The Great War, Literary Tastes, and Political Correctness: The Strange Case of Charles Pollen Adams, German Dialect Poet

Charles Pollen Adams was a strange candidate to be America's most {xjpular and widely-read German dialect poet at the turn of the twentieth century.'To begin with, he was not of German but of Yankee, that is.New England ancestry, and, as far as is known, was not at all proficient in German, neither standard nor dialect, and had never studied the language formally.Other New Englanders, including his distant relative John Quincy Adams, had exhibited an affinity for German language, literature, and culture which dated back to the earliest days of colonization.But while Adams was named for the German patriot and scholar Charles Pollen, his initial contact with German dialect, according to numerous biographical sources, came not from scholarly circles but from listening as a youth to his family s washerwoman and from conversing with Pennsylvania German soldiers in the Army o f the Potomac during his rather lengthy convalescence from wounds sustained in the batde of Gettysburg.Adams never claimed to be a professional writer, and saw his poetry largely as an avocation.In his own words, "I am, and always have been in the business world and my writing has been my diversion and not my occupation.^ Yet while he had committed him self early on to a career in business-primarily as a dry goods merchant-his poetr>-made him well known in the literary' world, not escaping the attention of such luminaries as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Twain, Whittier, James Whitcomb Riley, and Longfellow.He claimed, in a lecture given at the Emerson College o f Oratory in 1900, to have been inspired in his literary use of German dialect by Charles Godfrey Leland , an American who had studied at Heidelberg and Munich and had popularized the genre through his "Hans Breitmann ballads.Leland s collection showed his familiarity with high German culture, such as his parody of the opening lines of the Nibelungenlied.The ballads, beginning with "Hans Breitmann s Barty (1856), were widely circulated in mid-nineteenth-century America and depicted, in a "peculiar jumble of English and German," what Adams called the coarse type of German-rollicking, beer drinking and sometimes profane.* Breitmann was emblematic for the German immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after the abortive

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