American Literature: Poetry

II. Beginnings: 1600s Through the American Revolution (1775-1783)

From the beginning until well into the 19th century, widespread agreement existed that American poetry would be judged by British standards, and that poetry written in America was simply British poetry composed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet in responding to British styles, American poetry took inspiration from the new physical environment and the evolving culture of the colonies. In the process it recorded a subtle shift from poets who were dependent imitators to poets who spoke for and in the language of the new nation.

A. New England Puritan Poetry

Puritans who had settled in New England were the first poets of the American colonies. Most Puritan poets saw the purpose of poetry as careful Christian examination of their lives; and private poems, like Puritan diaries, served as a forum where the self could be measured daily against devout expectations. Puritan leaders deemed poetry a safe and inspiriting genre, since they considered the Bible itself to be God's poetry. Thus poetry became the literary form that allowed devout believers to express, with God's help, divine lessons. Other genres, such as drama and fiction, were considered dangerous, capable of generating lies and leading to idle entertainment instead of moral uplift.

Puritan poets had grown up in England during a period when Christian epic poetry—culminating in Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton—was considered the highest literary accomplishment. When they came to America they maintained their cultural allegiances to Britain. Anne Bradstreet looked to British poets Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser; Edward Taylor looked to poets George Herbert and John Donne.

Bradstreet was the first poet in America to publish a volume of poetry. The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America was published in England in 1650. Bradstreet had lived in England until 1630, when at the age of 18 she arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where she spent the rest of her life. Although Bradstreet wrote many poems on familiar British themes and produced skilled imitations of British forms, her most remarkable works responded directly to her experiences in colonial New England. They reveal her attraction to her new world, even as the discomforts of life in the wilderness sickened her. Her poetry contains a muted declaration of independence from the past and a challenge to authority. Although Bradstreet's verses on the burning of her house in 1666 and poems on the death of three grandchildren end by reaffirming the God-fearing Puritan belief system, along the way they also question the harsh Puritan God. Further, Bradstreet's work records early stirrings of female resistance to a social and religious system in which women are subservient to men. In “The Prologue” (1650), Bradstreet writes, “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits, / [than] A poet's pen....” Bradstreet's instincts were to love this world more than the promised next world of Puritan theology, and her struggle to overcome her love for the world of nature energizes her poetry.

Taylor, a poet of great technical skill, wrote powerful meditative poems in which he tested himself morally and sought to identify and root out sinful tendencies. In “God's Determinations Touching His Elect” (written 1680?), one of Taylor's most important works, he celebrates God's power in the triumph of good over evil in the human soul. All of Taylor's poetry and much of Bradstreet's served generally personal ends, and their audience often consisted of themselves and their family and closest friends. This tradition of private poetry, kept in manuscript and circulated among a small and intimate circle, continued throughout the colonial period, and numerous poets of the 17th and 18th centuries remained unknown to the general public until long after their deaths. For them, poetry was a kind of heightened letter writing that reaffirmed the ties of family and friends. Taylor's poems remained unpublished until 1939, when The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor appeared. Many of Bradstreet's most personal poems also remained unpublished during her lifetime.

Public poetry for the Puritans was more didactic or instructive in nature and often involved the transformation into verse of important biblical lessons that guided Puritan belief. Poet and minister Michael Wigglesworth wrote theological verse in ballad meter, such as The Day of Doom (1662), which turned the Book of Revelation into an easily memorized sing-song epic. Puritan poetry also included elaborate elegies, or poems honoring a person who had recently died. Puritans used these poems to explore the nature of the self, reading the character of the dead person as a text and seeing the life as a collection of hidden meanings.

B. Southern Satire

Colonial poets of the 18th century still looked to British poets of their time, such as Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips. Both were masters of pastoral verse—poetry that celebrated an idealized English countryside and rural life—and of satirical verse. Initially, this satiric tone was more prevalent in the southern colonies than in New England.

Two poets from the Maryland Colony, Ebenezer Cook and Richard Lewis, wrote accomplished satirical poems based on British pastoral models. But their poems cleverly undermine those models by poking fun at the British. Cook's The Sot-Weed Factor (1708) is a long narrative poem written in rhyming couplets that mocks Americans as a backward people but aims its satire most effectively at the poem's narrator, who is a British snob. Americans may be laughable, Cook suggests, but they are not as ridiculous as the British with their ignorance and prejudice about Americans.

C. Revolutionary Era Patriotic Poetry

A penchant for satire continued in the American Revolutionary era, when American poetry was centered on Connecticut and a group of poets known as the Connecticut Wits (or Hartford Wits). This group, most of whose members were associated with Yale University, included David Humphreys, John Trumbull, and Joel Barlow. Along with other writers they produced The Anarchiad (1786-1787), a mock epic poem warning against the chaos that would ensue if a strong central government, as advocated by the Federalists, was not implemented in the United States. American poets used the British literary model of the mock epic as a tool to satirize and criticize British culture. Trumbull's mock epic M'Fingal (1775-1782) lampooned the British Loyalists during the Revolution.

Revolutionary-era poets composed more than satire, however. They felt an urgency to produce a serious—even monumental—national poetry that would celebrate the country's new democratic ideals. Epic poems, they believed, would confer importance and significance on the new nation's culture. Educated in the classics, these poets were also lawyers, ministers, and busy citizens of the new republic. They did not bother with the question whether a new nation required new forms of poetry, but were content to use traditional forms to write about new subjects in order to create the first truly American poetry. Whereas traditional epics celebrated past accomplishments of a civilization, American epics by necessity celebrated the future. Examples of such epics include Barlow's The Vision of Columbus (1787), later revised as The Columbiad (1807); Greenfield Hill (1794) by clergyman Timothy Dwight; and The Rising Glory of America (1772) by Philip Freneau. All offered the prospect of America as the future culmination of civilization.

Freneau, the most accomplished patriot poet, was not associated with Connecticut. He was born in New York City and later lived in a variety of places. His range of experience and clarity of expression made him a very popular poet, widely regarded as the first poet who spoke for the entire country. Much of his poetry focused on America's future greatness, but he also wrote on other subjects, including the beauties of the natural world. Such lyric poems as “The Wild Honey Suckle” (1786) and “On a Honey Bee” (1809), can be seen as the first expressions in American poetry of a deep spiritual engagement with nature.

D. Early Black Voices

Slavery was the great contradiction in the new nation that had affirmed in its Declaration of Independence a basic belief that “all men are created equal” and have “inalienable” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Many of the country's early leaders believed that African slaves were intellectually inferior to whites. Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave, challenged those racist assumptions early on. Brought to America as a young girl, Wheatley was educated by her masters in English and Latin. She became an accomplished poet, and her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was published in England. Like the white patriot poets, Wheatley wrote in 18th-century literary forms. But her highly structured and elegant poetry nonetheless expressed her frustration at enslavement and desire to reach a heaven where her color and social position would no longer keep her from singing in her full glory.

Wheatley's poetry, along with that of other slaves, begins a powerful African American tradition in American poetry. In 1746 Lucy Terry, a slave in Massachusetts who was also educated by her owner, wrote the first poem to be published by a black American: "Bar's Fight." The poem, which was not published until 1855, describes the victims and survivors of a Native American raid against settlers. It was followed by Jupiter Hammon's biblically inspired, hymnlike verse, “An Evening Thought; Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries” (1761).

Born at the time of the founding of the nation, African American poetry retained its concern with the burning issues of the American Revolution, including liberty, independence, equality, and identity. It also expressed African American experiences of divided loyalties. Just as white Americans experienced divided loyalties in the republic's early years—unsure whether their identity derived from the new country or from their European past—so too did African Americans, who looked always to their African past and to their problematic American present.

Poetry

Ⅰ.Introduction,

Ⅱ.Beginnings: 1600s Through the American Revolution (1775-1783),

Ⅲ.The 19th Century,

Ⅳ.The 20th Century.

Drama

Ⅰ.Introduction,

Ⅱ.Beginnings: 1600s and 1700s,

Ⅲ.Nationhood: The 1800s,

Ⅳ.The Modern Era: The 1900s

Prose

Ⅰ.Introduction,

Ⅱ.Beginnings: The 1500s and 1600s,

Ⅲ.Toward Independence: The 1700s,

Ⅳ.Nationhood: The 1800s ,

Ⅴ.Modernism: The 1900s,

Ⅵ.Current Trends