Chapter 5 - The Emergence of a Southern Tradition

Summary

People from a range of social positions wrote poetry in colonial Georgia, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Poets wrote about social relations between the sexes, but they also wrote about the trials and tribulations of forming social bonds between men and the manners appropriate to forming productive social bonds within a community. Ballads, one of the most popular poetic forms in early seventeenth-century England, served the purposes of colonial propagandists particularly well. The periodicals' inclusion of poetry by colonial authors marks the beginning of a poetic tradition in which the colonists themselves composed at least part, if not always all, of the imagined audience. Much of the poetry published in the major periodicals of the region deals with the relations between the sexes: many poems concern courtship or take-up the problems faced by lovers, spurned and otherwise.