned Utnapishtim
of the impending doom, telling him to construct a gigantic boat that would
carry him through a great flood. Marshaling his family, relatives, and
shipbuilders, Utnapishtim built the vessel and took aboard all of his loved
ones and the workers. In addition, as instructed by Ea, he took with him
a variety of animals, wild and tame. After the waters came and swept over
civilization, Utnapishtim’s boat road the waters safely until coming to
rest on the mountain of Nisir. There it remained grounded for seven days.
Then Utnapishtim released a dove. If it did not return, he would know that
it had found land. But it returned. He next released a swallow. It too
returned. Finally, he released a raven. It did not return. Heartened, Utnapishtim
made sacrifices to the gods. In turn, they recanted their condemnation
of humankind and spared the boat and its cargo. Utnapishtim and his wife
then tells Gilgamesh that he must undergo a trial to prove himself worthy
of eternal life: Through seven nights, he must remain fully awake. But
Gilgamesh fails the test. At the prompting of Utnapishtim's wife, who pities
Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim gives the king a second chance, telling him about
a prickly underwater plant that confers youthfulness on its bearer. Gilgamesh
dives into the sea and finds it in the depths. But he does not eat of it
immediately. Instead, he decides to take it back to Uruk to let an elder
of Uruk eat of it first. (It is not clear here whether he wants to protect
himself against possible ill effects or whether he wants to share his good
fortune with his people.) Unfortunately, after stopping to bathe on his
way back to Uruk, he sets the plant aside and a snake slithers off with
it, eats of it, molts, and becomes young again.
thus returns to Uruk without having gained eternal life. But he is wiser
now by far than when he left the city. He accepts the inevitability of
death and takes comfort in the fact that the city he built and his other
great achievements will immortalize his name. And, as the information in
the prologue pointed out at the beginning of the epic, he became a great
king to his people.
The plot summary was compiled
from a version of The Gilgamesh Epic provided
online by the Assyrian International News Agency.
he is a demigod with extraordinary strength and good looks, King Gilgamesh
lacks maturity when the story begins. He abuses his people. He is boastful
and reckless. With Enkidu, he kills the guardian of the cedar forest, Humbaba,
simply because he craves adventure and seeks to enhance his reputation.
However, the death of Enkidu profoundly changes him. It makes him realize
that he, like the common lot that he rules, is vulnerable to suffering
and eventually death. After his quest for immortality fails, he returns
to Uruk and, as the prologue has already told us, becomes the benefactor
and protector of his people—a man who accepts his mortality but takes comfort
in the fact that the walls of Uruk and his other mighty works will live
on after him.
and Enkidu become inseparable friends. The friendship teaches Gilgamesh
that he is not an island unto himself but needs others to complement his
life. Whether he and Enkidu succumb to a deviant sexual relationship is
debatable. Passages in the text leave open this possibility.
welcomes adventure and derring-do—partly for the pleasure of it, partly
for the glory he will reap. His desire to strike out—to cross seas, to
enter forbidden lands, to fight battles—are in keeping with the ideals
of ancient civilization. He goes wrong, however, when he becomes unduly
proud and rash.
boasts of his heroic deeds and recklessly challenges Humbaba to enhance
his reputation. As in later Greek tragedies, he pays a price for his pride:
the death of Enkidu, as decreed by the angry gods.
Desire for Immortality
yearns for immortality. Through his heroic deeds, his construction of the
wall of Uruk, and other works, he does achieve everlasting fame. But the
one thing he most desires, eternal life on earth, he cannot have. In this
respect, he is like all of us human beings. We want to live forever on
earth, and we go to great lengths to prolong our mortal life as long as
possible. In the end, though, only the record of our achievements survives.
Respect for Nature
Gilgamesh Epic, respect for nature seems to be part of the Mesopotamian
worldview. Note, for example, that Humbaba keeps watch over the great cedar
trees in a forest forbidden to men and that a scorpion man and his mate
stand guard at the gate to the twin-peaked mountain, Mashu, that protects
the rising and setting sun. Siduri, the winemaker of the gods, keeps a
close watch on her vineyards and bolts a door against Gilgamesh when he
first approaches her..
experiences both external and internal conflicts. The external ones include
conflicts with the gods, Humbaba, and the Bull of Heaven. The internal
ones include his difficulty coping with the loss of Enkidu and overcoming
the fear of death.
climax of the epic occurs when Enkidu dies. His death is a turning point
in the life of Gilgamesh; it sends him on a quest that educates and matures
writing in The Gilgamesh Epic is succinct, plain, and fast-paced,
English translations of Sin-leqi-unninni's version (see Sources
and Authorship, above) of the epic indicate. Concrete similes
and metaphors abound, comparing Gilgamesh
to a bull, for example, and Enkidu to a star. But the predominant figure
of speech, certainly, is hyperbole. The
entire story is a gross exaggeration of the deeds of an idealized king,
but it is a magnificent exaggeration. Oddly, though, the writing does not
sensationalize or titillate. To be sure, it candidly tells of the encounter
between Enkidu and the temple prostitute, but it omits lurid details. Passages
describing violence are suspenseful, but gore and carnage are not part
of them. Another important writing device in this epic is repetition. Many
key narrations and descriptions are repeated word for word, suggesting
that the Gilgamesh story had an oral tradition before it was committed
to clay tablets. The following is an example of a passage that contains
repetition (which is highlighted in blue).
"Why should you
[Enkidu] roam the wilderness and live like an animal? Let
me take you to great-walled Uruk, to the temple of Ishtar, to the palace
of Gilgamesh the mighty king, who in his arrogance oppresses
the people, trampling upon them like a wild bull." She finished, and Enkidu
nodded his head. Deep in his heart he felt something stir, a longing he
had never known before, the longing for a true friend. Enkidu said, "I
will go, Shamhat. Take me with you to great-walled
Uruk, to the temple of Ishtar, to the palace of Gilgamesh the mighty king.
I will challenge him." (Mitchell)Repetition helped listeners
to absorb the details of the story. After all, they had no books from which
they could reread passages; they had only ears to hear the story told and
another noticeable writing device is the use of the epithet, such as great-walled
Uruk in the above passage or the term Utnapishtim the Faraway
to refer to the survivor of the Great Flood.
Mitchell, Stephen. Gilgamesh:
a New English Version. New York: Free Press, 2004. Page 80.
Study Questions and Essay
an essay that compares and contrasts Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
quality of Gilgamesh does the story emphasize more, physical strength or
was the attitude of the Mesopotamians toward nature and its resources?
an essay that compares and contrasts Gilgamesh with the hero of another
epic, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid,
did the Mesopotamians, as well as people of other ancient cultures, believe
in so many gods?


American poetry, the poetry of the United States, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the thirteen colonies (although before this unification, a strong oral tradition often likened to poetry existed among Native American societies). Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant-garde.
The history of American poetry is not easy to know. Much of the American poetry published between 1910 and 1945 remains lost in the pages of small circulation political periodicals, particularly the ones on the far left, destroyed by librarians during the 1950s McCarthy era. The received narrative of Modernism proposes that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I. But this narrative leaves out African American and women poets who were published and read widely in the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. Toward the end of the millennium, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African Americans, Hispanics, Chicanos and other cultural groupings.
Poetry in the colonies
As England's contact with the Americas increased after the 1490s, explorers sometimes included verse with their descriptions of the "New World" up through 1650, the year of Anne Bradstreet's "The Tenth Muse", which was written in America, most likely in Ipswich, Massachusetts or North Andover, Massachusetts) and printed/distributed in London, England by her brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge. There are 14 such writers whom we might on that basis call American poets (they had actually been to America and to different degrees, written poems or verses about the place). Early examples include a 1616 "testimonial poem" on the sterling warlike character of Captain John Smith (in Barbour, ed. "Works") and Rev. William Morrell's 1625 "Nova Anglia" or "New England," which is a rhymed catalog of everything from American weather to glimpses of Native women, framed with a thin poetic "conceit" or "fiction" characterizing the country as a "sad and forlorn" female pining for English domination. Then in May 1627 Thomas Morton of Merrymount – an English West Country outdoorsman, attorney at law, man of letters and colonial adventurer – raised a Maypole to celebrate and foster more success at this fur-trading plantation and nailed up a "Poem" and "Song" (one a densely literary manifesto on how English and Native people came together there and must keep doing so for a successful America; the other a light "drinking song" also full of deeper American implications). These were published in book form along with other examples of Morton's American poetry in "New English Canaan" (1637); and based on the criteria of "First," "American" and Poetry," they make Morton (and not Anne Bradstreet) America's first poet in English. (See Jack Dempsey, ed., "New English Canaan by Thomas Morton of 'Merrymount'" and his biography "Thomas Morton: The Life & Renaissance of an Early American Poet" Scituate MA: Digital Scanning 2000).
One of the first recorded poets of the British colonies was Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672), who remains one of the earliest known women poets who wrote in English. The poems she published during her lifetime address religious and political themes. She also wrote tender evocations of home, family life and of her love for her husband, many of which remained unpublished until the 20th century.
This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was, understandably, the dominant note of most of the poetry written in the colonies during the 17th and early 18th centuries. The earliest "secular" poetry published in New England was by Samuel Danforth in his "almanacks" for 1647–1649, published at Cambridge; these included "puzzle poems" as well as poems on caterpillars, pigeons, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Of course, being a Puritan minister as well as a poet, Danforth never ventured far from a spiritual message.
A distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose book "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," was published in 1773. She was one of the best-known poets of her day, at least in the colonies, and her poems were typical of New England culture at the time, meditating on religious and classical ideas.
The 18th century saw an increasing emphasis on America itself as fit subject matter for its poets. This trend is most evident in the works of Philip Freneau (1752–1832), who is also notable for the unusually sympathetic attitude to Native Americans shown in his writings, sometimes reflective of a skepticism toward Anglo-American culture and civilization. However, as might be expected from what was essentially provincial writing, this late colonial poetry is generally somewhat old-fashioned in form and syntax, deploying the means and methods of Pope and Gray in the era of Blake and Burns. The work of Rebecca Hammond Lard (1772–1855), although quite old, still apply to life in today's world. She writes about nature, not only the nature of environment, but also the nature of humans.
On the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place. As the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative, to say the least. This can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English-language poetic developments in London.
The first significant poet of the independent United States was William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), whose great contribution was to write rhapsodic poems on the grandeur of prairies and forests. However, the first internationally acclaimed poet was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) who nearly surpassed Alfred, Lord Tennyson in international popularity, and, alongside William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., formed the Fireside Poets (also known as the Schoolroom or Household Poets) were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England. The name "Fireside Poets" is derived from that popularity: their general adherence to poetic convention (standard forms, regular meter, and rhymed stanzas) made their body of work particularly suitable for memorization and recitation in school and also at home, where it was a source of entertainment for families gathered around the fire. The poets' primary subjects were the domestic life, mythology, and politics of the United States, in which several of the poets were directly involved.
Other notable poets to emerge in the early and middle 19th century include Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Sidney Lanier (1842–1881), and James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916). As might be expected, the works of all these writers are united by a common search for a distinctive American voice to distinguish them from their British counterparts. To this end, they explored the landscape and traditions of their native country as materials for their poetry.
The most significant example of this tendency may be The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow. This poem uses Native American tales collected by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan from 1836 to 1841. Longfellow also imitated the meter of the Finnish epic poem Kalevala, possibly to avoid British models. The resulting poem, while a popular success, did not provide a model for future U.S. poets.
As time went on the influence of the transcendentalism of the poet/philosophers Emerson and Thoreau increasingly influenced American poetry. Transcendentalism was the distinctly American strain of English Romanticism that began with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Emerson, arguably one of the founders of transcendentalism, had visited England as a young man to meet these two English poets, as well as Thomas Carlyle. While Romanticism transitioned into Victorianism in post-reform England, it grew more energetic in America from the 1830s through to the Civil War.
Edgar Allan Poe was a unique poet during this time, brooding over themes of the macabre and dark, connecting his poetry and aesthetic vision to his philosophical, psychological, moral, and cosmological theories. Diverse authors in France, Sweden and Russia were heavily influenced by his works, and his poem "The Raven" swept across Europe, translated into many languages. However, as a poet he declined in popularity, and alienated himself from his contemporaries by publicly accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, though Longfellow never responded. In the twentieth century the American poet William Carlos Williams said of Poe that he is the only solid ground on which American poetry is anchored.
Whitman and Dickinson
The final emergence of a truly indigenous English-language poetry in the United States was the work of two poets, Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). On the surface, these two poets could not have been less alike. Whitman's long lines, derived from the metric of the King James Version of the Bible, and his democratic inclusiveness stand in stark contrast with Dickinson's concentrated phrases and short lines and stanzas, derived from Protestant hymnals.
What links them is their common connection to Emerson (a passage from whom Whitman printed on the second edition of Leaves of Grass), and the daring originality of their visions. These two poets can be said to represent the birth of two major American poetic idioms—the free metric and direct emotional expression of Whitman, and the gnomic obscurity and irony of Dickinson—both of which would profoundly stamp the American poetry of the 20th century.
The development of these idioms, as well as more conservative reactions against them, can be traced through the works of poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935), Stephen Crane (1871–1900), Robert Frost (1874–1963) and Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Frost, in particular, is a commanding figure, who aligned strict poetic meter, particularly blank verse and terser lyrical forms, with a "vurry Amur'k'n" (as Pound put it) idiom. He successfully revitalized a rural tradition with many English antecedents from his beloved Golden Treasury and produced an oeuvre of major importance, rivaling or even excelling in achievement that of the key modernists and making him, within the full sweep of more traditional modern English-language verse, a peer of Hardy and Yeats. But from Whitman and Dickinson the outlines of a distinctively new organic poetic tradition, less indebted to English formalism than Frost's work, were clear to see, and they would come to full fruition in the 1910s and '20s.
Modernism and after
This new idiom, combined with a study of 19th-century French poetry, formed the basis of American input into 20th-century English-language poetic modernism. Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) were the leading figures at the time, with their rejection of traditional poetic form and meter and of Victorian diction. Both steered American poetry toward greater density, difficulty, and opacity, with an emphasis on techniques such as fragmentation, ellipsis, allusion, juxtaposition, ironic and shifting personae, and mythic parallelism. Pound, in particular, opened up American poetry to diverse influences, including the traditional poetries of China and Japan.
Numerous other poets made important contributions at this revolutionary juncture, including Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (1886–1961), Marianne Moore (1887–1972), E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), and Hart Crane (1899–1932). The cerebral and skeptical Romantic Stevens helped revive the philosophical lyric, and Williams was to become exemplary for many later poets because he, more than any of his peers, contrived to marry spoken American English with free verse rhythms. Cummings remains notable for his experiments with typography and evocation of a spontaneous, childlike vision of reality.
Whereas these poets were unambiguously aligned with high modernism, other poets active in the United States in the first third of the 20th century were not. Among the most important of the latter were those who were associated with what came to be known as the New Criticism. These included John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), Allen Tate (1899–1979), and Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989). Other poets of the era, such as Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982), experimented with modernist techniques but were also drawn towards more traditional modes of writing. Still others, such as Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), adopted Modernist freedom while remaining aloof from Modernist factions and programs.
In addition, there were still other, early 20th Century poets who maintained or were forced to maintain a peripheral relationship to high modernism, likely due to the racially charged themes of their work. They include Countee Cullen (1903–1946), Alice Dunbar Nelson (1875–1935), Gwendolyn Bennett (1902–1981), Langston Hughes (1902–1967), Claude McKay (1889–1948), Jean Toomer (1894–1967) and other African American poets of the Harlem Renaissance.
The modernist torch was carried in the 1930s mainly by the group of poets known as the Objectivists. These included Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978), Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976), George Oppen (1908–1984), Carl Rakosi (1903–2004) and, later, Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970). Kenneth Rexroth, who was published in the Objectivist Anthology, was, along with Madeline Gleason (1909–1973), a forerunner of the San Francisco Renaissance. Many of the Objectivists came from urban communities of new immigrants, and this new vein of experience and language enriched the growing American idiom.
World War II and after
Archibald Macleish called John Gillespie Magee, Jr. "the first poet of the war".
World War II saw the emergence of a new generation of poets, many of whom were influenced by Wallace Stevens and Richard Eberhart (1904–2005). Karl Shapiro (1913–2000), Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) and James Dickey (1923–1997) all wrote poetry that sprang from experience of active service. Together with Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), Theodor Seuss Geisel ('Dr. Seuss') (1904-1991), Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) and Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966), they formed a generation of poets that in contrast to the preceding generation often wrote in traditional verse forms.
After the war, a number of new poets and poetic movements emerged. John Berryman (1914–1972) and Robert Lowell (1917–1977) were the leading lights in what was to become known as the Confessional movement, which was to have a strong influence on later poets like Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) and Anne Sexton (1928–1974). Though both Berryman and Lowell were closely acquainted with Modernism, they were mainly interested in exploring their own experiences as subject matter and a style that Lowell referred to as "cooked" – that is, consciously and carefully crafted.
In contrast, the Beat poets, who included such figures as Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Gregory Corso (1930–2001), Joanne Kyger (born 1934), Gary Snyder (born 1930), Diane Di Prima (born 1934), Amiri Baraka (born 1934) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born 1919), were distinctly raw. Reflecting, sometimes in an extreme form, the more open, relaxed and searching society of the 1950s and 1960s, the Beats pushed the boundaries of the American idiom in the direction of demotic speech perhaps further than any other group.
Around the same time, the Black Mountain poets, under the leadership of Charles Olson (1910–1970), were working at Black Mountain College. These poets were exploring the possibilities of open form but in a much more programmatic way than the Beats. The main poets involved were Robert Creeley (1926–2005), Robert Duncan (1919–1988), Denise Levertov (1923–1997), Ed Dorn (1929–1999), Paul Blackburn (1926–1971), Hilda Morley (1916–1998), John Wieners (1934–2002), and Larry Eigner (1927–1996). They based their approach to poetry on Olson's 1950 essay Projective Verse, in which he called for a form based on the line, a line based on human breath and a mode of writing based on perceptions juxtaposed so that one perception leads directly to another.
Other poets often associated with the Black Mountain are Cid Corman (1924–2004) and Theodore Enslin (born 1925), though they are perhaps more correctly viewed as direct descendants of the Objectivists. And one-time Black Mountain College resident, composer John Cage (1912–1992), along with Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004), wrote poetry based on chance or aleatory techniques. Inspired by Zen, Dada and scientific theories of indeterminacy, they were to prove to be important influences on the 1970s U.S avant-garde.
The Beats and some of the Black Mountain poets are often considered to have been responsible for the San Francisco Renaissance. However, as previously noted, San Francisco had become a hub of experimental activity from the 1930s thanks to Kenneth Rexroth and Gleason. Other poets involved in this scene included Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) and Jack Spicer (1925–1965). These poets sought to combine a contemporary spoken idiom with inventive formal experiment.
Jerome Rothenberg (born 1931) is well known for his work in ethnopoetics, but he was also the coiner of the term "deep image", which he used to describe the work of poets like Robert Kelly (born 1935), Diane Wakoski (born 1937) and Clayton Eshleman (born 1935). Deep Image poetry was inspired by the symbolist theory of correspondences, in particular the work of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The term was later taken up and popularized by Robert Bly. The Deep Image movement was also the most international, accompanied by a flood of new translations from Latin American and European poets such as Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo and Tomas Tranströmer. Some of the poets who became associated with Deep Image are Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Mark Strand and W. S. Merwin. Both Merwin and California poet Gary Snyder would also become known for their interest in environmental and ecological concerns.
The Small Press poets (sometimes called the mimeograph movement) are another influential and eclectic group of poets who also surfaced in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1950s and are still active today. Fiercely independent editors, who were also poets, edited and published low-budget periodicals and chapbooks of emerging poets who might otherwise have gone unnoticed. This work ranged from formal to experimental. Gene Fowler, A. D. Winans, Hugh Fox, street poet and activist Jack Hirschman, Paul Foreman, Jim Cohn, John Bennett, and F. A. Nettelbeck are among the many poets who are still actively continuing the Small Press Poets tradition. Many have turned to the new medium of the Web for its distribution capabilities.
Los Angeles poets: Leland Hickman (1934–1991), Holly Prado ( born 1938), Harry Northup (born 1940), Wanda Coleman (born 1946), Michael C. Ford (born 1939), Kate Braverman (born 1950), Eloise Klein Healy, Bill Mohr, Laurel Ann Bogen, met at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, in Venice, California. They are lyric poets, heavily autobiographical; some are practitioners of the experimental long poem. Mavericks all, their L.A. predecessors are Ann Stanford (1916–1987), Thomas McGrath (1916–1990), Jack Hirschman (born 1933). Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, created by George Drury Smith in 1968, is the central literary arts center in the Los Angeles area.
Just as the West Coast had the San Francisco Renaissance and the Small Press Movement, the East Coast produced the New York School. This group aimed to write poetry that spoke directly of everyday experience in everyday language and produced a poetry of urbane wit and elegance that contrasts with the work of their Beat contemporaries (though in other ways, including their mutual respect for American slang and disdain for academic or "cooked" poetry, they were similar). Leading members of the group include John Ashbery (born in 1927), Frank O'Hara (1926–1966), Kenneth Koch (1925–2002), James Schuyler (1923–1991), Barbara Guest (1920–2006), Ted Berrigan (1934–1983), Anne Waldman (born in 1945) and Bernadette Mayer (born in 1945). Of this group, John Ashbery, in particular, has emerged as a defining force in recent poetics, and he is regarded by many as the most important American poet since World War II.
American poetry today
The last forty years of poetry in the United States have seen the emergence of a number of groups, schools, and trends, whose lasting importance has, necessarily, yet to be demonstrated.
The 1970s saw a revival of interest in surrealism, with the most prominent poets working in this field being Andrei Codrescu (born in 1946), Russell Edson (born in 1935) and Maxine Chernoff (born in 1952). Performance poetry also emerged from the Beat and hippie happenings, the talk-poems of David Antin (born in 1932), and ritual events performed by Rothenberg, to become a serious poetic stance which embraces multiculturalism and a range of poets from a multiplicity of cultures, including Puerto Rican born poets Giannina Braschi (born in 1953) and Julia de Burgos (born in 1914) who lived and wrote in New York City about the plight of the Hispanic-American immigrants. This mirrored a general growth of interest in poetry by African Americans including Gwendolyn Brooks (born in 1917), Maya Angelou (born in 1928), Ishmael Reed (born in 1938), Nikki Giovanni (born in 1943), and Detrick Hughes (born in 1966).
Another group of poets, the Language school (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, after the magazine that bears that name), have continued and extended the Modernist and Objectivist traditions of the 1930s. Some poets associated with the group are Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman and Leslie Scalapino. Their poems—fragmentary, purposefully ungrammatical, sometimes mixing texts from different sources and idioms—can be by turns abstract, lyrical, and highly comic.
The Language school includes a high proportion of women, which mirrors another general trend—the rediscovery and promotion of poetry written both by earlier and contemporary women poets. A number of the most prominent African American poets to emerge are women, and other prominent women writers include Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), Jean Valentine (born in 1934) and Amy Gerstler (born in 1956).
Although poetry in traditional classical forms had mostly fallen out of fashion by the 1960s, the practice was kept alive by poets of great formal virtuosity like James Merrill (1926–1995), author of the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover, Richard Wilbur, and British-born San Francisco poet Thom Gunn. The 1980s and 1990s saw a re-emergent interest in traditional form, sometimes dubbed New Formalism or Neoformalism. These include poets such as Molly Peacock, Brad Leithauser, Dana Gioia, Donna J. Stone, Timothy Steele, and Marilyn Hacker. Some of the more outspoken New Formalists have declared that the return to rhyme and more fixed meters to be the new avant-garde. Their critics sometimes associate this traditionalism with the conservative politics of the Reagan era, noting the recent appointment of Gioia as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. More recent examples of New Formalism, however, have sometimes crossed over into the more experimental territory of Language poetry, suggesting that both schools are being gradually absorbed into the poetic mainstream.
Haiku has also attracted a community of American poets dedicated to its development as a serious poetic genre in English. The extremely terse Japanese haiku first influenced the work of Pound and the Imagists, and post-war poets such as Kerouac and Richard Wright wrote substantial bodies of original haiku in English. Other poets such as Ginsberg, Snyder, Wilbur, Merwin, and many others have at least dabbled with haiku, often simply as a syllabic form. Starting in 1963, with the founding of the journal American Haiku, poets such as Cor van den Heuvel, Nick Virgilio, Raymond Roseliep, John Wills, Anita Virgil, Gary Hotham, Marlene Mountain, Wally Swist, Peggy Willis Lyles, George Swede, Jim Kacian, and others have created significant oeuvres of haiku poetry, evincing continuities with both Transcendentalism and Imagism and often maintaining an anti-anthropocentric environmental focus on nature during an unparalleled age of habitat destruction and human alienation.
The last two decades have also seen a revival of the Beat poetry spoken word tradition, in the form of the poetry slam, which was born of the Nuyorican movement led by New York–based Puerto Rican poets Pedro Pietri, Giannina Braschi, and Miguel Piñero. Chicago construction worker Marc Smith turned urban poetry performance into audience-judged competitions in 1984. Poetry slams emphasize a style of writing that is topical, provocative and easily understood. Poetry slam opened the door for a new generation of writers and spoken word performers, including Alix Olson, Apollo Poetry, Taylor Mali, and Saul Williams, and inspired hundreds of open mics across the country.
Poetry has also become a significant presence on the Web, with a number of new online journals, 'zines, blogs and other websites. An example of the fluid nature of web-based poetry communities is, "thisisbyus, now defunct, yet this community of writers continues and expands on Facebook and has allowed both novice and professional poets to explore writing styles.
During the contemporary time frame there were also major independent voices who defied links to well-known American poetic movements and forms such as poet and literary critic Robert Peters, greatly influenced by the Victorian English poet Robert Browning’s poetic monologues, became reputable for executing his monologic personae like his Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria into popular one-man performances.
Events, like the 9/11 attacks, influenced both content of poems and the public's attention to poetry.
Robert Pinsky has a special place in American poetry as he was the Poet Laureate of the United States for three terms. No other poet has been so honored. His "Favorite Poem Project" is unique, inviting all citizens to share their all-time favorite poetic composition and why they love it. He is a professor at Boston University and the poetry editor at Slate. "Poems to Read" is only one demonstration of his masterful poetic vision, joining the word and the common man.
In general, poetry in the contemporary era has been moving out of the mainstream and onto the college and university campus. The growth in the popularity of graduate creative writing programs has given poets the opportunity to make a living as teachers. This increased professionalization of poetry, combined with the reluctance of most major book and magazine presses to publish poetry, has meant that, for the foreseeable future at least, poetry may have found its new home in the academy and in small independent journals.
- Academy of American Poets
- Biker Poetry
- Chicano poetry
- Cowboy poetry
- Haiku in English
- List of national poetries
- List of poets from the United States
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|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Poetry of the United States.|
- Cary Nelson, Ed. (1999–2002) Poet biographies at Modern American Poetry. Retrieved December 5, 2004
- Poet biographies at the Academy of American Poets Captured December 10, 2004
- Poet biographies at the Electronic Poetry Centre Captured December 10, 2004
- Various anthologies of American verse at Bartleby.com Captured December 10, 2004
- Poetry Resource a website for students of poetry