There’s not enough love for John Quincy Adams (1767-1848). I’m not sure why. He loved billiards and skinny-dipping. He *might* have owned a pet alligator. Sadly, even some of the most passionate history lovers take one look at America’s Ebenezer Scrooge-looking sixth president, and quickly turn the page. It shouldn’t be that way. He once wrote: “Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet.” In later years, he was called “Old Man Eloquent.” He knew. He saw. He became.
Most of Adams’ poetry was written in the diary he kept from the age of eleven until his death at eighty. He wrote rhymed couplets, yet the subject matter ranged from beautiful women on the street to passionate arguments against slavery. He wrote love poems about his wife Louisa and reworked some biblical psalms into his own style. He also translated poems into English, such as Christoph Martin Wieland’s fairy tale epic “Oberon.” His mother Abigail wrote him: “How unpardonable would it have been in you, to have been a Blockhead.” Ouch! At least he escaped that fate.
Abigail’s warning rose with jagged shards of wind piercing each silent tongue, swirling into sun-reddened nothingness. While accompanying his father John on a diplomatic mission to Paris in 1778, John Quincy Adams wrote his mother: “My Pappa enjoins it upon me to keep a journal, or a diary, of the Events that happen to me, and of objects that I See, and of Characters that I converse with from day to day.” Little did the boy know what unseen worlds his diary would welcome, or that his words would be studied centuries in the future!
As Adams grew more famous (before and during 1825-1829), people took notice of his poetry. His art was no longer confined to his diary and enjoyed the glamour of publication. However, not all of this publicity was good. His long poem “Dermot MacMorrogh or the Conquest of Ireland” received this shady review:
“Indeed it is that short sentence of four words -By John Quincy Adams- to which ‘Dermot MacMorrogh’ will be solely indebted for all the attention it will receive. Were it not for this magic sentence, we doubt if many readers would get further than the middle of the first Canto; and we are quite certain that none would ever reach the end of the second.”
Art is subjective. While this critic didn’t like Adams’ style, others did. Senators Thomas Hart Benton (MO) and John Davis (MA), both remarked that “some of his ‘Hymns’ are among the finest devotional lyrics in our language.” They even edited his posthumous poetry collection, Poems of Religion and Society (1848). His poem “The Wants of Man” (originally published 1841) was later given the limelight in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Parnassus (1874), a collection of Emerson’s favorite poems. Now, I’m not going to say that the first American philosopher’s approval is all the validation you need, but I’m sure The Adams-ation was popping bottles and getting “wastey-pants” in Heaven.
Here is one of my favorite John Quincy Adams poems, “The Hour-Glass”:
Alas! How swift the moments fly!
How flash the years along!
Scarce here, yet gone already by,
The burden of a song.
See childhood, youth, and manhood pass,
And age, with furrowed brow; rime was-
Time shall be-drain the glass
But where in Time is now?
Time is the measure but of change;
No present hour is found;
The past, the future, fill the range
Of Time’s unceasing round.
Where, then, is now?
In realms above,
With God’s atoning Lamb,
In regions of eternal love,
Where sits enthroned I AM.
Then, pilgrim, let thy joys and tears
On Time no longer lean;
But henceforth all thy hopes and fears
From earth’s affections wean:
To God let votive accents rise;
With truth, with virtue, live;
So all the bliss that Time denies
Eternity shall give.
Curious History Girl 