4 - Poetry

Summary

Like the drama eighteenth-century poetry was a public and didactic art. The practice of publishing verse in newspapers, common throughout the formative period, bespoke both the topicality of poetic discourse and, what was closely related, its embeddedness in the life of the nation. Poetry seldom dealt with private imaginings and personal emotions. Rather, it concerned itself with the kind of widely known information that was reported in the press: warfare, politics, the deaths of eminent individuals, and other public matters. Poetry had a social identity, and it shared in communal existence as a regular feature in newspapers and magazines, at college commencements and Fourth of July celebrations, and on city streets where it was hawked in broadside.

This accent on the community was strengthened by the poetic influences Americans absorbed from the English tradition. Early poets who enjoyed special popularity in the Republic included William Shakespeare and John Milton, both of whom were interpreted by Americans as writing on public themes, Shakespeare as a foe of tyranny, Milton as a friend of religious liberty and the author of the modern era's greatest epic. The Augustan, or neoclassical, style, at its height in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, held sway in the United States throughout the early years of independence. Emerging after the pietistic extremities and startling linguistic turns of the metaphysicals, neoclassicism moved away from intense and idiosyncratic expression toward “correctness” and regularity. The poetry of Alexander Pope, James Thomson, John Dryden, and Jonathan Swift – the first in particular revered in America – addressed social and political issues with the goal of inculcating proper attitudes.