Library of Southern literature/Volume 1/Thomas Albert Smith Adams
THOMAS ALBERT SMITH ADAMS
[1839—1888]
THE great-grandparents of T. A. S. Adams, as he was generally called, were Welsh-Irish Presbyterians, who emigrated from Ireland to South Carolina in 1766. Abram Adams, his father, moved with his wife and five children, in 1834, to Noxubee County, Mississippi, and bought a tract of land from the Indians. Ten out of the fourteen children in this thrifty, intelligent, religious family lived to the age of twenty-one. Among them was T. A, S. Adams, born February 5, 1839, and named for a general under whom his father served in the War of 1812. From the neighborhood school he entered, with marked literary proclivities, the University of Mississippi and completed the Junior year, graduating with honors at Emory and Henry College, Virginia, in 1860. The same year he married, and entered the Methodist ministry. He was chaplain of the 11th Mississippi Volunteers in the Confederate Army. Transferring in 1871 from the Mobile Conference, which he had joined, to the North Mississippi Conference, formed that year, he soon ranked among the leaders in the Conference, filling important stations and at intervals appointed to the presidency of several church schools. He was among the first, and one of the ablest and most earnest, advocates of a Mississippi Methodist College. His remarkable epic poem, 'Enscotidion; or, Shadow of Death,' was published in 1876. 'Aunt Peggy and Other Poems' appeared in 1882, in which year he was a delegate from his Conference to the General Conference of the Southern Methodist Church. The degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred on him by his alma mater in 1884. In 1886 he became president of Centenary College, Louisiana, but resigned the next year and moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where he established a school with the design of having it become the State Methodist College. But his plans miscarried, and he reentered the itinerant ministry in the North Mississippi Conference. At the annual conference in December, 1888, he preached with great power, to the delight and edification of his hearers. He died suddenly, from a stroke of apoplexy, December 21, 1888, in the railway station at Jackson, Mississippi, while preparing to leave for his new appointment at Oxford, Mississippi. The following day, after eloquent tributes to his memory by Bishop C. B. Galloway and Dr. W. B. Murrah, his remains were laid to rest in the city cemetery.
As a learned, and at times brilliant and profound preacher, Dr. Adams was perhaps best known. Poetical and philosophical, spiritual and logical, scholarly and original—it is not surprising that he came to eminence. But as a man of letters more than as an educator and preacher is he entitled to distinction. Considering his opportunities, his scholarship was extraordinary, as his carefully kept ledger notebooks as well as his publications abundantly attest. He was master of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; and he could read with ease in three or four modern languages besides his own. To various church papers he was a frequent and versatile contributor. In controversy he was skilful, ready, formidable. Fiction, in various forms, he essayed in his later years, leaving five incomplete stories and several legends among his manuscripts. But poetry was his passion and his luxury, even from boyhood; and his place and rank as a poet may be appraised by the two volumes which he contributed to Southern literature.
The author himself culled his poems carefully for the volume published in 1882, entitled 'Aunt Peggy and Other Poems.' "Aunt Peggy" is a narrative poem of about thirty-one hundred lines, broken into ten chapters. Written in short iambic couplets, discursively narrative, the poem as a whole is disappointing. The pictures of a simple, hardy country life in Mississippi seventy or eighty years ago are interesting; the old field-school, in chapter seven, especially so, because of its graphic and humorous portrayal. The tenth chapter is the longest and as poetry the best. In it there are richer, softer tints, and the poet sings to the flute, rather than to the harp. The flickerings of youthful sentiment in "Aunt Peggy's" aged, widowed heart are revealed with tender grace, and the closing apostrophe to Memory is a noble utterance.
The twenty-seven other poems in the volume with "Aunt Peggy" are mostly of a personal and religious nature. "Bury Him in the Sea," on the burial of Dr. Coke at sea, is a spirited poem with fine imagery and lofty sentiments. "Growing Gray," "Never so Much as Now," "While we May," "Hie Jacet," and several others in the minor key attest, in contemplative mood, genuine inspiration and artistic execution. "Old Papers" and "Even with the World" are fanciful and have a note of humor with a serious undertone.
But the measure of Dr. Adams as a poet should be taken by his first volume 'Enscotidion; or, Shadow of Death,' published in 1876, with an Introduction by Rev. R. A. Young, D.D. In youth the author had versified a negro's grotesque dream of a visit to the lower world, and called it "Cuffy's Dream." Fascinated, apparently, by the mysterious theme, for years he continued more seriously his efforts to fathom its depths and light its darkness. The result is 'Enscotidion; or, Shadow of Death,' an epic of six hundred and fifty-two Spenserian stanzas and seven lyrics, divided into five cantos of nearly equal length. Self-reliant and intrepid indeed is the spirit that would attempt to wake new music on the mighty harp from which "The Inferno" and "Paradise Lost" were evoked. It is not the orchestral music of the old masters, very truly; for in scope, machinery, and measure 'Enscotidion' differs widely from their great epics. Yet in places there are suggestions of Miltonic sweep and grandeur; elsewhere are approaches to Dantesque realism in the vivid conjunction of things earthly and unearthly; again, in versification and tendency to allegory Spenserian traces are easily discernible. No Satan and Michael, Virgil and Beatrice, or Archimago and Duessa appear in 'Enscotidion.' Time, Death, Disease, Night, Solitude, Reason, Hope, Faith, Fiends, and Furies, and a youth from Earth guided by Despair, are the chief acquaintances to be formed in this realm of phantoms and of horrors. Through all this "strange, wild dream" a serious purpose runs, which is, to show that this side of death, however steeped in sin the soul may be, there is yet hope of heaven.
Applause from high sources was bestowed on the new poet. Dr. Young begins his Introduction with the prediction that "the author of 'Enscotidion' is destined to take a high rank among the poets of America"; and Bishop J. C. Keener is credited with the remark that Dr. Adams ought to have time and means to give a poetical interpretation to the Apocalypse, being the only man he knew able to do this. But, owing to its nature and more perhaps to the unpropitious times in the South for the favorable reception of poetry of the kind, the work did not receive generally the attention that it deserved. A slight revision with a brief prefatory argument to each canto would doubtless have increased the number of its readers. Only one edition of the poem has been published.
Unequal, admittedly, 'Enscotidion' is; but what poem of six thousand lines is not? At times even Homer nods, Milton proses, and Dante is repulsively gruesome or grotesque. The epilogue stanzas addressed to the muse or to the reader, and the touches of morbid humor or satire, which might have been omitted in a revision, are the most serious defects of the poem. That to such amazing depths and agonizing distances, to so good purpose and with so few artistic lapses, the poet in imagination or phantasy carries Azan, is a feat no less than wonderful, an achievement almost unparalleled in American literature.
Among the manuscripts of Dr. Adams is the fragment of another epic, 'The Lost Restored.' The argument for five books is complete. A lyric invocation and most of the first book in blank verse have been written. Heaven and illimitable space, saints and angels, Christ and God are the objects and personages in this projected epic. Men and devils do not appear, for the Judgment with its momentous issues has long since passed. Twelve legions of angels dispatched ten thousand years before to a universe millions and millions of miles distant have not returned. A council is held in heaven. How they were lost and how restored is the theme of this well-nigh celestial tragedy. It is referred to only to show more fully the ardent poetic nature and the lofty literary aspirations of Dr. Adams.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
For fuller information of the life and writings of this poet, preacher and scholarly teacher, the reader is referred to the appended bibliography. His manuscripts in excellent state of preservation are in the hands of his widow, Mrs. Susan S. Adams, who now lives at Emory, Virginia, her paternal home.