Samuel Marion Tucker

“ Boston’s craving for a native poet, the bad taste of the time, and the poet’s own wayward life combined to give Paine a reputation surpassing that of any of his contemporaries. At Harvard he was known by his occasional poems, and his patriotic song Adams and Liberty made him a celebrity. Though he practised law, he gave most of his time to the theatre and to poetry. Soon his reputation was such that he could command five dollars a line for his verse, a price never before approached in America and perhaps never since equalled. ”

“ The fearfull bird his little house now builds In trees and walls, in Cities and in fields. The outside strong, the inside warm and neat, A natural Artificer compleat. The verse of all her longer poems is precisely that of Sylvester—a couplet, not quite loose, but less compact than the heroic couplet, with the characteristic Elizabethan freedom in rhyme and with the shifting caesura. It is not, however, in these long, dreary, and purely didactic poems that Anne Bradstreet shows her real capacity. ”

“ That her poems were read and admired is attested by such poetic tributes as that of Nathaniel Ward, who affirms that she was “a right Du Bartas girle,” and represents Apollo as unable to decide whether Du Bartas or the New England Muse was the more excellent poet. But Anne Bradstreet was not a poet; she was a winsome personality in an unlovely age. That she should have written verse at all was phenomenal, but that it should have been poor verse was inevitable. ”

“ The longer American patriotic poems of the later eighteenth century may take the form of narratives of battle, of personal eulogies, or, perhaps most characteristically, of philosophic statements of what today is called “Americanism.” They increase in number toward the close of the century, when the air was full of American principles and ideals, and finally, in spite of their imitative style, they become in spirit at least a distinctive product without exact parallel in England. ”

“ In these and a few other of Paine’s poems one finds rhetorical passages of some merit amid a waste of bombast and affectation but looks in vain for any imagination or real feeling. The diction embodies all the vices against which the new poetry rebelled. Della Crusca plus Pope would have crushed a more genuine talent than Paine’s. His reputation is a curious evidence of the pathetic craving for a national poet and of the determination to force the birth of a genius. ”

“ Her Contemplations is a meditative and descriptive poem in thirty-three seven-line stanzas, in which occur passages at least pleasing in suggestion and rhythm, however reminiscent of greater times and talents:
When I behold the heavens as in their prime, And then the earth (though old) stil clad in green, The stones and trees, insensible to time, Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen; If winter come, and greeness then do fade, A Spring returns, and they more youthfull made; But Man grows old, lies down, remains where once he’s laid. ”

“ The most characteristic poetic products of early New England are the memorial poems. Subsequent generations have made merry over their matter and style, and indeed little can be said in their favour if they are to be taken as an index to the poetic taste of the time and not simply as conventional tributes to the dead. If, however, the New England elegy is to be judged on its literary merits, we should remember that it was not an isolated type, unique in the poverty of its matter and style, but that it simply reflected its English origin was closely related to its English counterparts. ”

“ The poems in English are in the form of irregular odes or heroic couplets stilted and commonplace in subject and style. The modern reader may find amusement in such loyal lines as
Bourbons to humble Brunswicks were ordained: Those mankind’s rights destroyed, but these regained. But the patriotic poem was soon to transfer its allegiance. A truly remarkable quantity of narrative verse tells the story of the Revolution and celebrates its civil and military leaders. Almost everyone who wrote verse in America after the Revolution produced an ode or an epic to vindicate his patriotism. ”

“ The hundreds of patriotic ballads, songs, and odes that appeared after the Revolution, though more ambitious and “literary,” seem less spontaneous and sincere than the earlier verse, which called a nation to arms; and for all their flaunting of the stars and stripes, they leave the reader cold. Scarcely a poet who wrote between 1780 and 1807 failed to compose at least one such poem; but, it is safe to say, the only patriotic ballads of permanent merit written between 1725 and 1807 are the sea poems of Freneau. ”

“ Yet, though the New England of the seventeenth century left us many thousands of lines of verse of various kinds, as against the less than one thousand lines left by all the colonies to the south of that region, it was Virginia that produced what is perhaps the one real American poem of the seventeenth century. This is the epitaph on the insurrectionary leader Nathaniel Bacon, written “by his Man.” The “Man” clearly was no menial but a reader and a poet. ”

“ Mather Byles is a more eminent figure in the annals of American poetry than is at all warranted by his poems, which are few and altogether imitative. His reputation is due in part to the general poverty of the transition period—the barest era in our verse—and in part to his fame as a preacher and a wit. He was born in 1707, was educated at Harvard, and served as pastor of the Hollis Street church in Boston through the greater part of his ministerial life. After the Declaration, he became a staunch and vehement Tory, lost his former popularity, and died embittered and broken in 1788. ”

“ The two most vigorous and prolific tory satirists were Joseph Stansbury (1750–1809) , a merchant of Philadelphia, and the Rev. Jonathan Odell (1737–1818) , of New Jersey. Their satires and satirical songs, odes, and ballades are generally alike both in matter and style, but Stansbury is the better poet, and has to his credit several satirical lyrics, quite as good as any of their time on either side of the water. He turrns off an ode to the king, a comic ballad recounting an American reverse, or a loyal song, all with equal facility and with little of the invective characteristic of Odell. ”

“ On these bleak climes by fortune thrown, Where rigid reason reigns alone, Where lovely fancy has no sway, Nor magic forms about us play— Nor nature takes her summer hue, Tell me, what has the muse to do? ”

“ John Hayes, professor at Dickinson College, in the 2500 lines of blank verse of his Rural Poems (1807) celebrates American birds and flowers in spite of his imitation of Milton and Thomson. Still more interesting in this respect is The Foresters (1804) of the ornithologist Alexander Wilson, a poem in 2200 lines of heroic couplets which tell the story of a journey through New York and Pennsylvania to Niagara Falls. Wilson is a scientist rather than a poet, but he sees nature sympathetically and gives what he sees in a simple and direct style. ”

“ War ends in peace, and morning light Mounts upon Midnight’s wing. In his Vanity of Vanities, which was appended to the third edition of The Day of Doom in 1673, certain rather polished heroic quatrains suggest Davenant or Dryden as possible models. But, as Wigglesworth’s library contained not one volume of English poetry, the poet must have found his model outside of his library;it is beyond belief that either he or any other New England versifier of his period could have originated or even improved any form of verse. ”

“ To Columbus, as he lies sick and in prison, there appears Hesper, the genius of the western world, and, with the purpose of setting forth all that Columbus and America have contributed to the welfare of the world, reviews the state of Europe in the middle ages, the voyages of discovery, conquests, and colonisation, and the war of the Revolution, with references to contemporary persons and events. ”

“ Their more ambitious and laboured poems, including almost all those by Dwight, Barlow, and Humphreys, are to the modern reader the least successful. Their best work, which they themselves and the public took less seriously, is in the form of satire, and was mainly written, singly or in collaboration, by Trumbull, Theodore Dwight, Alsop, and Hopkins. Yet the work of the “Hartford Wits” in fostering poetry in a period of political and social struggle and change deserves grateful recognition from the student of American literature. ”

“ The inflated journalistic style of the last decade of the century suggested the one really clever and original literary satire of its time in America. The Echo was begun in 1791, was published serially, and appeared complete as a volume of three hundred pages in 1807. Its authors, who seem to have been Richard Alsop and Timothy Dwight, select some particularly bombastic passage from a current newspaper and travesty its style in heroic couplets, with a result that has not yet quite lost its flavour. ”

“ Ten years later a second imitation of Pomfret followed in The Choice by Dr. Benjamin Church of Boston, who longs for a home in the country, the right kind of wife, congenial friends, and leisure to read his favourite poets—Milton, Dryden, Gay, “awful Pope, unequalled bard,” and “nature-limning Thomson.” Though dwelling in a small American town, he sighs for solitude as longingly as he might have done in the midst of a world capital. Livingston and Church are half a century late in their sporadic imitations ”

“ The feeble New England imitation cannot compare with the original. Du Bartas, though often flat and prosaic, is immense in his range, and is at times even a poet; Anne Bradstreet’s range is narrow; her allusions are merely to the best known historical and mythological characters; her descriptions of natural phenomena, though she might be expected to find original inspiration in her New England environment, are vague and conventional. In occasional lines of Sylvester’s translation occurs something of Elizabethan spaciousness ”

“ Yet Freneau surpassed all his contemporaries not only in quality but also in sheer quantity and in variety of subject and form. Furthermore, his work presents an almost unique combination of satiric power, romantic imagination, and feeling for nature. At one extreme is the bitter invective of his satires; at the other, the delicate fancy of his best lyrics. His early poems show the influence of Milton, as in The Power of Fancy; of Gray, as in The Monument of Phaon and The Deserted Farm House; and of Goldsmith, as in The American Village—all of which contain lines of original power and beauty ”

“ An Entertainment for a Winter’s Evening is perhaps the earliest piece of Hudibrastic verse written in America. We have travelled far from Puritan New England when a Bostonian can find amusement in the godless spectacle of a drunken parson and his tipsy companions, and can edify his fellow townsmen with a burlesque account of their nocturnal adventures.
Associated with Byles and Green in Poems by Several Hands was the Rev.John Adams, a young clergyman of Boston who died in 1740 at the age of thirty-five. Five years after his death his friends published his Poems on Several Occasions ”

“ Urian Oakes, president of Harvard, is discovered amid this dreary elegiac waste, its merits are sure to be exaggerated. This poem in fifty six-line stanzas, though commonplace in though and style, is not without pathos, and gives an impression of sincerity. But the Rev. Urian Oakes himself was not so fortunate in his elegist, no less a person than the Rev. Cotton Mather, the most prolific elegist of his time. His elegy on Oakes reaches a length of over four hundred lines. To adorn his subject he “ransacks the ages, spoils the climes” ”

“ His Works in Prose and Verse, an octavo volume of over five hundred pages, was published one year after his death, with all the reverence due to a classic.
“The American Sappho” was not the only woman singer of Boston. Mrs.Susanna Rowson, [7] besides her plays and novels, wrote poems which unite “sensibility” and didacticism. Her odes, hymns, elegies, nature lyrics, and songs show little observation of life or nature, and scarcely any distinctive American quality. Of all these, the patriotic lyric America, Commerce, and Freedom, which is commonplace but not without spirit, alone has survived. ”

“ Richard Alsop’s Charms of Fancy in all its 2300 lines of heroic couplets contains not a fresh image or an original idea; but The Powers of Genius by John Blair Linn is at least the work of a man of taste and scholarship and compares favourably with all but the very best of its British counterparts. The extreme of dulness and futility is reached in the many poems on philosophy and religion for which Pope and Young were largely responsible. ”