Early American Poetry: Selections from Bradstreet, Taylor, Dwight, Freneau, and Bryant

THREE Timothy Dwight (1752-1817)

THREE Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) SEVERAL GENERATIONS after Edward Taylor, Connecticut ,Valley Calvinism found another poetic spokesman in Timothy Dwight, better known for his success as president of Yale but remembered as well for his literary achievements as one of the Connecticut Wits, a loosely associated group of young poets writing around the time of the Revolution. Dwight's verse reflects a far more complex social experience than Taylor's frontier ministry , an emerging nationalism, and the influence of eighteenthcentury theories of reason and social order. But it reveals as well a continuing emphasis on religious values and a powerful desire to maintain the New England traditions built up by such settlers as Bradstreet and Taylor. By background, training, and vocation, Dwight personified the tradition his writings defended. His grandfather, Jonathan Edwards (grandson and successor of Solomon Stoddard), had led the Great Awakening of the 1740s from his Northampton, Massachusetts, pulpit, and young Dwight grew up in a Northampton still strongly influenced by Edwards himself and by the division of rationalistic Old Light and evangelical New Light Calvinism the Awakening had precipitated. Timothy's parents encouraged his intellectual precocity, and family legend recalls how the four-year-old boy taught neighboring Indian children to read the catechism. The story, however true, finds the essence of the man within the child: purposeful, intelligent, conScientious, and inherently a teacher. All these qualities would manifest themselves later in his writing. Educated at Yale from 1765-1769, Dwight studied the classical 121 122 Timothy Dwight languages, scripture, and mathematics while responding to the incipiently revolutionary fervor which led his classmates to wear Connecticut homespun for their commencement as a symbol of their support for American manufactures. Although the curriculum included no literary study as such and certainly no British literature , Dwight apparently read contemporary English poetry in the college library and shared his pleasure with John Trumbull. Excessive study and an insane dietary regimen brought temporary sickness and a lifelong eye problem, but Dwight graduated from Yale with a reputation for intellectual and moral excellence which led to his appointment, two years later, as a college tutor and master's degree candidate. Returning to Yale, he and Trumbull continued their discovery of eighteenth-century poetry, introduced literary study to the curriculum, and encouraged the poetic aspirations of their undergraduate friends Joel Barlow and David Humphreys, who would eventually be grouped with them as the Connecticut Wits. Dwight's master's Dissertation on the History, Eloquence, and Poetry of the Bible (1772) showed his combination of literary and religious interests, as did The Conquest of Canaan, which he began early in the 1770s. Married to Mary Woolsey in 1777 and ordained a minister the same year, he was well launched in his career when he left Yale to serve as a military chaplain in Washington's army. Called back to Northampton in 1778 after his father's death, Dwight supported his mother, wife, twelve brothers and sisters, and his own children by running two farms, serving in the legislature , preaching, and running a private academy. Later, as minister to the prosperous town of Greenfield, Connecticut, he ran another innovative coeducational academy but found more time and stimulus for literary work. He published The Conquest of Canaan in 1785, The Triumph of Infidelity in 1788, and Greenfield Hill in 1794. When he became president of Yale in 1795 on the death of Taylor's grandson, Ezra Stiles, he restricted his literary effort to revision and completion of Barlow's edition of Watts's Psalms in 1797 and promulgated his ideas thereafter by teaching, curricular innovations, preaching, articles, letters, and two posthumously published prose works: Theology and Travels in New England and New York. Intensely active as a champion of New England Calvinism and federalism, he left a greater reputation Introduction 123 as an educator and citizen than as a poet at his death in 1817. A few prevailing beliefs characterized Dwight's writing, in verse as well as prose. The first was his pride in New England and, by extension, the United States insofar as the country reflected the traditions of his home region. He was one of the first to celebrate the northeastern landscape, the White Mountains of New Hampshire and sand dunes of Provincetown, as well as the cultivated fields of the Connecticut Valley. He hailed the Yankee people whose diligence had fructified the rugged land, and he attributed their prosperity (both...