7. So long as Puritan ideals, however modified and softened, continued to dominate any considerable part of American education, that is, up to a point somewhere within the past twenty-five years, our poetry has tended to be obviously didactic. Not only clerical but secular poets have seemed to regard themselves as direct teachers of morality. In satirical writers,—Freneau, Halleck,—or in literature that by virtue of its kind is pietistic, such a tendency is altogether normal and effective. But in supposedly imaginative poems such as “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” though the basic moral order of the universe doubtless ought to be inherent, it just as certainly ought to contrive its own effect, without the adventitious aid of sermonising. To the present writer, much of the best—not of course the very best—in American poetry loses in ethical as well as æsthetic value through the intrusion of argument and exhortation on the subject of conduct or belief. The finest work of Holmes, for instance, “The Chambered Nautilus,” may be thought to lose in this way. The spirit of the United States is a prosaic spirit, hence our verse, when it is at all substantial, rarely lacks some element or other from the style of the forensic orator.
8. On the other hand, since we can make no pretence to the possession of a tragic drama, and none to a truly national epic, it may safely be affirmed that our poetry has risen to its greatest heights in meditative and religious lyric; in meditative verse on nature, that is, such “nature-poetry” as assumes the Divine immanence throughout the world of objective reality—in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”; and in the religious lyric, that is, in a few of our hymns.
The Earlier Poets.—We commence this survey of American poetry at the date to which the sections adapted from Tyler have conducted the literature as a whole, namely, the year 1784. The chief poets of the Revolutionary period, Barlow, Dwight, Trumbull, and Freneau, all lived well on into the next century, Barlow, in fact, being the only one of these who did not survive the War of 1812.
In Barlow’s day, heroics were the fashion. His magnum opus, a rhymed epic on the discovery of America, had already taken shape in manuscript as early as 1781; in 1787 it appeared as “The Vision of Columbus”; by 1807 it had grown into the ponderous “Columbiad.” It is an uninspired, pseudo-classical narrative, schematically and metrically correct, but organically lifeless, full of the “printer’s devil personification” so characteristic of its time. With gratuitous industry, as it supplies all the lineage of personified abstractions like “Discord,” so it begins the history of America at Creation, fetches the story down through colonial times to the Revolution, and includes in its sweep a glance at events yet to come. Similarly in his mock-heroic, “The Hasty Pudding” (1793), which is touched with fancy and is in every way more attractive than his “Columbiad,” Barlow commences with the growth and harvesting of the maize which is to furnish the flour.
Dwight, who was at first a tutor, but from 1795 until his death, in 1817, president, of Yale College, in 1785 brought forth a Biblical epic entitled “The Conquest of Canaan,” in which the narrative of Exodus is diversified by allusions to heroes in the American War of Independence, and by a tale of romantic love superadded. Dwight was a diligent reader of Pope and Goldsmith, but he did not confine his interest to the eighteenth century; he knew the enchantment of the poets’ poet, Spenser; and like Thomson he could at times, as in “Greenfield Hill,” look with his own eyes at things about him. He was a friend of Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow; on occasion he penned a bitter invective. But as a writer he will be remembered for his noble hymn, whose second stanza commences,
I love Thy Church, O God,
which is the key-note of his life.
Trumbull, though he lived to a great age (1750–1831), had completed his remarkable mock-heroic, “M’Fingal,” prior to 1784; hence at this point he interests us chiefly on account of his friendship with Dwight and Barlow, and his effect on later satirists.
With Freneau the case is different. Some of his choicest verse did not appear until 1786, when he published a collection containing “The House of Night”; and in 1795 he brought together in another collection what he apparently considered best in his output for twenty-five years or more preceding. This was very uneven, including much that might better have been left unprinted, and other work which stamps Freneau as the one American of true poetical genius before 1800. He was not unaware of his powers, and aimed to develop them by frequent perusal of good models in ancient and modern literature; but he was not sufficiently self-critical. He prolonged a career of travel and rapid composition, in both poetry and prose, beyond the normal span of life, making still another collection of his works in 1815. His latter years were darkened by the thought that he was being unwarrantably neglected for men of lesser talent. A man of great bodily vigour, he was meditating yet another, a final, edition of his writings, when he came to his unfortunate end. In 1832 he lost his way as he was returning home through a snow-storm, and died from exposure. His once maligned personality has of late been duly vindicated, and his work has received generous praise. It is claimed that Scott and Campbell were content to borrow lines from him. Furthermore, he has been deemed a co-worker with Coleridge and Wordsworth in bringing about in literature the so-called “return to nature.” The parallel might easily be carried too far. Until literary scholarship has broadened and deepened its knowledge of the entire period in which Freneau was active, neither the worth of his poetry nor the possible extent of his influence can be judicially determined. There can be no question that such poems as “The Wild Honeysuckle,” “The Hurricane,” “The Dying Indian,” and “Eutaw Springs” have more than a transitory value. However, it is by his satirical verse that Freneau might seem more likely to persist; for the nature of satire tolerates in some measure a free and easy style such as he developed.
Early Minor Poets.—Of the minor poetry prior to 1815 there is little to be said by way of praise. We see in it how the influence of Akenside and other English didactic writers of a previous age gives ground before the newer spirit of Wordsworth and Coleridge; although the satires of the Revolution had a lineage, in Paine and others, that did not quickly die away; and although several other literary fashions had their intervals of existence, as, for example, the imitation of “Ossian” and the cult of the Della Cruscans. The intellect of Akenside made itself felt in such work as “The Power of Solitude” (1804), by Joseph Story (1779–1845), and the anonymous “Pains of Memory,” published four years later. “Of much higher merit,” thinks Professor Bronson, “are the didactic poems of Robert Treat Paine (1773–1811), a man of versatile and brilliant parts, but dissipated character. His lyrics, orations, and dramatic criticisms all show ability. But his best work is ‘The Ruling Passion,’ a poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in 1797.” This is “frankly on the model of Pope, but so witty, vigorous, and pointed that it does honour to its original.” William Cliffton’s “Poems” (1800), and Thomas G. Fessenden’s “Original Poems” (1804), can only be mentioned.