American Poetry - Poetry in The Colonies

Poetry in The Colonies

As England's contact with the Americas increased after the 1490s, explorers sometimes included verse with their descriptions of the "New World" up through 1650, the year of Anne Bradstreet's "The Tenth Muse," which was written in America, most likely in Ipswich, Massachusetts or North Andover, Massachusetts) and printed/distributed in London, England by her brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge. There are 14 such writers whom we might on that basis call American poets (they had actually been to America and to different degrees, wrote poems or verses about the place). Early examples include a 1616 "testimonial poem" on the sterling warlike character of Captain John Smith (in Barbour, ed. "Works") and Rev. William Morrell's 1625 "Nova Anglia" or "New England," which is a rhymed catalog of everything from American weather to glimpses of Native women, framed with a thin poetic "conceit" or "fiction" characterizing the country as a "sad and forlorn" female pining for English domination. Then in May 1627 Thomas Morton of Merrymount – an English West Country outdoorsman, attorney at law, man of letters and colonial adventurer – raised a Maypole to celebrate and foster more success at this fur-trading plantation and nailed up a "Poem" and "Song" (one a densely-literary manifesto on how English and Native people came together there and must keep doing so for a successful America; the other a light "drinking song" also full of deeper American implications). These were published in book form along with other examples of Morton's American poetry in "New English Canaan" (1637); and based on the criteria of "First," "American" and Poetry," they make Morton (and not Anne Bradstreet) America's first poet in English. (See Jack Dempsey, ed., "New English Canaan by Thomas Morton of 'Merrymount'" and his biography "Thomas Morton: The Life & Renaissance of an Early American Poet" Scituate MA: Digital Scanning 2000).

One of the first recorded poets of the British colonies was Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672), who remains one of the earliest known women poets who wrote in English. The poems she published during her lifetime address religious and political themes. She also wrote tender evocations of home, family life and of her love for her husband, many of which remained unpublished until the 20th century.

Edward Taylor (1645–1729) wrote poems expounding Puritan virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical style that can be seen as typical of the early colonial period.

This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was, understandably, the dominant note of most of the poetry written in the colonies during the 17th and early 18th centuries. The earliest "secular" poetry published in New England was by Samuel Danforth in his "almanacks" for 1647–1649, published at Cambridge; these included "puzzle poems" as well as poems on caterpillars, pigeons, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Of course, being a Puritan minister as well as a poet, Danforth never ventured far from a spiritual message.

Another distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose book "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," was published in 1773. She was one of the best-known poets of her day, at least in the colonies, and her poems were typical of New England culture at the time, meditating on religious and classical ideas.

The 18th century saw an increasing emphasis on America itself as fit subject matter for its poets. This trend is most evident in the works of Philip Freneau (1752–1832), who is also notable for the unusually sympathetic attitude to Native Americans shown in his writings, sometimes reflective of a skepticism toward Anglo-American culture and civilization. However, as might be expected from what was essentially provincial writing, this late colonial poetry is generally somewhat old-fashioned in form and syntax, deploying the means and methods of Pope and Gray in the era of Blake and Burns. The work of Rebecca Hammond Lard (1772–1855), although quite old, still apply to life in today's world. She writes about nature, not only the nature of environment, but also the nature of humans.

On the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place. As the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative, to say the least. This can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English-language poetic developments in London.