Poetry of the revolution

The Revolutionary period was not without its poets. From the beginning of the conflict, in 1775, to the end, there was a copious flow of verse which sprang naturally enough from the turbulence of popular excitement and emotion. Here and there among the crude productions of these unschooled rhymers, one comes upon compositions which show an unexpected strength of feeling expressed with considerable literary art. This is especially true of the political satires and the ballads which are conspicuous in Revolutionary literature.

Jonathan Odell, 1737-1818.

Foremost among the tory versifiers -- for both parties in the contest had their literary champions in metre as in prose -- was Jonathan Odell, who invoked the muse thus: --

"Grant me for a time

Some deleterious powers of acrid rhyme,

Some ars'nic verse, to poison with the pen

These rats who nestle in the lion's den."

Odell came of pioneer Puritan stock and was himself a native of New Jersey. he was a graduate of Princeton, and became a surgeon in the British army. He later went to England, where he took orders for the Church.

Returning to New Jersey, he became rector of the parish in Burlington. With the outbreak of hostilities, and the development of violence against all suspected of royalist sympathies, the clergyman was forced to take flight; and as a refugee, he remained in New York until the evacuation of the British troops.

Odell's literary talent was soon engaged in the composition of satiric poems; modeled on the satires of Dryden and Pope, they show considerable merit. Odell wrote with a trenchant pen. There is no humor in his satire -- it is wit, caustic, biting; the tone of his verse is the tone of bitter, implacable invective. Four satires, all written in 1779, furnish the best examples of his verse: The Word of Congress, The Congratulation, The Feu de Joie, and The American Times. The following lines from the last of his satires are sufficient to exhibit his skill in satire and in verse:--

"What cannot ceaseless impudence produce?

Old Franklin knows its value and its use:

He caught at Paine, relieved his wretched plight,

And gave him notes, and set him down to write.

Fire from the Doctor's hints the miscreant took,

Discarded truth, and soon produced a book, --

A pamphlet which, without the least pretence

To reason, bore the name of Common Sense.

...............

The work like wildfire, through the country ran,

And Folly bowed the knee to Franklin's plan.

Sense, reason, judgment were abashed and fled,

And Congress reigned triumphant in their stead."[6]

Persistent in his attitude, irreconcilable and belligerent still, Jonathan Odell forsook the colonies at the close of the contest and migrated to Nova Scotia, where he lived to old age, unconvinced and unrelenting to the last.

The Hartford Wits.

Three Revolutionary poets of large and serious purpose, and widely famed in their generation, may be grouped together, not only because of some similarity in their verse, but also because they were all Connecticut men; two were conspicuous members of a coterie noted as "the Hartford Wits." That Connecticut town, indeed, enjoyed a reputation as a literary centre through the exploits of this group. The two Hartford poets were John Trumbull and Joel Barlow; the third of this group was Timothy Dwight.

The close of eighteen century. Transition

Coincidentally with the satires, the epics, the songs and ballads, which owed their measure of inspiration immediately to the spirit of that strenuous time, we note also the appearance of a different school of verse which meant infinitely more in the development of our literary art.

Philip Freneau, 1752-1832.

Among the satirists of the Revolutionary epoch, there was none whose pen was readier or sharper in its thrusts than Philip Freneau; and among the poems of the war itself, none holds a firmer place in our literature than Freneau's brief elegy on the valiant who died at Eutaw Springs. One line of this poem was thought worthy of adaptation by the author of Marmion. But Freneau's strongest claim for remembrance lies in a few compositions which mark the beginning of nature poetry in America.

Philip Freneau owed his foreign name to Huguenot ancestry, but he was born in New York and was graduated, in 1771, at Princeton, where he had been a classmate and room-mate with James Madison. In the early part of his career Freneau engaged in commercial ventures in the West Indies and made frequent voyages, commanding his own vessel. Once (in 1780) he was captured by the British and was for several weeks confined in an English prison ship in New York harbor. The hardships of this experience are rehearsed in a poem entitled The British Prison Ship, filled to the brim with the horror and rancor of his suffering. Many another fierce broadside did he hurl at the nation's foe, until hostilities ceased. After the war, Freneau entered journalism, but his later years were comparatively inactive. Near the close of his eightieth year, on a December night, returning to his home from a gathering with friends, he lost his way in the snow and fell by the road-side; the next morning he was found dead.

The Nature Poems.

The compositions which have done most for Freneau's fame as a poet belong to his earlier years. In these productions, we find the beginning of genuine nature poetry in America. Here we have Freneau's opening lines on The Wild Honeysuckle:--

"Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,

Hid in this silent, dull retreat,

Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,

Unseen thy little branches greet;

No roving foot shall crush thee here,

No busy hand provoke a tear."

Of a different tenor are two poems in pensive key: The Indian Student and The Indian Burying-ground. In all these compositions, we feel the spirit of a true poet who loves Nature and responds to her appeals spontaneously and without artifice. There had been a few previous attempts at this form of treatment in American verse, but they had been isolated instances and had failed of the excellence attained by Freneau. These poems are therefore the more worthy of note. The volume which contains these productions appeared in 1786 -- the same year in which the first volume of the poems of Robert Burns was published; and twelve years before the Lyrical Ballads introduced William Wordsworth as the first recognized champion of simplicity and naturalness in English verse.

The new literature

With the turn of the century, our young republic entered upon an era of expansion and development which can be described only as marvelous. The rapid progress in the settlement of the West, the influx of foreign immigration, the growth of the larger cities, extension of transportation systems by construction of canals and government roads, application of the new inventions employing the power of steam in river navigation and on railroads, -- these features of American progress during the first fifty years in our first completed century of national existence can be here but thus briefly summarized. It is unnecessary to attempt a full historical outline of that period of growth and change except to note that coincidentally with this expansive period of material prosperity and growth, our national literature entered upon what we may not inaptly term its golden age -- the age of its best essayists, novelists and poets, our real American men of letters.