SOURCE: Harrington, Joseph. “Re-Birthing ‘America’: Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, and the Invention of Modern Poetics.” In Making America/Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper, edited by A. Robert Lee and W. M. Verhoeven, pp. 249-74. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.

[In the following essay, Harrington discusses the shift in poetic sensibility between 1800 and 1830 described through the poetic differences between Freneau and Bryant.]

… Not as a re-birth of values that had existed previously in America, but as America's way of producing a renaissance, by coming to its first maturity and affirming its rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and culture.

—F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance¹

Who reads a book by Philip Freneau? U.S. literary historians have tended to concur with Robert Pinsky's assessment that Freneau was “the first poet of the United States of America.”² However, one could do worse than the following for a consensus opinion of the poet's aesthetic legacy:

A writer in verse of inferior note was Philip Freneau, whose pen seems to have been chiefly employed on political subjects, and whose occasional productions, distinguished by a course strength of sarcasm, and abounding with allusions to passing events, which are perhaps their greatest merit, attracted in their time considerable notice, and, in the year 1786, were collected into a volume.

This combination of faint praise and put-down counts the ways that Freneau outrages sensibilities accordant with New Criticism: he concerns himself with passing political events, not universal verities; he employs a course and sarcastic tone rather than one informed by irony or ambiguity; and—his biggest mistake—he was popular “in his time.” In short, Freneau should be remembered more for his work as a journalist than as a poet.³

Yet the passage I cite was written in 1818 by another poet-journalist, William Cullen Bryant.⁴ Bryant, on his way to becoming the nation's premier poet, wrote about his poetical forbears as a way of distinguishing the new American poetry from the old. It is a measure of Freneau's obscurity that he was still very much alive, had published several editions of new and collected poems, and remained an active writer when he was made a part of literary history and referred to in the past tense by the twenty-four-year-old Bryant.

But more remarkable is the change in sensibility that the young critic's remarks betoken. In the 1810s and 20s, Bryant helped to produce a change in the meaning of “poetry.” For Bryant, proper poetry ceased to participate in public debate; instead, it counteracted a public life that seemed ever more demanding, threatening, and materialistic. As the political meaning of “America” came to appear less unsettled and undetermined than it had in the years immediately following ratification, poetry became a medium of consolidating and reproducing an American culture in private. The speaking subject of the eighteenth-century public poem had been a partisan citizen engaged in name-calling controversy or composing a moral essay; the more mature Bryant would create the poetic voice of a reflecting, unified, universal, expressive private person—one that discovered itself most readily in nature.

It must have sounded odd to the older generation to indict someone on the charge of mixing poetry and politics. Far from shunning the world of “affairs,” poets of the early Republic almost always pursued other professions and thought of poetry not as sacralized art form so much as potent rhetorical medium. Freneau identifies himself as “Author of Poems written during the Revolutionary War” in his 1815 Poems, On American Affairs, and a Variety of Other Subjects, Chiefly Moral and Political.⁵ From the 1770s through the 1810s, Freneau, Mercy Otis Warren and other republicans took up cudgels in newspaper verse against the Federalists over such issues as the French Revolution, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the trade war that erupted into the shooting variety in 1812. Poets on all sides of these conflicts debated as easily in rhymed couplets as in purple prose. Poetry and journalism did not appear particularly distinct.

In fact, many of Freneau's poems attack rival journalists. In the 1782 “Epigram occasioned by the title of Rivington's Royal Gazette being scarcely legible,” Freneau attacks the loyalist editor through a dialogue between Satan and Rivington's printer, Jemmy. When Satan accuses Jemmy of disloyalty for his shoddy printing job, Jemmy replies:

'Tis yours to deceive with the semblance of truth,
Thou friend of my age, and thou guide of my youth!
But to prosper, pray send me some further supplies,
A sett of new Types, and a sett of new Lies.(6)

Freneau also plundered the news for scenes of daily life and specimens of human foibles. The following February 1793 excerpt from the National Gazette suggests something of the Freneau wit:

On Tuesday evening last, the weather suddenly changed from warm and moderate … to a severe snow storm at north-east. …

This has for the present put and end to the expectations of our shad-epicures—That the February salmon-eaters in New York, will also be disappointed … is more than probable.⁷

This quotidian item calls forth the mock-heroic Muse:

Where now are all our January shad
And salmon-eke-that came before their time—
Alas! they're fled to some less rigorous clime,
Where suns, that never squint, shall make them glad—
          Ladies, no more for salmon set your caps—
          Some weeks too (fish girls say) must now elapse
          'Till shad once more shall be so void of brains,
          As to be captured in our seins—
          Then pray don't sob and pout—
                    If absent from our stream,
                    There's only one to blame,
Winter, that antifederal knave—'tis—keeps them out.(8)

This seafood crisis offers an opportunity to poke fun, à la Pope, at the “the quality.” Freneau cannot resist taking a dig at Federalist paranoia and the absurdity of contemporary political debate. As Mary W. Bowden observes, “In Freneau's world, all subjects are worthy ones.”⁹ Freneau's literary world is, by the same token, decidedly an eighteenth-century one.

In 1809, in a more serious vein, Freneau apostrophized his political patron, the embattled outgoing President Thomas Jefferson, in the following lines:

When to the helm of state your country call'd
No danger awed you and no fear appall'd;
Each bosom, faithful to its country's claim,
Hail'd Jefferson, that long applauded name. …(10)

Not all bosoms so hailed, however. For over fifteen years, both Jefferson and Freneau (editor, in the 1790s, of the Jeffersonian National Gazette) had engaged Hamilton and the Federalists in an ongoing war of words. The sides fought over fiscal policy, the repressive measures of the Adams administration against its opponents, and whether revolutionary France or royalist England was more at fault for disrupting commerce. Conservatives and mercantile interests subsequently would lambaste Jefferson for the Embargo Acts. Much of this argument took place in “numbers.”

Rarely do Freneau's voluminous oeuvre or the newspaper poems of his day deviate from couplet form and Augustan style. Rarely does Freneau express his anglophobic republicanism in any but the most strident moral terms. Before the erstwhile editor's encomium to his chief is done, it launches a rather venomous barb at the late Treasury Secretary, victim of a re-election duel:

We saw you libell'd by the worst of men,
While hell's red lamp hung quivering o'er his pen,
And fiends congenial every effort try
To blast that merit which shall never die—
These had their hour, and traitors wing'd their flight,
To aid the screechings of distracted night.(11)

This is vintage stuff. Hamiltonians appear not simply as the loyal opposition but as agents of both hell and England.

Attacks by the other side proved equally caustic. Consider lines, calling for the lame-duck President's resignation, from an anonymous, satirical anti-Embargo tract of 1808:

Go, wretch, resign the presidential chair,
Disclose thy secret measures foul or fair,
Go, search, with curious eye, for horned frogs,
Mongst the wild wastes of Louisianian bogs;
Or where Ohio rolls his turbid stream,
Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme;
Go scan, Philosophist; thy ******* charms,
And sink supinely in her sable arms;
But quit to abler hands the helm of state,
Nor image ruin on they country's fate!

These lines represent what we might call the attack-poetry of the early Republic: personal, vindictive, high-flown and petty at once, sometimes clever, sometimes not. In addition to listing the ill effects of the embargo, the poet accuses Jefferson of doing obeisance to Jacobin France, rather than supporting Britannia's efforts to stop anarchy in its tracks. The President emerges as a sort of Pudd'nhead Wilson, more interested in zoology, paleontology and philandering than statesmanship. If the Republican-democrats had their Freneau, the Federalists, too, had precocious poet-propagandists: this poem, “The Embargo,” was signed “By a Youth of Thirteen.”

The publishers of “The Embargo” released a new edition, including several new poems, the following year. The author's name now appeared on the title page: William Cullen Bryant.¹² In this printing, the youth of fourteen includes “The Spanish Revolution,” honoring the efforts of the Spaniards to drive Napoleon's forces from the Iberian peninsula. Here Bryant attempts the ode to liberty at which Freneau excelled:

Iberia, rising from disgrace and chains,
Repuls'd th' Usurper from her native plains;—
O'er independence hung her faithful shield,
Though fiend-like carnage hover'd round the field,
And nobly brav'd the caitiff hordes of Gaul,
At heaven-born freedom's life-inspiring call!(13)

This passage may strike the reader of today as bellicose, declamatory and “of historical interest merely.” Bryant would level these same criticisms at Freneau nine years after the publication of “The Spanish Revolution.”

In later life, Bryant reportedly expressed irritation whenever “The Embargo” was mentioned: when asked if he owned a copy, he replied, “No, why should I keep such stuff as that?”¹⁴ Part of the poet's testiness can be attributed to the ribbing he took from Whig editors who delighted in regaling the renegade Jacksonian Democrat with his juvenile satire. And part of Bryant's discomfort undoubtedly sprang from the obsolescence and adolescence of the style. But the shift in poetics between 1800 and 1830 heralds more than a new generation of poets' coming of age. Rather, Bryant's poetry represents a new era in English-language literature in America. If the “Poet of Our Woods” bridled at the mention of his youthful satire, it may be that by the 1840s “The Embargo,” to its author, had come to look like something other than “poetry.”

Freneau and Bryant often treated similar themes. If Bryant meditated upon the beauties of the western Massachusetts forests, Freneau wrote upon “The Beauties of Santa Cruz” (1776) and other Caribbean islands he visited as a ship's captain. If Bryant drew upon the Graveyard Poets to compose “Thanatopsis,” so too did Freneau in his meditation upon death, “The House of Night” (1775). And Bryant would write poems in praise of liberty throughout the 1820s. However, these poets treated those themes in very different manners and degrees. Freneau would reprint thirty-year-old political poems, and, while withdrawing from politics in his later years, would continue to write pentameter couplets occasioned by his travels or by the news. Bryant, by contrast, would specialize in longer blank-verse meditations upon (and in) nature, after the fashion of the young Wordsworth: Bryant became an early champion of the Romantic poet upon reading Lyrical Ballads in 1813. Late in life, Walt Whitman would hail “Bryant … bard of the river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of open air, with scents as from hay-fields, grapes, birch borders.”¹⁵ Emerson, like Whitman, prized Bryant's depictions of the wild: “He renders Berkshire to me in verse, with the sober coloring, too, to which my nature cleaves … our friend's inspiration is from the inmost mind …”¹⁶ The healthy-minded walker of the western Massachusetts woods and hills, the godfearing man who finds God's messages everywhere, the amateur botanist who tried to render up detailed descriptions of the wild in verse—this is the Bryant depicted by his admiring readers.

Bryant thus transformed himself from the splenetic “Youth of Thirteen” to the revered “Poet of Our Woods,” the “American Wordsworth,” the poet who in 1815 rhapsodized upon a famous “Yellow Violet”:

When beechen buds begin to swell,
          And woods the blue-bird's warble know
The yellow violet's modest bell
          Peeps from the last year's leaves below.(17)

The poet confesses he did not notice the lowly flower as he wandered “midst the gorgeous blooms of May” (P [Poems, 5th ed.], 230). From this recollection, as in other poems, Bryant draws a moral analogy:

So they, who climb to wealth, forget
          The friends in darker fortunes tried.
I copied them—but I regret
          That I should ape the ways of pride.

(P, 230)

The self-described “stripling” who in 1809 would declaim upon “fiend-like carnage” would in 1817 pen “Thanatopsis,” the poem which secured his fame, an eloquent though gloomy musing now etched upon the memory of many a former American school-child:

          Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon.

(P, 31)

Bryant's lines on death as union with nature and on stoic acceptance of the passage of time found more favor than Freneau's more chilly elegies; as Kenneth Price suggests, it is easy to read Whitman's “This Compost” as a rewriting of “Thanatopsis.”¹⁸

Bryant collected the poems he had been writing since the 1810s in a 1832 volume. The frontispiece bears an etching of a lone wanderer (male, dressed in business suit and hat) in the midst of a woodland scene. The caption is taken from “Inscription for an Entrance to a Wood”: “enter this wild wood, / And view the haunts of Nature.” This inscription appears at the entrance to Bryant's oeuvre, and it invites the reader to leave the world and retreat into a realm that refreshes, restores and renews. Indeed, it often seems that, for Bryant, Poetry and Nature (capitalized, as proper nouns) are synonymous. In the poem “I broke the spell that held me long,” Bryant makes this equation explicit. Although the poet tries to forsake poetry for business (in Bryant's case, law), he cannot:

Still came and lingered on my sight
Of flowers and streams the bloom and light,
And glory of the stars and sun;—
And these and poetry are one.
They, ere the world had held me long,
Recalled me to the love of song.

(P, 190)

The omnivorous Freneau, as with many poets of his day, writes poems that encompass everything from the beauties of the tropics to piscine peccadilloes. For Bryant, as for many of his European coevals, poetry is pastoral, and nature is a precinct within which one develops or renews one's spirit. In Bryant's hands, poetry will become more rarefied, more exalted, more ennobling than mere letters. And poetry will cease to take the form of the discourse or screed and will become lyric, “song.”

The poem “Green River” (1819) ends with a succinct statement of this understanding of the nature of poetry. The speaker addresses the western Massachusetts river, saying:

          Though forced to drudge for the dregs of men,
And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen,
And mingle among the jostling crowd,
Where the sons of strife are subtle and loud—
I often come to this quiet place,
To breath the airs that ruffle thy face,
and gaze upon thee in silent dream,
For in thy lonely and lovely stream,
An image of that calm life appears,
That won my heart in my greener years.

(P, 220)

“Green River” ends where Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” begins. If Wordsworth's speaker leaves “the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world” to lose himself in nature, Bryant's speaker can never quite tear himself away from that world. As Robert Ferguson notes, “Bryant's nature poems invariably lead to civilization and away from the settings they purport to celebrate.”¹⁹ The poet who visits the Green River is not so much a Wordsworthian “worshipper of Nature” as an overworked small-town lawyer who needs some rest and relaxation. Drudgery and strife are still with us in this poem, late and soon.

For the poet of the American woods, Nature can never free poet or reader from binary oppositions; Nature, at the end of the poem, is both valued and defined in opposition to business, to the city, to the public. Nature prepares one to re-enter the world: the American Wordsworth has to get back to the office. When we enter Bryant's wood, we leave (temporarily) “the sons of strife”—both lawyers Bryant faced in court and partisan poets in the papers. We enter a Nature that, like poetry, is an access to calmness, to nostalgia, to an exaltation emanating from a God that is Unitarian but not pantheistic. The entrance to Bryant's wood leads away from an eighteenth-century conception of a civic-republican public sphere and into a nature that is part of a liberalist private space that offers respite.

Bryant, in the form, voice and themes of his poetry from the 1820s until his death in 1878, would continue to acculturate and acclimate U.S. readers to a nineteenth-century version of liberal subjectivity. As the United States expanded its mercantile and industrial activity, business began to claim more of the life of American men, even as women largely lost their status as producers. Social dislocation produced the social movements that Sean Wilentz enumerates as “popular movements for labor's rights, land reform, debtor relief, expansion of the suffrage, hard money, and numerous other causes.”²⁰ Bryant and other middle-class professionals viewed these tendencies, especially in the cities, with growing alarm in the 1820s and 30s.

At the same time, the private sphere came to mean more than the proper realm of the person as property owner: for both men and women, privacy, in the early nineteenth century, included intimacy, home, family, self-cultivation. Also during this period, the role of the “house-wife” emerged—the woman whose ostensible lack of occupation advertised her husband's prosperity. Yet this new cohort of women did have time for both reading and writing, and much of the growing book-market was composed of women readers. By the same token, women were represented as purely private beings whose appearance and speech in public was considered suspect; reading itself took on the cast of a purely private activity. Taken together, these trends both prompted and reinforced the privatization of literature that Bryant promoted.²¹

In nineteenth-century liberalism, the private served, as it had in classical liberalism, as a domain in which the (male) citizen prepared himself to participate in public life. But the mechanistic, contractual subject inherited from the previous century was yielding to a more organic model of selfhood. By 1859, J. S. Mill would depict this model, which had been developing for several decades, saying: “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”²² The emergence of modern liberal society seemed to Mill to shut down the very personal liberty it promised to protect. Mill countered this tendency by opposing “society” and politics to civilization, education, and culture. If the subject of the state is a machine, individuality is, on the contrary, the essence of human nature, and human nature is Nature writ large—it is a tree that must be nourished. Mill equates poetry with this “cultivation” of the tree of human nature. As Nancy Rosenblum points out, the philosopher associated poetry with inwardness, privacy, withdrawal and restoration. Poetry became therapeutic for Mill during his severe depression because his poetic detachment “awakened new sympathies, and ultimately returned him from depression to public affairs.”²³ If poetry for Freneau shuttled freely between public and private matters, for Mill, as for Bryant, poetry countered the deleterious effects of the former by enriching the latter.

As we have seen, Bryant anticipated this understanding of poetry by almost 30 years—as did the European Romantic writers whom he read. By the time the poet assumed the editorship of the New York Evening Post, he had confined his explicitly political writings to journalistic prose—though that prose was often as obstreperous as “The Embargo.” Bryant the newspaper man was the creature of the metropolis; Bryant the poet became the denizen of his rural Long Island home, Cedarmere. This poet would always find consolation and therapeutic influence in nature/poetry and would charge readers to do the same:

And look at the broad-faced sun, how he smiles
          On the dewy earth that smiles in his ray,
On the leaping waters and gay young isles;
          Ay, look, and he'll smile thy gloom away.

(P, 203)

Meanwhile, Bryant became so incensed by a rival editor as to horsewhip the man on Broadway.²⁴ This sort of thing provided grist for Freneau's mill in the 1790s; by 1831, it seemed rather beneath the nobility of the art. Both men appear in retrospect as reluctant though accomplished controversialists; for Bryant, however, controversy and poetry were prima facie different. In 1834, the poet wrote Richard Henry Dana:

Poetry may get printed in the newspapers, but no man makes money by it, for the simple reason that nobody cares a fig for it. The taste for it is something old-fashioned; the march of the age is in another direction; mankind are occupied with politics, railroads, and steamboats.²⁵

Freneau, who had written an ode to Robert Fulton, might have been puzzled by these comments. In fact, Bryant's poems would earn him a not-inconsiderable sum, but the poems readers cared for served as foils, not complements, to the editorial page. The separation of spheres in the Republic of Letters was complete.

Bryant was not only aware of this separation, he theorized it. In the 1825 “Lectures on Poetry,” the poet rejects a clear dichotomy between poetry and “eloquence”:

By eloquence I do not mean mere persuasiveness: there are many processes of argument that are not susceptible of eloquence. … But by eloquence I understand those appeals to our moral perceptions that produce emotion as soon as they are uttered.

(PR [Prose Writings of William Cullen Bryant, 1889] 13)

By distinguishing eloquence from argument, Bryant excludes both rational-critical debate and scurrilous satire from poetry. Poetry, for Bryant, delivers “direct lessons of wisdom” but is not “merely didactic” (PR, 11). Rather, poetry delivers up “the elements of moral truth” which “the mind instinctively acknowledges”:

Thousands of inductions resulting from the application of great principles to human life and conduct lie, as it were, latent in our minds, which we have never drawn for ourselves, but which we admit the moment they are hinted at, and which, though not abstruse are yet new.

(PR, 11)

Thus “we need no reasoning” to grasp the truths of poetry: it does not communicate, it transmits. Poetry becomes a seemingly detextualized writing, a sort of moral infusion. And, as Bryant says, “This is something in a world whose inhabitants are perpetually complaining of its labors, fatigues, and miseries” (PR, 5). Here Bryant sets the stage for a transcendent poetry that exists over against contingency.

Bryant's poet produces this version of Poetry through an alchemical distillation: “He only extracts and concentrates, as it were, life's ethereal essence, arrests and condenses its volatile fragrance” (PR, 23). Bryant, like Shelley, demands a poetry that does not dwell on the mundane cause and effect of narrative, but that delivers up the gold of human nature in small, lyrical vessels. Bryant's alchemical metaphor, like the poetics it expresses, is employed by more formalist critics of the present. Milton J. Bates, for instance, writes of Wallace Stevens's political poem Owl's Clover (1936):

If that book seems in retrospect to have been an aberration in Stevens' career … it nevertheless taught him how much of the day's news, and what kind, he could successfully admit into his poems. He learned that a poem, like mankind, cannot bear very much reality—at least it cannot bear much reality into the realm of pure poetry. Once the volatile essence of a poem has evaporated, its realistic residue is apt to seem pitifully inert.²⁶

Stevens here comes off as a failed alchemist. And that is the point: all alchemists are failed, because you cannot turn lead into gold. Likewise, for Bates, as for Bryant, you cannot turn the day's news into “poetry,” because the volatile essence of Poetry will evaporate in public, leaving you with only “realistic residue.” “Nothing in the world is deader,” Stevens would write, than “yesterday's political (or realistic) poetry.”²⁷ By the 1930s and 40s, this idea was not so new. Bryant, as much as anyone, brought about the shift from a poetry of yesterday's news to Poetry as volatile spiritual essence that makes us realize what we did not realize that we already knew.

U.S. culture required different things of its poets and its poetry in the post-revolutionary period than in the 1830s. In the 1780s and 90s, it seemed to many that the United States would become a radical-democratic, even Jacobin confederation of local governments; later, during Jefferson's administration, a levelling republican trend seemed to have gained the upper hand. However, by the “Era of Good Feelings” and one-party rule in the late 1810s and early 20s, the Federalist Party may have gone but a Federalist vision of the polity prevailed. The Constitution was secure, political power increasingly centralized, monied interests entrenched, and American power established internationally: the United States had emerged as a modern liberalist state. Bryant joined the victorious Democrats not because of Jacksonian populism but to preserve free trade. By the time the second party system emerged under Jackson, the constitutive principles of political culture had been established. As Hugh Brogan puts it:

The underlying agreements of the American political elite had at last reasserted themselves. Once the disturbing influence of Hamilton was removed and the intransigence of England had finally settled the question of what America's foreign policy should be, there was very little to quarrel about.²⁸

Accordingly, the task of ideology was not so much disputation but consolidation of an idea of “America.” Poetry's role as medium of cultural reproduction replaced its role as medium of public debate. The fireside replaced the platform in poetry, and the meaning of the art in U.S. cultural life changed accordingly.

In the newspaper verse that reached the majority of readers in the late eighteenth century, poets debated not only policy, but also the nature of the new nation—whether it would be a radical democracy or an electoral aristocracy, whether it would be a country of subtle or pronounced class distinctions, what role (if any) the native people of the continent would play. Bryant's poetics, by contrast, is both spiritual and functional: in his version, not only does poetry provide solace, it serves as a “support of our innocence” (PR, 15), promotes “the perfection of the moral character” (PR, 16-17), “glor[ies] in sentiments of fortitude and magnanimity, the fountain of disinterested sacrifices … cherishes patriotism, the incitement to vigorous toils endured for the welfare of communities” (PR, 17). Poetry appears to be a practical activity precisely because of its idealizing effects on society; this notion would remain dominant in American poetic culture for at least one hundred years.²⁹

Bryant's poems helped to promote values consistent with the emerging social order, to produce a new self-understanding in middle-class U.S. readers, and to naturalize progress. Often this cultural production worked via a moral explicitly stated at the end of a meditation upon nature. Perhaps Bryant's most (in)famous poem in this vein is “To a Waterfowl” (1818). The speaker addresses the water-bird, asking, “Whither, 'midst falling dew, … dost thou pursue / Thy solitary way!” Wherever it may be, “Vainly the fowler's eye / Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong” because “There is a Power whose care / Teaches thy way along that pathless coast” (P, 266). The speaker draws a moral from his nature experience:

          He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

(P, 267)

The seasonal migration assures the viewer that he is not part of an ignorant army clashing at night, but rather that God (or, rather “a Power”) is in the heavens and all's not so bad with the world. Rather than being lost, as “Green River” puts it, “among the jostling crowd” (like Poe's “Man of the Crowd”), the poet of “To a Waterfowl” sees divine ordinance and protection for—though not a prophecy of—progress.

The next generation of men poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, known now as the Fireside or schoolroom poets, owed much to Bryant for their themes as well as their treatment of those themes; so too did popular women poets such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Sarah Helena Whitman. The conjunction that the poet draws between moral truth and emotion would serve as his ars poetica for the rest of his career and would serve U.S. poets as a guiding principle for the next century. Home, hearth and childhood took on prominence in poems that now celebrated a private sphere structured around family relationships, an idealized childhood, and a defensive stance towards the public as both polis and agora, as in this stanza:

Innocent child and snow-white flower!
Well are ye paired in your opening hour.
Thus should the pure and the lovely meet,
Stainless with stainless, and sweet with sweet.

(P, 205)

Though the flower will fade or the child grow tired of it, the speaker analogically admonishes, “Yet, as thy tender years depart, / Keep that white and innocent heart” (P, 205). In “The Lapse of Time,” Bryant renounces regret in favor of good things to come for both family and country:

The months that touch, with added grace,
          This little prattler at my knee,
In whose arch eye and speaking face
          New meaning every hour I see;
The years, that o'er each sister land
          Shall lift the country of my birth
And nurse her strength, till she shall stand
          The pride and pattern of the earth. …

(P, 35)

Both nation and child are infants and will go nowhere but up: here domesticity joins a patriotism with an imperialistic cast. Yet this projected American dominance (or emergence as a city on a hill) will occur naturally—the years, not humankind, will nourish its progress.

When Bryant treats themes of patriotism, liberty, or current events, they have a way of seeming long ago, far away, and part of the landscape. “The Damsel of Peru” who sees her lover off to fight the Spaniards is a “damsel” of the 1820s, not the middle ages; “The Song of the Greek Amazon” deals not with mythology but with a woman who takes up arms to avenge her lover's death in the Greek war of independence; the true story of “The African Chief” who goes mad when enslaved reads like an Irving-inspired legend; and all seem contemporaneous with William Tell (to whom Bryant also pens an ode). Even as Bryant raised funds for the Greek Revolution, in his poetry that Revolution and the American one seem interchangeable, distant and natural, not the product of propaganda and political action.

The shift from an early republican to an antebellum poetics is demonstrated in “The Battle-Field” (1837), the last poem of the 1839 edition. While in the poem “Seventy-Six” “Already blood on Concord's plain / Among the springing grass had run” (P, 64), the time and place of “The Battle-Field” are indefinite. However, a reference to the Revolution (and possibly to the War of 1812) is difficult to miss:

Ah! never shall the land forget
          How gushed the life-blood of her brave—
Gushed, warm with hope and courage yet,
          Upon the soil they fought to save.
Now, all is calm, and fresh, and still,
          alone the chirp of flitting bird,
And talk of children on the hill,
          And bell of wandering kine are heard.

(P, 268)

Here, the patriots fight for the soil: It is the land itself, not the people, that remembers. But warfare has ceased, the soil is secure, and now the work of progress has begun: nature, family, and agriculture supply new themes for the poet. Indeed, the real fight is now not between people, but between abstract qualities. Battle becomes watered-down Spenserian allegory:

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;
          The eternal years of God are hers;
But error, wounded, writhes with pain,
          And dies among his worshippers.

(P, 269)

The poem ends with a call to fight the good fight: Charles H. Brown here detects a reference to Bryant's own editorial fights.³⁰ Any such reference is general and implicit, not as in Freneau's poems an explicit reference to a specific editorial conflict. Rather, the poem captures the essence of all moral combat.

The ideological implications of this movement toward abstraction become particularly apparent in Bryant's poems about native people. Perhaps the best known, “The Prairies” (1832), marks the last major poem of Bryant's most productive period. Jules Zanger correctly remarks that:

This poem, read in the context of Bryant's editorial support of the Indian Removal Act and the violent dislocations the Act precipitated, reveals an uncharacteristic political cast and, more significantly, an uncharacteristic employment of the poem as a rhetorical political instrument.³¹

Yet Bryant deals with the topic not through direct political statement but through indirection, idealization and naturalization. There is no mention of an act or policy: as Zanger points out, the poem “offers a theory of historical change which denies human—that is, national—responsibility for the fate of the Indian.”³² It is the status of “The Prairies” as a political text that does not mention politics that makes it characteristic of both Bryant's work and canonical notions of art-writing for the next 160 years.³³

The poet begins by picturing the American plains as Eden: “These are the Gardens of the Desert … fresh as the young earth, ere man had sinned …” (P, 50). The Speaker begins to stake out this specifically American Eden:

The prairies. I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness.

(P, 50)

The nation too was at this time swelling, dilating and encircling vast new territories, and had been doing so since the Louisiana Purchase. Bryant wrote this poem on a trip to visit his brothers, who were settling Illinois; and the editor was one of the first advocates for annexation and development of the Oregon Territory as well. The prairie hawk that the speaker sees comes off a bit like the American eagle:

                                                  … ye have played
Among the palms of Mexico and vines
Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks
That from the fountains of Sonora glide
Into the calm Pacific. …

(P, 50)

Just as the speaker's eye and heart expand, so the hawk's flight takes in large tracts of Mexico. Bryant, by encompassing the continent, is in the same moment making the landscape a U.S. landscape by unifying it as “America.” This trope began in the heyday of Federalism: the United States becomes a unified America through inscription upon a unified territory.³⁴ In The Federalist 2, for instance, John Jay wrote that:

It has often given me pleasure to observe, that Independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, wide spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. … A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together …³⁵

The pleasure that Jay's observation affords him in 1787 New York is akin to Bryant's in Illinois in 1831: the nation is not detached and distant but contiguous and spreading. Both essay and poem accomplish this topographical and tropological movement. This vista belongs, in both cases, to the western sons of “America,” conceived of not as a political designation encompassing diversity, but as an epithet or sentence that elides plurality. Bryant's hawk symbolically extends Jay's vision of unified America beyond the Mississippi to the south and the west.

But there's the rub. As the steed crosses the undulating waves of grass, the rider “thinks of those / Upon whose rest he tramples” (P, 51). These are the mound-builders, a race assumed at the time to antedate the Native Americans. Bryant associates this mechanical and agricultural community with ancient Greece:

…—a disciplined and populous race
Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek
Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms
Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock
The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields
Nourished their harvests, here their herds were fed.

(P, 51)

This vanished race would seem to supply America with a ready-made classical civilization. But like ancient European cultures, this one perishes at the hands of barbarian invaders:

                                                                      … The red man came—
The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,
And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.

(P, 52)

In this self-serious, compact Homeric narrative, Bryant casts the plains peoples as both hunters and warriors, tribesmen who do not understand the Lockean principle that property, created through labor, is better than communalism. There is, in other words, a snake in the garden, and the same fate could befall a newer civilization in the same part of the world.

To conclude this history, Bryant draws a moral of sorts:

Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise
Races of living things, glorious in strength,
And perish, as the quickening breath of God
Fills them, or is withdrawn. The red man too—
Has left the blooming wilds he ranged so long,
And, nearer to the Rocky Mountains, sought
A wider hunting ground. The beaver builds
No longer by these streams, but far away,
On waters whose blue surface ne'er gave back
The white man's face. …

(P, 53)

This story coheres with Bryant's cyclical and pessimistic view of history: the relocation becomes divinely sanctioned, and, like the beaver's being driven from its habitat, natural (it is perhaps no accident that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is to this day located in the Department of the Interior, whose primary responsibility is for parks and wildlife). It is not that the army drives the southern tribes on a death-march into Oklahoma—rather, they actively seek “a wider hunting ground.” Poetry transmutes policy into (to use the language of the “Lectures”) “the elements of moral truth” which “the mind instantly acknowledges … without the consciousness of labor” (PR, 11). As Zanger points out, Jackson's second inaugural address follows the same line of thought, as in this passage:

… one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflection. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another.³⁶

Just as the European-Americans' forefathers left their homes for a new land, Jackson continues, so the Indian must move westward. Thus change the forms of being. As in “Thanatopsis,” “Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim / Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again … lost each human trace” (P, 31) here, too, a younger generation ploughs up the bones of its forebears. As in “The Battle-Field,” the sound of battle gives way to the speaker's vision of a “domestic hum” on the plains:

                                                                                                    From the ground
Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice
Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn
Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds
Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain
Over the dark-brown furrows.

(P, 54)

By the poem's end, “civilization” has returned, along with the busy bee, “A more adventurous colonist than man.” These are both Nature's bees and Mandeville's.³⁷

But not all poets in this period produced a “premature elegy” for the native people, as Zanger terms it. Ten years previously, the True American published a poem entitled “On the Civilization of the Western Aboriginal Country,” by the impoverished, aging Revolutionary veteran Philip Freneau. Freneau, like Bryant, takes the long view:

          Two wheels has Nature constantly for play,
She turns them both, but turns a different way;
What one creates, subsists a year, an hour,
When, by destructions wheel is crushed once more.(38)

It soon becomes apparent, however, that Freneau's poem will differ from Bryant's in more than tone and form:

          Thou, who shall rove the trackless western wastes
Tribes to reform, or have new breeds embraced,
Be but sincere!—the native of the wild
If wrong, is only Nature's ruder child;
The arts you teach, perhaps not All amiss,
Are arts destructive of domestic bliss. …

(LP [The Last Poems of Philip Freneau], 69)

Freneau's Indians are closer to Rousseau than to the Visigoths; “civilization” is for the older poet ambiguous—here the Indians already possess a version of domesticity. Freneau recognizes that the dislocated tribes are in fact farmers: “The Indian native, taught the ploughman's art, / Still drives his oxen, with an Indian heart” (LP, 69). But beyond the difference in attitude, the theory of the poem is fundamentally different than Bryant's. As the title implies, the poem explicitly addresses a policy concern in a direct, discursive style. Freneau sermonizes a “Thou” who shalt convert the native. For Bryant, the proper subject for poetry, even poetry about history, is Nature, and other topics are pastoralized when subjected to poetical treatment. For Freneau, humankind is a fit subject in itself, and humans do not fade into natural cycles—poetry encompasses Reason as much as Nature. Rather than, like Bryant, observing an omnipotent Nature with reflexive equanimity (as, indeed, Emerson and Thoreau cultivated the habit of doing), Freneau rails:

          Whether the impulse of the mind commands
To change a creed or speculate in lands,
No matter which—with pain I see You go
Where wild Missouri's turbid waters flow,
There to behold, where simple Nature reign'd,
A thousand Vices for one Virtue gained;
Forests destroyed by Helot's, and by slaves,
And forests cleared, to breed a race of knaves—
The bare idea clouds the soul with gloom—
Better return, and plough the soil at home.

(LP, 70)

Freneau's is a world of subjects and objects, actors and acted upon. Speculators and missionaries (not farmers) will bring about changes to the Indians and to the land. If the poet despairs, it is not out of reverent submission but out of a feeling of political defeat. Freneau's politics, like his poetics, is republican: for him, it is better to stay in a particular locality, to farm that spot, to immerse oneself in its day-to-day life, and to cultivate virtue than to attempt to expand, to capitalize, and to unify. Freneau's poem also draws a moral, but one that partakes more of ethics than of natural history. Freneau instructs “You” to “learn from Indians one great Truth,” namely that “through all, through nation, tribe, or clan, / The child of Nature is the better man.” (LP, 71) Nature for Freneau teaches responsibility rather than neutrality. Bryant, however, in his 1840 anthology of American poetry, predictably would choose to represent Freneau by his elegiac poems “The Dying Indian” and “The Indian Burying-ground,”³⁹ and present-day anthologists have followed the latter choice.

For this part, Bryant introduced the middle voice into American literature, a voice that later would become a prominent feature of modernist writing.⁴⁰ This voice is neither active nor passive, transitive nor intransitive: the forms of being just change. Just as the liberal subject comes to recognition of itself by itself, so too does “America.” By Bryant's time, a new nationalist literature had constructed, as Michael Warner says, “Americanness as a distinctive but privately possessed trait.”⁴¹ One did not regard fugitive or occasional poems as the literature that would promote national identity or civic virtue: rather, one cultivated a sense of these qualities through reading a book by the hearth or in one's closet. “I speak of a modern nationalist imaginary,” Warner writes, “to emphasize that it requires your public self-imagery to develop in the private sphere. As a nationalist subject, you have a repertoire of self-perceptions that, though national, can be detached from any context of action understood as political.” Freneau, on the other hand, flourished in an age when such perceptions were in flux; he had seen Hamilton allow speculators to buy seemingly worthless war bonds from impoverished supporters of the Revolution (such as himself) only to pay off the bonds and create a wealthy elite. In the 1791 poem “The American Soldier,” the poet-veteran waxed indignant:

Remembering still the toils of former days
To other hands he sees his earnings paid;
They share the due reward-he feeds on praise,
Lost in the abyss of want, misfortune's shade.(42)

Such sentiments were fresh seven years after the Treaty of Paris and during Hamilton's tenure at Treasury. By 1829, Bryant would take pleasure in observing how “wealth is taken away from the undeserving and turned over with unfailing poetic justice to the laborious and the thrifty.”⁴³ The poetic quality of this justice derives from a poetics Bryant helped to craft.

Whitman eventually would embrace Bryant's nationalist poetics. The Whitman of the 1880s lamented “the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States” (a concern shared by Bryant) and called for poets and intellectuals to “stamp, and more than stamp, the interior and real democratic construction of this American continent.”⁴⁴ Explaining that he uses “the words America and democracy as convertible terms,” the poet calls for “a fusion of the States into the only reliable identity, the moral and artistic one.” Echoing Jay, the poet avers that if America is to survive as such, it needs “mighty poets … national expressers, comprehending and effusing for the men and women of the States, what is universal, native, common to all, inland and seaboard, northern and southern.” The “divine literatus” will accomplish this task via “the fervid and tremendous Idea, melting everything else with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional, power.”⁴⁵ This is the melting po(e)t that resolves the dazzling plurality of “Song of Myself” into a final, decisive Unum. For Whitman, Bryant is the first national poet because the poet of the Berkshires inscribed this America onto the very landscape. If Bryant is the poet of America (or “democracy”), Freneau is the poet of a faction within America—a quarreler tolerated by a democracy that, by mid-century, appeared normative rather than procedural. Whitman and Bryant celebrate unity; Freneau writes a poem “On the Proposed System of State Consolidation”: “misguided men … from monstrous creeds a monstrous system grew.”⁴⁶ Freneau has the misfortune to write against the national ideology that would dominate official culture for the rest of the century.

Today, one can find vestiges of more than one strain of Bryant's poetic. The idea of poetry as ethereal form and inward meditation survives, within the U.S. academy, in the canon and in formalist methods of analysis that thrive in poetry studies (even as they are disappearing from the rest of the profession). At the same time, the notion of poetry as infusing the reader with moral truths, emotional enthusiasm, and spiritual sustenance survives in popular notions of poetry, in poems printed in religious magazines, written in community-based writing workshops, or appearing in The Best Loves Poems of the American People (in print now for 58 years). At the same time, a new phenomenon is emerging that may change what poetry means in the United States. In reading series, small presses, performance, video, on CDs and CD-ROM, in poetry slams and festivals, what many (especially younger) U.S. residents call “poetry” is becoming more public, diverse, multicultural, political, and (perish the thought) entertaining. In this respect, we may detect the shade of Captain Freneau winking at us over the space of two centuries.

Notes

1. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford UP, 1941), vii.

2. Robert Pinsky, Poetry and the World (New York: Ecco P, 1988), 103.

3. Freneau contributed both poems and prose to numerous newspapers and held several journalistic posts, most notably as editor of the National Gazette between 1791 and 1793.

4. William Cullen Bryant, “Early American Verse,” Prose Writings of William Cullen Bryant, vol. 1: Essays, Tales, and Orations, ed. Parke Godwin (New York: Appleton, 1889), 48. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text (PR).

5. Philip Freneau, A Collection of Poems, on American Affairs, and a Variety of Other Subjects, Chiefly Moral and Political; Written Between the Year 1797 and the Present Time (New York: David Longworth, 1815).

6. Judith R. Hiltner, The Newspaper Verse of Philip Freneau: An Edition and Bibliographical Survey (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1986), 108. One obstacle to researching Freneau is the lack of a complete collected works, a project forestalled as much by the volume of those works as by their obscurity. Accordingly, I have used several different editions in an attempt to give the reader a broad sample of Freneau's work rather than to establish definitive editorial accuracy.

7. Hiltner, The Newspaper Verse of Philip Freneau, 522.

8. Hiltner, The Newspaper Verse of Philip Freneau, 522.

9. Mary W. Bowden, Philip Freneau (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 85.

10. Philip Freneau, Poems of Freneau, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 170.

11. Hiltner, The Newspaper Verse of Philip Freneau, 172.

12. William Cullen Bryant, The Embargo: Fascimile Reproductions of the Editions of 1808 and 1809 (Gainesville FL: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1955). The passage above (22-23) resurrects the old campaign accusation that Jefferson had fathered children by one of his slaves—an accusation that now appears entirely plausible.

13. Bryant, The Embargo, 49.

14. Charles H. Brown, William Cullen Bryant (New York: Scribner's, 1971), 29.

15. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (Boston: Godine, 1971), 109.

16. Quoted in Brown, Bryant, 468-69.

17. William Cullen Bryant, Poems, 5th ed. (New York: Harper, 1839), 229. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text (P).

18. See Kenneth M. Price, Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990).

19. Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984), 175.

20. Sean Wilentz, “Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution, 1815-1848,” The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990), 60.

21. For more on these tendencies, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor P, 1988).

22. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. David Spitz (New York: Norton, 1975), 56.

23. Nancy L. Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987), 78.

24. See Brown, Bryant, 185-87, for an account.

25. Quoted in Brown, Bryant, 217.

26. Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 192.

27. Bates, Wallace Stevens, 192.

28. Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the United States of America (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990), 270.

29. In the 1825 “Lectures,” Bryant declares, “Well, when we are persuaded to part with our hearth-fires, and to refuse the fruits which sunshine and showers have ripened for our sustenance, let us give up poetry” (PR, 20). Likewise, Madeline Alston writes, in the Living Age for November 1918 that poetry “is a necessity, like fresh air and sunshine, and it is the necessity of poetry and of the cultivation of the poetic spirit that requires recognition if we are to save our children from the asphyxia of materialism” (Madeline Alston, “Children and Poetry,” Living Age 299 [1918], 484). For both writers, poetry's practicality resides in its power to cultivate the spirit and domestic virtues in the midst of a “practical” society.

30. Brown, Bryant, 258.

31. Jules Zanger, “The Premature Elegy: Bryant's ‘The Prairies’ as Political Poem,” Interface: Essays on History, Myth and Art in American Literature, ed. Daniel Royot (Montpellier: U Paul Valery, 1985), 15.

32. Zanger, “The Premature Elegy,” 16.

33. Even this indirect, sublimated approach to politics proved too close for Emerson. In early 1839, the Emerson would write Fuller, saying that Bryant's “poetry seems exterminated from the soil, not a violet left—the field stiff all over with thistles and teazles of politics” (Brown, Bryant, 255). Emerson here hews to an even purer notion of “literature” than Bryant. I use the term art-writing here to circumvent the reified separation of spheres inherent in the distinction between “literature” and “letters”; rather, the historical shift I describe highlights the shifting meanings that different modes of writing assume when placed in different presentation-contexts.

34. Compare this conception to that implied in the title of Freneau's poem “To the Americans of the United States.”

35. In Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Garry Wills (New York: Bantam, 1982), 7.

36. Quoted in Zanger, “The Premature Elegy,” 16.

37. This is not to deny that Bryant published political newspaper verse (Whitman contributed some to the Evening Post) nor that he wrote some of his own. The year that Bryant wrote “The Prairies,” he also wrote “The Bee in the Tar Barrel,” Lampooning Henry Clay's opposition to Indian “removal”:

    The world, he declared, would all look glum
    To see us coax the Cherokee nation
    From their fathers' graves from whites and rum,
    Their pockets lined with compensation.

    (Zanger, “The Premature Elegy,” 15)

    The point is that this is a rare performance, and not one that, like “The Prairies,” ends up in the poet's collected works (or in the Norton Anthology of American Literature).

38. Philip Freneau, The Last Poems of Philip Freneau, ed. Lewis Leary (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1945), 69. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text (LP).

39. William Cullen Bryant, Selections from American Poets, Harpers' Family Library, no. 111 (New York: Harper, 1840), 15-18.

40. For a discussion of the middle voice as it appears in contemporary continental philosophy and in modernism, see Vincent P. Pecora, “Ethics, Politics, and the Middle Voice,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 203-30; Hayden White, “Writing in the Middle Voice,” Stanford Literature Review 9 (1992): 179-87; and Martin Jay, “Experience Without a Subject: Walter Benjamin and the Novel,” New Formations 20 (1993): 145-55.

41. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990), 149.

42. Hiltner, The Newspaper Verse of Philip Freneau, 414.

43. Brown, Bryant, 181.

44. Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 459.

45. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, 456, 460, 456, 46.

46. Quoted in Bowden, Philip Freneau, 77.