The Indian Burying Ground (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Philip Freneau
- First Published: 1788
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: United States or Americans, Ghosts or apparitions, Native Americans or American Indians, Eighteenth century, Death or dying, Imagination, Visions, epiphanies, or revelations, Romanticism, Mortality, Cemeteries
The Poem
“The Indian Burying Ground” is a short lyric poem of forty lines celebrating the spirits of Native Americans haunting their sequestered graves in the North American wilderness. It is an early American example of the Romantic movement in Western literature. Although its elegiac subject matter harks back to the eighteenth century British school of “graveyard” poetry, Philip Freneau adds a Romantic twist to the sepulchral theme of human mortality. This writer displays a Gothic fascination with supernatural phenomena and moonlit scenes of fancy, a primitivistic...
[The entire page is 1185 words long]
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