Readers today generally find eighteenth-century poetry less readable than eighteenth-century prose. Yet, most middle-class or upper-class readers and writers of the eighteenth century valued poetry above prose. Members of the elite in particular saw the composition and consumption of poetry as a genteel activity that marked their education and taste.

Moreover, poetry was well suited to the situation of American publishing, in which book-length works were expensive and risky to print, while new periodicals in need of poetry and other shorter material were frequently established (even if they did not last long). The poetry that readers and writers prized was what we now call neoclassical: poetry that used regular rhyme and meter, that often mimicked forms found in classical writing, that served an educational purpose as well as being entertaining, and that celebrated the values of reason, moderation, and balance. In its use of set forms and poetic diction and allusion, such poetry required a certain set of skills that marked the writer as well educated and cultured.

Poetry was so highly valued and so widely practiced that the list of Revolutionary-era poets is very long, but because of the changing tastes in poetry, most of the names are not familiar to readers today. Each of the poets from that era whose reputations have best survived—Phillis Wheatley, Philip Freneau, and the group collectively known as the Connecticut Wits—has a distinguishing feature. Wheatley we remember today because of her historical importance and because of the amazing feat of her poetic achievement despite her status as a slave. Freneau is remembered because he appears to anticipate the Romantic movement in poetry, which was slow to influence American writers. The Connecticut Wits remain a staple of textbooks and surveys in part because they were the first to call themselves a school of poets and because they worked early to “canonize” themselves.

This is by no means to say that Wheatley, Freneau, and the Wits are not worth reading and remembering for other reasons; rather, they are only a small slice of a broader poetic field that is also worth consideration.

Wheatley’s work, although unusual because of its author’s enslaved status, is representative in many ways of the major trends of poetry of the time. Wheatley’s poetry is serious, written in recognizable forms and genres, often has a moral purpose or intent, uses poetic diction, and often is written to a specific person or group of people to commemorate a specific event. Much of Freneau’s work, similarly, fits the general poetic trends, although some of his works, notably The House of Night (1779) and The Wild Honey Suckle (1786), are notable for attitudes and themes more typically considered Romantic.

The group called the Connecticut Wits included John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, David Humphreys, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop, and Elihu Hubbard Smith. A group of these writers collaborated on a mock epic, The Anarchiad (1786–1787), that mocked contemporary social disorder in the wake of the Revolution. Other notable works by members of the group include Barlow’s The Hasty-Pudding (1796), Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1794), Humphreys’s A Poem on the Industry. Addressed to the Citizens of the United States of America (1794), and Barlow’s The Columbiad (1807).

In 1793, Smith edited and published the first anthology of American poetry, American Poems, a collection of work mostly by members of this group. Although he is generally thought of as a later-nineteenth-century poet, William Cullen Bryant, who was considered a young prodigy in poetry, has his roots in this era; his first poetic efforts appeared in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and one of his most famous poems, Thanatopsis, in 1817.

Many of the poets who are less well remembered are women. Sarah Wentworth Morton has been remembered largely for a single work, The African Chief (1792), because that poem was influential later in the nineteenth century as the abolitionist movement grew. Morton wrote a great deal of verse, however, including several verse plays that dealt self-consciously with American themes, including Ouâbi; or the Virtues of Nature (1790) and Beacon Hill (1797). Mercy Otis Warren also wrote verse plays, several of them satirical representations of the royal administration in the years just before the Revolution; she published a collection of her work, Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, in 1790.

Many women, however, wrote poetry without publishing it, and some of that work has recently been rediscovered by literary critics. A group of mostly female poets, including Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Hannah Griffitts, Milcah Martha Moore, Annis Boudinot Stockton, and Susanna Wright flourished in the post-Revolutionary era in the Delaware Valley around Philadelphia. While some of these women published a few poems, they wrote mostly for a smaller audience that included each other and an extended network of friends, family, and acquaintances.

American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (2007) includes generous selections of poetry by a broad variety of poets. Additional collections include Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton (1995) and Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (1997). These two volumes include valuable introductory material that provides important context for understanding these poets and the concept of manuscript culture.

Critical works related to poetry of the era focus mostly on the work of a single poet or a group of poets. Broader studies that are useful include David S. Shields’s Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (1997) and Susan M. Stabile’s Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (2004).

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH

1. During the period of the Revolution and early Republic, British poets were developing the style of poetry we today call Romantic; at the same time, they were pioneering a vision of the author as an individual who was highly original in his or her (mostly his) style and ideas.

American poets, as seen in the work of the Connecticut Wits and the Delaware Valley network, tended to associate in groups and to mentor one another and even to write collaboratively. Issues of authorship are worth considering, then, in relationship to poetry of the era.

Students interested in questions of communal authorship are advised to explore Milcah Martha Moore’s Book or the work of the Connecticut Wits.

2. As noted, Philip Freneau has often been seen as a precursor of the Romantic style in poetry. Why didn’t Romantic poetry take hold earlier in the United States?

Students might wish to conduct a comparative study that takes into consideration the social conditions that affected the development of poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. It is worth noting here that the differences in poetic development are much more pronounced than in trends in prose writing.

3. In general, male poets of the era have been better remembered and are more likely than women to appear in textbooks, with a few notable exceptions.

Students interested in these gender differences might wish to compare the work of male and female poets to determine whether the greater representation of male poets is a result of their superior quality or other reasons. Students might also wish to consider the models of masculinity and femininity implied in the works of these poets.

4. As noted, not all poets chose to publish their work; poets whose works remained in manuscript were until recently considered amateurs, despite the fact that eighteenth-century readers did not make that distinction in the same way.

In fact, poets who wrote for print publication were often looked down upon by some elite-class writers, who felt that the printed works were pandering to the lowest element in culture, rather than serving those with the best literary taste. With these issues in mind, students are encouraged to consider what differences are observable in the works of poets who wrote for publication and those who did not.

5. Since poets required a certain kind of education to meet the standards of neoclassical verse, poetry might justly be considered the most elitist genre in early American literature.

What do you make of this claim? Can a rhetoric of class difference or class distinction be found in the work of early American poets?

Categories: Literature

Tags: American literary canon, American manuscript tradition, American poetic tradition, American poetry history, American Romanticism, Annis Boudinot Stockton, colonial American poetry, Connecticut Wits, early American feminism, early American literature, eighteenth-century poetry, literary culture of the elite, manuscript culture, Mercy Otis Warren, Neoclassical Poetry, Philip Freneau, Phillis Wheatley, poetry and social class, poetry anthologies, poetry in periodicals, poetry publishing in early America, Revolutionary-era poets, Sarah Wentworth Morton, women poets of the 18th century