Customer Reviews

American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Library of America #178)

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In its ongoing efforts to make accessible the American experience in literature, the Library of America has published two-volume anthologies covering American poetry in the Nineteenth Century and American poetry in the Twentieth Century. The LOA's most recent anthology, "American Poetry: the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" is a single volume and it presents the poetry of the earliest settlers -- poems written for the most part in America before there was a United States. In its 950 pages, the volume includes over 300 poems by 108 poets, including many works previously unpublished, together with biographies of the poets and explanatory notes prepared by the editor, David S. Shields. The poems and poets are chronologically arranged.

While Nineteenth and Twentieth Century American poetry will be familiar to many, most readers will find a great deal that is new in this recent collection. This anthology is the most comprehensive ever undertaken for early American poetry. As Shields explained in an interview he gave for the Library of America, access to printing was limited for early poets. They tended to meet in clubs, homes, and cafes to exchange their works. Poetry had a regional influence, and many works included in this collection were discovered in manuscript only recently. Thus, there is the excitement of reading and learning something new in approaching this volume.

Poetry is the mirror of the hearts and aspirations of a people, and the value of this collection lies in the insight it offers into colonial America in its diversity and preoccupations. Many of the poems in the early part of the book were written by New England Puritans and reflect their theological and religous bent. There are a great many ceremonial poems, apparently preached from the pulpit as an elegy on the death of a leader. Other poems constitue reflections on America and its promise and contrast, from varying perspectives, life in New England from life in the Old England. A small number of poems are critical of the Puritans and their severity. Michael Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom", presenting a vision of hellfire to sinners was a famous poem of its day and much of it is included here. Edward Taylor's meditative verse became generally available only in the late 1930s, and a generous selection of his poetry is presented here.

As the volume progresses, various voices come into play from the middle colonies and from the South. There are comic works, even ribald poems, poems describing, from various perspectives, the settlers encounters with the Indian tribes (and some poems by the Indians themselves), reflections on nature, on urban life (I enjoyed the poem by Joseph Breintnall "A plain Description of one single street in this City"), on commerce, and on the relations between the sexes. There are poems by Southern plantation owners which reflect their early ambivalence over slavery. And there are many poems about the American revolution written from a variety of perspectives, from ardent Patriots to the Loyalists who remained, at great cost to themselves, devoted to the British monarchy.
Women are well-represented in this anthology, including the works of many women who led outwardly quiet lives, (Susanna Wright, Mary Hirst Pepperell, for example, to others who were highly active intellectually in revolutionary America (such as Mercy Otis Warren).

The poems in the volume tend to be lengthy. They use a variety of verse forms, almost all of which are in rhyme, and in many respects seem to follow patterns established by the English metaphysical poets and by John Donne or by later writers such as Alexander Pope. The poems vary widely in quality. There are many enjoyable works included but there are some which seem amateurish and which will be a struggle for most readers. The collection, on balance, seems less valuable for its literary worth than for the insight it offers into a developing people and an age. The best way to approach this book, as with many anthologies of poetry, is through browsing and through reading a little at a time rather than through working through the entire text at once.

The poets in the volume whose names will be recognized by some readers include Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), the first woman to have a volume of poetry published in English, Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), a brilliant African American woman who came to America as a slave and wrote beautifully during a short life, and Philip Frenau (1752 -- 1832) whose work spans the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Frenau and Joel Barlow (1754-1812) whose homespun poem "The Hasty-Pudding" is included in this volume are the only two poets represented both in this collection and in the LOA anthology of Nineteenth Century American poetry. The works of Bradstreet, Wheatley, Frenau, and Barlow, are good places to start for the reader wanting to work into the volume.

One of the poets included in this volume is George Berkely (1685-1753). Berkeley's idealism is familiar to students of philosophy, but he also spent three years in America in an unsuccessful attempt to establish a college. Berkeleley wrote a poem about his experiences in America, "Verses on the Prospect of planting arts and Learning in America." It concludes:

"Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way;
The four first Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day;
Time's noblest Offspring is the last."

This vision of America and its future is an inspiring summary of what is best in the dream of the early American settlers.

Robin Friedman

I always urge people to read more poetry and to read widely from all periods of history. Poetry emphasizes the music within human meaning and helps us understand in a way that is more than a sum of the words. Reading poetry from past times helps us see into their hearts, what mattered to them, and how their language was heard and spoken by them. Poetry is a tremendously valuable window into the human heart and our capacity for expressing meaning with language. Our time is emphatically poor in the poetic spirit and the sense of language has narrowed terribly in the common culture. I am at a loss on what could ignite it again, but I know it will never come from the kinds of poetry cranked out in most academic and seemingly high literary settings. But this is a different subject.

This tremendously valuable anthology was put together by David Shields who teaches Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. He has not selected the poems for their high literary merit or to try and provide a sense homogeneity that was not a part of those centuries. Instead, he tries to provide us a sense of the varied voices of those times. We read poems on religious themes, on commerce, on the selection and treatment of slaves, on learning the alphabet, and lyrics that would have been set to music (we don't get the music). We also get poems with political themes, on the loss of loved ones, on art, the classics, and much else. Another benefit is the range of voices provided hear. Besides the famous poets we also get the expected educated white males, but we also hear from women, African Americans, and Native Americans.

Some of the poems are beautiful and some are rather crudely fashioned. Some have themes that are shocking in our time and may be difficult for readers to take in without the prejudice of our time closing their understanding to what is being said and sung. While it is completely fair to reject a poem's meaning and sensibilities, it is a mistake to not open your understanding to all that is being said and fitting it to its times and cultural setting. By doing so you gain more insight into human history that does not make you complicit with its moral values or sentiments. This is a rich volume that has much to offer its readers, I hope you can get past the simple and easy judgments our time quickly stamps on so much of the past without understanding or context. Pushing our sentiments and values into past times is just as much of an anachronism as those movie bloopers such as the Roman soldiers wearing wrist watches.

The volume provides several helps for the reader. We get a biographical paragraph on each poet represented in the book, notes on texts, acknowledgements of help the author received for various works, and notes on words and phrases in the text that might be obscure for the modern reader. These last notes are listed by page and line number. Unfortunately, none of the poems have line numbers, but you can easily find the item in question in the notes or from the notes back to the text. Finally, the poems are listed by title and first lines, and the poets are listed alphabetically by last name with the page numbers of their poems.

A wonderful contribution and I hope it becomes a source of many hours of reading and contemplation for you.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

David Shields collected and edited an odd collection of poems to include in the Library of America's collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century poetry. The major writers--Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Philip Freneau, Phyllis Wheatley--are well represented but there are too many odd choices. Some poets-namely Joel Barlow and the Hartford Wits--are barely included. Some of Francis Hopkinson's best poems were left out. Shields includes too many "celebrity" poets. There is a poem by Thomas Paine that seems a bit out of place. There is also one by John Andre, the young British officer best known for being hung as a spy by the Americans during the Benedict Arnold affair. Andre did not consider himself an American and did nothing to shape American writing. Why was he included? If he was included because he saw service in America then other British officers who wrote verse--John Burgoyne for example--should be considered American writers. While spelling from the era is haphazard to say the least, we have "Poor Julian" and "Poor Julleyoun" on the same page. It should have been one or the other but not both. No anthology of poems will ever please all readers of course but there is little in the way of explanation despite many fine notes. This is a useful book to be sure but, after finishing it, I was not entirely satisfied.

Every home library should have at least a few anthologies, and any of the Library of America series are great additions. The covers look great, there is a sewn-in book mark, and the pages have that thin, high-quality feel to them. And the selections chosen for each anthology are spot-on. They are great to have for your children, especially if they are writing a paper and need examples from outside of their classroom sources. Plus, the price is right--over-all, a solid, smart buy.