American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (review)

Writing in these pages in 2003, Philip Gould announced the arrival of “The New Early American Anthology,” one that both broadened the category of “American” to include non-Anglophone works and “press[ed] the boundaries of the literary” to include all manner of texts communicating the variety of experiences of early American life. While this anthological revolution has been generally and rightly celebrated, it was not unreasonable to have wondered at the time how this development would bode for the study of early American poetry in particular. Not only did it fall largely upon this once most-commonly-anthologized genre to make room for the hitherto-unpublished narratives, letters, diary entries, and the like, but poetry seemed to stand out in the new anthologies as the genre least likely to boast of its own groundbreaking new discoveries. What was needed, it seemed, was an anthology that reflected a corresponding revolution in the study of early American poetry, and that pressed the boundaries of the genre in equally innovative and revisionary ways. With the publication of David Shields’s American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, I am happy to announce the arrival of the New Early American Poetry Anthology.

Just how groundbreaking is this latest installment of the Library of America series? It is so, first and foremost, by its very existence. The only other early American poetry anthology currently in print is—get ready for this—a recent reprint of a collection edited by Oscar Wegelin in 1903. The last time a book was published with the title Early American Poetry was 1978, and this was not, in fact, an anthology. One has to go back to 1968 for the last work of this kind—Kenneth Silverman’s Colonial American Poetry—and while this earlier volume can be justly praised for the variety of poems included, particularly from outside of New England, the difference in the scope of Shields’s new collection is substantial. In purely quantitative terms, American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries contains some 300 poems by 108 poets over 836 pages, not including an additional 100 pages of textual, biographical, and explanatory notes. Among this number of poets included are names likely to be found in more traditional literary anthologies (Anne Bradstreet, Ebenezer Cook, Phillis Wheatley, Philip Freneau); several still largely unknown belletrists who cultivated societies of wit and friendship in British America (Jane Turell, Archibald Home, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson); a few historical figures famous for achievements other than poetry, but who also wrote verse on occasion (John Smith, Roger Williams, Bishop Berkeley, Benjamin Banneker); and a dozen or more obscure or anonymous versifiers who simply used poetry as their chosen mode of communication, often with surprising and delightful results.

It is this emphasis—what might be called the “uses of poetry”—that sets this collection apart and teaches its readers what is unique and important about early American poetry. For this is an anthology not of “poets” as such, but of men and women who wrote poetry, for a hundred different reasons, each one arising from some distinct cultural and economic circumstance within colonial and Revolutionary-era America. Some of the uses poetry was put to, of course, are quite familiar, and on full display in this collection: there are hymns and psalms and religious meditations, elegies on famous men and ill fated children, political satires on matters of local and continental import. Still, even well-versed students of early American poetry will be struck by the generic and thematic variety: there are ballads recounting the circumstances of the author’s emigration (the well-known “Sot Weed Factor,” but also “The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of his fourteen Years Transportation in Virginia”); poems on farming, managing slaves, and staple crops (“The Sugar Cane,” “The Convert to Tobacco,” “A Rhapsody on Rum”); poems of school and work (“A College Room,” “A Whaling Song”); poems submitted to newspapers advertising escaped slaves or warning against con-men...