A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

Have ever been hostile to reason and wit,

Enslaving a world that shall conquer them yet.

’Tis a folly to fret at the picture I draw:

And I say what was said by a Doctor Magraw;

“If they give us their Bishops, they’ll give us their law.”

How that will agree

With such people as we,

Let us leave to the learned to reflect on awhile,

And say what they think in a handsomer stile.

As a consequence of this feeling that America should be different, the tendency grew to seek out native subject matter and to cease conscious imitation of English literary models. For the next half century American authors were contending, every now and then, that native themes should occupy their attention, and a good deal of verse and prose was written with this idea in mind. Most of it was more conscientious than interesting, for literature, to be genuinely effective, must be produced not to demonstrate a theory but to express what is honestly in the author’s mind. The first step toward achieving nationality in American writing was, therefore, to achieve new and independent habits of national thinking. The Irish mind, for example, is basically different from the English mind, and Irish literature has therefore a long and beautiful history of its own, in spite of the fact that Ireland is near to England and subject to it. But the Australian is simply a transplanted English-speaking, English-thinking mind, and Australia has consequently produced no literature of which the world is yet aware.