Gateway to the Classics: American Literature by William J. Long

It is a literary rule that the spirit of any age is measured by the poems which it inspired; but as we study this Homeric period of American history we are confronted by the startling fact that its heroism has never found adequate expression. It appeals to the young American as an age of great ideals and noble action, like the age of Elizabeth; yet no poet caught the inspiration and expressed it so as to make us feel the national enthusiasm. Much was attempted, in ballads, lyrics, dramas, even epics; but little remains save the remembrance of failure. We shall confine ourselves, therefore, to an outline of the forms which verse assumed, and to the work of one man, Philip Freneau, who marks the beginning of a new and important movement.

§ Songs and Ballads

Moore's Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution and Sargent's The Loyalist Poetry of the Revolution contain the best of our early ballads; but one must search a dozen collections, and the files of century-old newspapers, to appreciate the quantity and variety of this particular form of poetry. Every town had then its ballad maker, every newspaper its poet's corner, and every important event on land or sea was immediately celebrated in song. Merely as a suggestion, we name "The Volunteer Boys," "The Old Man's Song," "The Battle of Trenton," "The Dance," "A Fable," "The Battle of the Kegs," "Bold Hathorne," "King's Mountain," and "The Present Age," which are types of all the rest. As we read them, we hear again the toot of a fife, the rattle of a drum, the tread of marching soldiers; for whatever their literary faults, they still preserve something of the warlike spirit that inspired them. And there is at least one, "The Ballad of Nathan Hale," which we can never forget:

Partly because of our sympathy for the brave young patriot who suffered the meanest of deaths for his country, and partly because of the peculiar melody and the fine natural setting, "Nathan Hale" rises above all others of its class into the realm of poetry. It is, in our judgment, the best of a thousand ballads produced during the Revolutionary period.

§ The Hartford Wits

This unfortunate pseudonym was given to a group of clever college men, living in Hartford, who wrote newspaper verses to support the government or to satirize the follies of the age. Their chief aim, however, was not political but literary, and we have not yet done justice to their endeavor. Barlow, Dwight and Trumbull, the leaders of these "wits," are remarkable for two things: they were the first group of men who made a definite attempt to create a national poetry in America, and they were probably the pioneers of our modern English studies. There were no teachers of modern literature in those days; Dwight and Trumbull, both tutors at Yale, were regarded as innovators when they formed classes for the study of English letters. Meanwhile Trumbull wrote his "Progress of Dulness" (1772), a famous satire ridiculing, among other things, the college fashion of stuffing men's heads with Latin, Greek and Hebrew to the exclusion of their own noble literature.

The attempt at a literature which should be national rather than provincial is shown in The Columbiad of Joel Barlow (1754–1812). This is an epic of ten books, so long and dull that few persons ever finish the task of reading it. Yet the motive is magnificent, and there is enough heroic material in the poem to make us sympathize with Hawthorne, who wanted to make a melodrama of The Columbiad and put it on the stage to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. The epic is now forgotten, and Barlow is known as the author of "Hasty Pudding" (1796). This burlesque poem was very popular in its day, and is still worth reading. But it seems a pity that this ambitious man, who aimed to create a national literature, should now be remembered as the singer of the joys of mush and milk.

Timothy Dwight (1752–1817) was another poet who attempted to express the new national spirit, first by patriotic songs like "Columbia," then by a huge epic called The Conquest of Canaan (1785). The few who have patience to read this work will feel here and there the thrill of nationality, like the stir of a slumbering giant; may feel also the spirit of this noble teacher, the first of our great college presidents, who became so much a part of our life that his death "seemed to leave a gap in the solar system."

John Trumbull (1750–1831) is the most brilliant of this significant group of literary men. His youthful essays, in the Connecticut Journal, are in many ways superior to Franklin's, and some of his early poems, such as the "Ode to Sleep," are full of promise:

Like Freneau, he has the instinct of a poet; but when the Revolution approaches he throws himself into the strife of the hour, using a valiant pen instead of a sword for a weapon. Farewell, greatness! Trumbull is henceforth a mere satirist, a slave to literary fashion, wasting his genius on the three subjects of the hour, "Tea, Toryism, and Taxes."

Because of this absorption in political satire, Trumbull's extraordinary promise came to naught; his good work for modern literature is forgotten, and he is remembered only as the author of M'Fingal (1775–1782). This is a burlesque poem, modeled after Hudibras , ridiculing the principles of a Tory squire, and describing his punishment by a jeering mob of Whigs. It is something to be popular even for a day, and M'Fingal was the most popular and widely quoted work of the entire Revolutionary period. Aside from this, it has three merits: it is a good example of a rough type of American humor; it is an excellent picture of the political hurly-burly of the age; and it ranks with Paine's Common Sense among the literary forces which hastened the Declaration of Independence. Merely as a suggestion of the style, we add a few doggerel couplets from the third canto:

Philip Freneau (1752–1832)

In Freneau we have an example of the fact that the literary world is not divided by national barriers, for he is unmistakably a part of that important movement known as Romanticism, which influenced all Europe toward the close of the eighteenth century. We shall never appreciate Freneau at his best until we see him, not as the political satirist of his age, but as a forerunner of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in whom the romantic movement in English poetry made a definite and glorious beginning.

§ Life

Freneau was a man of contrasts. As we follow his career—as student, rebel, journalist, trader, poet, privateer; now afloat on the spacious deep, now scribbling in the narrow cell of a government clerk; to-day a captain on his own deck, to-morrow a captive in a loathsome prison ship—we have occasional memories of Walter Raleigh, that restless adventurer on unknown seas, in whom the Elizabethan age is personified.

He was of French-Huguenot descent, and was born in New York in 1752. His father was a wine merchant, like the father of Chaucer, and growing prosperous the family removed to a farm near Monmouth (now Freehold) in New Jersey. Here his boyhood was spent; hither he returned to rest after toil, and here he perished in a storm, three quarters of a century later.

When Freneau entered Princeton College, in 1768, he was already writing verses in imitation of Milton; but the turmoil of the age speedily drove him from poetry to politics. Among his classmates at old Nassau were Madison, who became President of the United States; Aaron Burr, that strange genius who did many extraordinary things besides shooting Hamilton; and Hugh Brackenridge, the dramatic poet. In the revolutionary aims of these enthusiasts we note a curious parallel to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, who planned their famous "Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna," which should change the natures of men and establish a new order of society. We note also the resemblance to Jefferson, who had just completed his college course, and who became closely associated with Burr and Freneau in the public service.

After graduation Freneau taught school, studied law, and incidentally lashed the British and Tories in his satiric verse. Next we find him in the West Indies, writing poems like "The Beauties of Santa Cruz," and giving little heed to the Revolution for which he had clamored. When he returned, in 1778, he was amazed at the havoc wrought here by the war. It was a sad, almost a hopeless time; but Freneau poured out a flood of confident satires, jeering at English generals, cheering on the fainting Patriots, and exulting over the coming treaty with France. After an unsuccessful venture with the United States Magazine , he seems to have fitted out a privateer; but the vessel was captured and Freneau was thrown into a horrible prison ship, from which he escaped, after a few months, reduced almost to a skeleton. Those who would see the vinegar of his early satire change to vitriol may find it in "The British Prison Ship," written after his escape, while his anger was hot within him.

Into the details of his later career we shall not attempt to enter. We note only that he was always a radical, attacking Hamilton and the Federalists as savagely as ever he assailed the Tories, and that his satires and newspaper articles form a red-peppery sauce to our history till after the War of 1812. Then all bitterness left him, and he rejoiced in a united democracy. Several editions of his poems appeared during his lifetime, two of which were published from his own press. As we read them now, our chief feeling is one of regret that such a man should have wasted his talents. He was capable of real poetry, and his quiet verses, scattered among rough satires, are like violets in a stony field.

§ Works of Freneau

The important works of Freneau fall naturally into two classes,—political satires and occasional poems of nature and humanity. The spirit of the former may be judged from four lines of one of his earliest efforts:

Here we feel not simply the rancor of a Patriot against Hessians and Tories, but the added hate of one whose ancestors had waged war for a hundred years against England. Nor was the bitterness all on one side. Opposed to Freneau were the clever Tory satirists, chief of whom was Jonathan Odell, who loved the cause that Freneau hated, and who flayed the Whigs on every occasion. "The Prison Ship," "The Midnight Consultation," describing an imaginary meeting of British generals after Bunker Hill, "America Independent," with its hatred of kings and Tories,—these three will give a good idea of Freneau's satiric power. We may appreciate them better if we remember that satire was a legitimate and powerful weapon in the struggle that made us a nation; and that Freneau used satire simply because it was the form of poetry that most strongly appealed to his readers:

It is a relief to turn from this bitter war of Whig and Tory to the poems of nature and humanity, which are as dear to us as to those who first read them. Such are "The Indian Burying Ground," suggesting that the savage has lost his fearsome aspect of earlier days and become a subject for romantic poetry; and "The Wild Honeysuckle," with its Wordsworthian appreciation of flowers and common things:

Other significant works are "Fancy and Retirement," "House of Night," "Beauties of Santa Cruz," "Eutaw Springs," "Ruins of a Country Inn," "Indian Student," "Death's Epitaph," "The Parting Glass" and "To a Honey Bee,"—none of them great poems, but all good, and remarkably original when we consider the fact that on both sides of the Atlantic many poets were still imitating Pope's heroic couplets.

§ Beginning Of Romantic Poetry

Freneau's satire is part of the general eighteenth-century classicism, which prevailed in England as well as America. His occasional poems are remarkable for this, that they indicate an independent beginning of romantic poetry here, at the same time that we began our national existence. Just as Brockden Brown made an original beginning in American fiction, so Freneau broke away from English satirists to speak in his own way to the hearts of his countrymen. And here he is closer than we have imagined to the greatest of all song writers. Thus, in 1786 Burns published his first volume, that famous Kilmarnock edition, which marks an epoch in the history of English poetry. In the same year Freneau published his Poems , and many of the latter are inspired by the same spirit that so deeply moved the Scottish plowman. Indeed, if we had found "Fair Flower that dost so comely grow" beside that other "Wee modest crimson tippet flower," we might easily assume that the same poet had written both; or that these lines from Freneau's "To a Honey Bee" had been taken from one of Burns's drinking songs:

Again, the year 1798 is famous because Wordsworth and Coleridge then produced an inspiring volume, Lyrical Ballads , which marks the dawn of the romantic day in English poetry. But long before that time Freneau had published "The House of Night" (1779), which is strikingly suggestive of Coleridge. And here is another suggestion:

We can hardly get rid of the impression that these lines were taken from Wordsworth; yet they were written by the boy Freneau, about the time that Wordsworth was born, in 1770. That the Lyrical Ballads were reprinted here, in 1802, and were much better appreciated than in England, may possibly be due to the fact that Freneau had prepared the way for romantic poetry. Moreover, he had influence abroad, as is shown by the fact that Campbell and Scott both "cribbed" his lines; which is an honor they never accorded to the Lyrical Ballads . We would not imply that Freneau is the equal of Burns or Coleridge or Wordsworth; we simply note the remarkable fact that the romantic movement, the most important since the age of Elizabeth, had an independent origin in this country. The spirit of the new movement is reflected in a poem of Freneau's boyhood:

If one has read L'Allegro , there is no mistaking the inspiration here. It is imitative, to be sure; but in an age of imitation Freneau, like Godfrey, was remarkable for this,—that he followed an ideal instead of a fashion. The delicate fancy of this little poem, its melody, its appeal to the imagination, its conscious following of Milton rather than of Pope,—all this suggests that the romantic movement in poetry began here, as in England, by a deliberate return to the old masters. And Freneau, the man who led the movement that gave us Bryant and Poe, Longfellow and Lanier, is worthy of more appreciation than our historians have thus far given him.

§ Miscellaneous Verse

With the crude songs and ballads inspired by the war, the attempt of the Hartford Wits to establish a national literature, the political satires of Patriots or Loyalists, and the romantic verse of Freneau, we have outlined the main forms of poetry during the Revolutionary period. In addition, one finds considerable "vagrom" verse, of small intrinsic value, but indicating that the Colonial era with its isolation and intensity was passing away, and that a new spirit of song was manifest, "like the first chirping of birds after a storm." The nearest approach to a definite literary type is found in the "society verse" of James McCloud and St. George Tucker, two graduates of William and Mary College, whose verses show the influence of the English Cavalier poets. In this significant group we include Francis Hopkinson, of Philadelphia, a stanch old Whig, who could unbend from his severity to write the rollicking "Battle of the Kegs," or dash off Cavalier lyrics like "My Love is Gone to Sea," and the jaunty love song beginning,

Very different these from the slashing satires of Trumbull, and from the ponderous epics of Dwight and Barlow! They suggest that all types of English poetry had taken root, like wind-blown seeds, on this side of the Atlantic; and that in any study of early American life or literature we must consider the gayety of the Cavalier as well as the seriousness of the Puritan.

Dramas also were written in this period by John Burk, Royall Tyler and William Dunlap; but, though they were once played to crowded houses, they are now forgotten. Much more interesting are the dramatic poems of Hugh Brackenridge, The Battle of Bunker's Hill (1776) and The Death of Gen. Montgomery (1777). In style both poems show the influence of Shakespeare; but in matter they are wholly American, and reflect a magnificent national patriotism. The dramatic satires of Mrs. Mercy Warren and the huge chronicle play, The Fall of British Tyranny (1776), are also significant, as a reflection of the dawning national consciousness.

Prominent among the minor versifiers who enjoyed a day's favor was Phillis Wheatley, the negro slave girl. In 1761 she stood, a trembling girl without name or speech, in the open slave market of Boston. Twelve years later she published, in London, a book with the following title: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston, in New England, 1773 . The book created a mild sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, and no wonder! Even the inspired Psalmist once cried out, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" This stranger among us was violently taken from her savage mother in Africa. She remembered the horror in that mother's face as her child was snatched away. She could recall the wild, free life of the tribe,—chant of victory or wail of defeat, leaping flames, gloom of forest, cries of wild beasts, singing of birds, glory of sunrise, the stately march of the wild elephants over the silent places. Here was material such as no other singer in all the civilized world could command, and she had the instinct of a poet. We open her book eagerly, and we meet "On the death of an Infant":

This is not what we expected. We skip the rest, and turn the leaves. Here is something promising, "To Imagination":

It is vain to seek further, for the end is disappointment. Here is no Zulu, but drawing-room English; not the wild, barbaric strain of march and camp and singing fire that stirs a man's instincts, but pious platitudes, colorless imitations of Pope, and some murmurs of a terrible theology, harmless now as the rumbling of an extinct volcano. It is too bad. This poor child has been made over into a wax puppet; she sings like a canary in a cage, a bird that forgets its native melody and imitates only what it hears. We have called attention to her simply because she is typical of scores of minor poets of the Revolutionary period who, with a glorious opportunity before them, neglected the poetry and heroism of daily life in order to follow a literary fashion.