James Whitcomb Riley - Critical Reception and Style

Critical Reception and Style

Riley was among the most popular and best-loved writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, known for his "uncomplicated, sentimental, and humorous" writing. Often writing his verses in dialect, his poetry caused readers to recall a nostalgic and simpler time in earlier American history. This gave his poetry a unique appeal during a period of rapid industrialization and urbanization in the United States. Riley was a prolific writer who "achieved mass appeal partly due to his canny sense of marketing and publicity." He published more than fifty books, mostly of poetry and humorous short stories, and sold millions of copies.

Riley is often remembered for his most famous poems, including the "The Raggedy Man" and "Little Orphant Annie". Many of his poems, including those, where partially autobiographical, as he used events and people from his childhood as an inspiration for subject matter. His poems often contained morals and warnings for children, containing messages telling children to care for the less fortunate in society. David Galens and Van Allen both see these messages as Riley's subtle response to the turbulent economic times of the Gilded Age and the growing progressive movement. Riley believed that the urbanization in the nation robbed children of their innocence and sincerity, and in his poems he attempted to introduce and idolize characters who had not lost those qualities. His children's poems are "exuberant, performative, and often display Riley's penchant for using humorous characterization, repetition, and dialect to make his poetry accessible to a wide-ranging audience."

Although indirectly hinted at in some poems, Riley wrote very little on serious subject matter, and actually mocked attempts at serious poetry. Only a few of his sentimental poems touched on serious subjects. "Little Mandy's Christmas-Tree", "The Absence of Little Wesley" and "The Happy Little Cripple" spoke about poverty, the death of a child, and disabilities. Like his children's poems, they too contained morals, suggesting society should take pity on the downtrodden and be charitable.

Riley wrote gentle and romantic poems that were not in dialect. They generally consisted of sonnets and were heavily influenced by the works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His standard English poetry was never as popular as his Hoosier dialect poems. Still less popular where the poems Riley authored in his later years; most were to commemorate important events in American history and to eulogize the dead.

Riley's contemporaries acclaimed him "America's best-loved poet". In 1920, Henry Beers lauded the works of Riley "as natural and unaffected, with none of the discontent and deep thought of cultured song." Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, and Hamlin Garland, each praised Riley's work and the idealism he expressed in his poetry. Only a few critics of the period found fault with Riley's works. Ambrose Bierce criticized Riley for his frequent use of dialect. Bierce accused Riley of using dialect to "cover up faulty construction" of his poems. Edgar Lee Masters found Riley's work to be superficial, claiming it lacked irony and that he had only a "narrow emotional range". By the 1930s popular critical opinion towards Riley's works began to shift in favor of the negative reviews. In 1951, James T. Farrell said Riley's works were "cliched." Galens wrote that modern critics consider Riley to be a "minor poet, whose work—provincial, sentimental, and superficial though it may have been—nevertheless struck a chord with a mass audience in a time of enormous cultural change." Thomas C. Johnson wrote that what most interests modern critics was Riley's ability to market his work, saying he had a unique understanding of "how to commodify his own image and the nostalgic dreams of an anxious nation."

Among the earliest widespread criticisms to rise against Riley was opinions that his dialect writing did not actually reflect the true dialect of central Indiana. In 1970 Peter Revell wrote that Riley's dialect was more similar to the poor speech of a child rather than the dialect of his region. Revell made extensive comparison to historical texts and Riley's dialect usage. Philip Greasley wrote that that while "some critics have dismissed him as sub-literary, insincere, and an artificial entertainer, his defenders reply that an author so popular with millions of people in different walks of life must contribute something of value, and that his faults, if any, can be ignored."