A word may be added on the poetesses of the time, several of whom, for example Mrs. Mercy Warren (1728–1814), having made themselves heard during the American struggle for liberty, continued to find an audience in the early years of the Republic. Mrs. Warren’s poems were collected in 1790, Mrs. Susanna H. Rowson’s in 1804. The sentimental Mrs. Sarah W. Morton may also be noted; she flourished somewhat later than the others (1759–1846). She is no longer interesting as the “American Sappho,” nor is it generally recalled that she considered Paine to be the American “Menander.” She was an exponent of the inane “Della Cruscan” style, which had its vogue in England until it was attacked by William Gifford, and in the United States until Gifford’s “Baviad” and “Mæviad” were republished at Philadelphia (1799), seconded by a poetical epistle to their author from the pen of the young Quaker Cliffton.
Not less pernicious than the Della Cruscans were the imitators of MacPherson’s “Ossian,” including Joseph B. Ladd (1764–1786), Jonathan M. Sewall (1746–1808), and John Blair Linn (1777–1804). Both schools gave place when the Wordsworthian reaction set in against “poetic diction” and the habit of writing verse about natural objects without having looked at them.
When party spirit runs high, satire is likely to be thriving. Political tension during the latter part of Washington’s presidency and during the administrations of Adams and Jefferson gave birth to a brood of satiric poems, many of them unacknowledged by their authors. Anonymous or otherwise, in most of them the writer’s pen was wielded as a bludgeon rather than a knife. Freneau himself was none too delicate in his censure of the government, although he ill deserved the reputation of a man lacking in love for his country; but Freneau was merely the most gifted among a number, more partisan than he, who, according as they were Federalists or Democrats, bitterly assailed the measures of the opposing faction. The “Democratiad” and the “Guillotina” were anonymous attacks in 1795 and 1796 upon the Democrats. William Cobbett, the Englishman, and Alexander Hamilton, whose private life offered an easy target, were pilloried as representatives of the Federalist party, in Carey’s “Porcupiniad” (1799) and a collection entitled “Olio” (1801).
Nor was factional spleen unrelated to a variety of patriotic sentiment which displayed itself in verse for holidays and state occasions; but, like all the satires, most of the post-Revolutionary effusions of patriotism have long since ceased to excite emotion. As has been noted, Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia” (1798) is one of the exceptions. Colonel David Humphreys (1753–1818), a large part of whose verse amounted to eulogies on Washington, to the general public is hardly so much as a memory; and his intention “to make use of poetry for strengthening patriotism, promoting virtue, and extending happiness” has gone the way of many similar purposes of great excellence unaided by genius.
Washington Allston.—The first poet of distinction who evidently represents the tradition of Wordsworth was the artist Washington Allston (1779–1843), a friend of Coleridge, and declared by him to have a genius for literature and painting “unsurpassed by any man of his age.” Southey too was an enthusiastic admirer; and Wordsworth, who was chary of praise for the age in which he lived, commended the American painter ungrudgingly. In Allston’s “Sylphs of the Seasons” (1813) there is evidence of the exact eye of an artist, and there is much delicacy of sentiment and gentle play of fancy; but great constructive and imaginative vigour are not present, and a certain tameness in the rhymes and obviousness in the succession of thoughts serve to explain why the poem has not secured a more lasting recognition. His “America and Great Britain” was included by Coleridge in “Sibylline Leaves” (1817), “for its moral no less than its patriotic spirit.” As an attempt to incorporate in language the conception of abstract, so to speak, intellectual, beauty, “The Angel and the Nightingale” reminds one of Shelley.
Before Allston, there had been ballad-writers who dealt with themes that are now familiar to readers of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In particular, the motive of the young and innocent girl who has been betrayed, and through her betrayal crazed, was a notable favourite. Lucius M. Sargent’s “Hubert and Ellen” (1812) is described as a poor imitation of Wordsworth, taking its cue, like Joseph Hutton’s ballad on Crazy Jane (“Leisure Hours,” 1812) and Henry C. Knight’s “Poor Margaret Dwy,” from one study or another of mental derangement in “Lyrical Ballads” or the “Poems” (by Wordsworth) of 1807. Doubtless a large number of parallels could be found in American literature to Wordsworth’s “Ruth,” and to his sympathetic treatment of other lowly types of humanity. In like manner, just as the same English poet fraternises with the robin and the butterfly, and Coleridge hails a young ass as his “brother,” and as Shelley in 1815 claims kindred with “bright bird, insect, or gentle beast,” so Knight addresses “The Caterpillar” (1821) as “cousin reptile.” The Puritans had averred, Most sins, and all sinners, are equal; Rousseau and the French Revolutionists went further, declaring, All men are equal; and now, responsive to the doctrine of Coleridge and his Pantisocrats, American poets were implying, All creatures are equal. Thus thrives the principle of democracy and fraternity. Themistocles is at length no better than the boorish islander, and the Apostles have lost their superiority to sparrows. “Cousin reptile,” of course, is an extreme case.
On its saner side, the new impulse set in motion several writers of not a little promise. Such was John Neal (1793–1876), whose poem “The Battle of Niagara” (1818) reflects Wordsworthianism at second hand through Shelley and Keats, with a touch of Byronic grandiloquence and tameness, but with a touch, too, of aboriginal nature, however crude. The native powers of Neal were later dissipated in journalism, novel-writing, and the like.
Joseph Rodman Drake.—Of great promise likewise, but cut short by a premature demise, was the career of Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820). Drake was a precocious spirit, working swiftly, and valuing his easily produced and quickly moving verses perhaps a little below their true worth. A friend of Halleck, and like Halleck under the sway of the novelist Fenimore Cooper, he reveals also how familiar he was with the half-luminous, half-misty style of Coleridge. In Drake’s happiest attempt, “The Culprit Fay” (1816), he aimed to find an utterance for the poetry of the great American rivers, hitherto neglected, as he and his friends decided, in the native literature. The outcome of a discussion between Drake, Freneau, and Cooper, this fanciful story is nevertheless replete with the cadences of Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816), however difficult it may be to explain the resemblance. Needless to say, “The Culprit Fay” could not make a general appeal like that of “The American Flag,” by the same author—a rhetorical and manneristic piece that, up to a few years ago, was on the lips of every American school-boy:
When Freedom from her mountain height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night,
And set the stars of glory there.
Set them where? In spite of the fact that it is grandiose and unprecise, “The American Flag” may yet be yielded an advantage in point of style over Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” with which one naturally compares it.