Discussion Topics
In what ways does Philip Freneau’s poetry reveal his admiration for British poetical achievements?
By what techniques does Freneau attempt to translate his patriotic fervor into poetry? How successful is he in this effort?
What are the objects of Freneau’s satire? What satirical techniques does he chiefly employ?
What structural devices are found in the poem “On Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man”?
Compare Freneau’s practice of adding philosophical reflection to his nature poems with the same tendency in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry.
Other literary forms
Philip Freneau (frih-NOH) is best remembered today for his poems. In his own time, however, such was hardly the case. Freneau’s contemporaries knew him best for his satirical, sometimes vituperative essays. Freneau first used his satirical skills as a prose writer in Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca (1770), which he wrote with Hugh Henry Brackenridge while the two were undergraduate classmates at Princeton (then College of New Jersey). In the introduction to the 1975 edition of the book, Michael D. Bell argues convincingly that this brief volume, more than half of which is by Freneau, is the first American novel.
After the outbreak of the American Revolution, Freneau put his satirical pen to work for American independence by contributing prose (and some poetry) to Brackenridge’s United States Magazine in 1779. During 1781 and 1782, he helped Francis Bailey publish Freeman’s Journal, a liberal and, of course, anti-British newspaper. During 1790 and 1791, he edited the Daily Advertiser in New York. Freneau’s next publishing venture is what some would consider his most famous; others would call it his most notorious. From October of 1791 until October of 1793, he edited The National Gazette in Philadelphia, which was at that time the center of the national government. In this newspaper, Freneau supported Jeffersonian politics and opposed the Federalist position of John Fenno’s United States Gazette, which operated under the financial control of Alexander Hamilton, the principal voice of Federalism.
Following Thomas Jefferson’s temporary withdrawal from politics, which concurred with loss of financial support for The National Gazette, Freneau returned to his New Jersey estate and set up a press of his own. There he published almanacs; yet another newspaper, The Jersey Chronicle; and another collection of his poetry (1795). In 1797, he and his expanding family relocated in New York, where Freneau began one more newspaper, The Time Piece and Literary Companion (March, 1797, to March, 1798). In his later years, he made contributions to such other newspapers as Charleston’s City Gazette (1788-1790, and also 1800-1801), the Philadelphia Aurora (1799-1800), the New-York Weekly Museum (1816), and Trenton’s True American (1821-1824).
Achievements
Philip Freneau’s contribution to the development of American satirical journalism is considerable. In The Political Activities of Philip Freneau (1902), Samuel E. Forman presents a scholarly discussion of Freneau’s role in the political arena of the early American republic. While serving as secretary of state, Jefferson declared that Freneau’s National Gazette “has saved our constitution, which was galloping fast into monarchy” (The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Paul L. Ford, 1892). In his “Tomo Cheeki, the Creek Indian,” a series of essays written for the Jersey Chronicle and printed on his own press at Mt. Pleasant, New Jersey, Freneau celebrated the unsullied national life of the American Indian, which contrasted sharply with the corrupted, unnatural life of whites transplanted from Europe. He also used his newspapers to condemn slavery and to advance temperance (not abstinence, but control).
Freneau’s major contribution to American letters, however, is his poetry. He has been called the poet of the American Revolution, the first American poet of any real significance, the founder...
(This entire section contains 594 words.)
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of American poetry, and the first herald of Romanticism in America. None of these titles is entirely correct. Although he styled himself poet of the Revolution by publishing a collection of his poems in 1809 asPoems Written and Published During the American Revolutionary War (two-thirds of the poems in the volume have nothing to do with the war), Freneau must share the title of poet of the Revolution with at least one other poet, Phillis Wheatley, America’s first African American to publish a book. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 and contains many poems that predict the movement toward independence; Wheatley continued to devote her pen to American independence in succeeding years by publishing such substantial poems as “To His Excellency General Washington” and “Liberty and Peace.”
Certainly, Freneau can no longer be considered America’s first significant poet but must join the growing list of poets whose reputations continue to be reclaimed or to be established for the first time. These recently recognized early American poets now include Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Wheatley, as well as Freneau. The existence of this enlarged list of important early American poets assuredly calls into question the notion that Freneau is the founder of American poetry. Despite Lewis Leary’s assertion, however, that “in the strict sense he had no descendants” (Soundings: Some Early American Writers, 1975), Freneau does participate significantly in the American experience of nature and in the struggle for freedom and identity, as well as in America’s awakening Romanticism. Even though Freneau founded no school of poetry, his poems display characteristics and foreshadowings of Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville.
Although Freneau must share several of his formerly attributed titles, he is no less significant as a writer of good poetry. To be sure, he is a transitional figure, but his significance does not begin and end as a figure of transition. This critical commonplace, that Freneau was a transitional figure and nothing more, may have predisposed many to find Freneau’s poetic ideas desultory and inconsistent. Perhaps these readers have not yet discovered how to read Freneau, for as Richard C. Vitzthum has ably shown in his provocative and balanced work, Land and Sea: The Lyric Poetry of Philip Freneau (1978), Freneau created personal and highly internalized poetic symbols, thereby manifesting his most significant contribution to the Romantic movement. Freneau’s poetry is, indeed, intensely personal, and when the keys to this personal intensity are revealed, his poems speak a universal tongue.