American Literature: Poetry

I

Introduction

American Literature: Poetry, verse in English that originates from the territory now known as the United States. American poetry differs from British or English poetry chiefly because America’s culturally diverse traditions exerted pressure on the English language, altering its tones, diction, forms, and rhythms until something identifiable as American English emerged. American poetry is verse written in this form of English.

The term American poetry is in some ways a contradiction. America represents a break with tradition and the invention of a new culture separate from the European past. Poetry, on the other hand, represents tradition itself, a long history of expression carried to America from a European past. American poetry thus embodies a clearly identifiable tension between tradition and innovation, past and future, and old forms and new forms. American poetry remains a hybrid, a literature that tries to separate itself from the tradition of English literature even as it adds to and alters that tradition.

American poetry could be defined differently, however, especially if it is not limited to poetry in English. Without that qualifying term, American poetry has its origins in the rich oral traditions of Native American cultures. Each of these cultures developed complex symbolic tales of the origins and history of its people, akin to epic poems in the European tradition. These tales were performed as part of rituals and passed on through memorization from one generation to the next. Some of them have been translated into English. Yet these works tend to vanish from most histories of American poetry because they were part of ongoing performances based in spoken rather than written language. Moreover, their rhythms and sounds are bound to the native languages in which they evolved.

Other cultures have contributed to the rich heritage of American poetry. Spanish-language poetry has been produced in America from the time of the earliest Spanish explorers to current Hispanic and Chicano and Chicana poetry. American poetry traditions also have thrived in many other languages, from Chinese to Yiddish, as the result of centuries of immigration to the United States.

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But most people mean by American poetry those rhythmic, memorable, and significant verse forms composed in English in the United States or in lands that became the United States. This overview of more than 300 years of American poetry tracks the creation of a national literature identifiably different from that of any other nation. In the 1600s colonial poets responded to the challenges of their new world and expressed the hopes and fears of Europeans who settled there. In the years following the Declaration of Independence (1776) American poets created a patriotic poetry as a defining literature for the new nation. A powerful new kind of poetry flowered in the mid- and late 19th century among the first poets to be born and raised as actual citizens of the United States. American modernist poetry emerged in the first half of the 20th century, as many writers sought to subdue nationalist impulses in their poetry and define themselves as part of an international advance in the arts. Finally, in the second half of the 20th century a multiplicity of diverse voices redefined American poetry. For information on American prose or drama, see American Literature: Prose; American Literature: Drama.

II

Beginnings: 1600s Through the American Revolution (1775-1783)

From the beginning until well into the 19th century, widespread agreement existed that American poetry would be judged by British standards, and that poetry written in America was simply British poetry composed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet in responding to British styles, American poetry took inspiration from the new physical environment and the evolving culture of the colonies. In the process it recorded a subtle shift from poets who were dependent imitators to poets who spoke for and in the language of the new nation.

A

New England Puritan Poetry

Puritans who had settled in New England were the first poets of the American colonies. Most Puritan poets saw the purpose of poetry as careful Christian examination of their lives; and private poems, like Puritan diaries, served as a forum where the self could be measured daily against devout expectations. Puritan leaders deemed poetry a safe and inspiriting genre, since they considered the Bible itself to be God’s poetry. Thus poetry became the literary form that allowed devout believers to express, with God’s help, divine lessons. Other genres, such as drama and fiction, were considered dangerous, capable of generating lies and leading to idle entertainment instead of moral uplift.

Puritan poets had grown up in England during a period when Christian epic poetry—culminating in Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton—was considered the highest literary accomplishment. When they came to America they maintained their cultural allegiances to Britain. Anne Bradstreet looked to British poets Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser; Edward Taylor looked to poets George Herbert and John Donne.

Bradstreet was the first poet in America to publish a volume of poetry. The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America was published in England in 1650. Bradstreet had lived in England until 1630, when at the age of 18 she arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where she spent the rest of her life. Although Bradstreet wrote many poems on familiar British themes and produced skilled imitations of British forms, her most remarkable works responded directly to her experiences in colonial New England. They reveal her attraction to her new world, even as the discomforts of life in the wilderness sickened her. Her poetry contains a muted declaration of independence from the past and a challenge to authority.

Although Bradstreet’s verses on the burning of her house in 1666 and poems on the death of three grandchildren end by reaffirming the God-fearing Puritan belief system, along the way they also question the harsh Puritan God. Further, Bradstreet’s work records early stirrings of female resistance to a social and religious system in which women are subservient to men. In “The Prologue” (1650), Bradstreet writes, “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits, / [than] A poet’s pen.…” Bradstreet’s instincts were to love this world more than the promised next world of Puritan theology, and her struggle to overcome her love for the world of nature energizes her poetry.

Taylor, a poet of great technical skill, wrote powerful meditative poems in which he tested himself morally and sought to identify and root out sinful tendencies. In “God's Determinations Touching His Elect” (written 1680?), one of Taylor’s most important works, he celebrates God's power in the triumph of good over evil in the human soul. All of Taylor’s poetry and much of Bradstreet’s served generally personal ends, and their audience often consisted of themselves and their family and closest friends. This tradition of private poetry, kept in manuscript and circulated among a small and intimate circle, continued throughout the colonial period, and numerous poets of the 17th and 18th centuries remained unknown to the general public until long after their deaths. For them, poetry was a kind of heightened letter writing that reaffirmed the ties of family and friends. Taylor’s poems remained unpublished until 1939, when The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor appeared. Many of Bradstreet’s most personal poems also remained unpublished during her lifetime.

Public poetry for the Puritans was more didactic or instructive in nature and often involved the transformation into verse of important biblical lessons that guided Puritan belief. Poet and minister Michael Wigglesworth wrote theological verse in ballad meter, such as The Day of Doom (1662), which turned the Book of Revelation into an easily memorized sing-song epic. Puritan poetry also included elaborate elegies, or poems honoring a person who had recently died. Puritans used these poems to explore the nature of the self, reading the character of the dead person as a text and seeing the life as a collection of hidden meanings.

B

Southern Satire

Colonial poets of the 18th century still looked to British poets of their time, such as Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips. Both were masters of pastoral verse—poetry that celebrated an idealized English countryside and rural life—and of satirical verse. Initially, this satiric tone was more prevalent in the southern colonies than in New England.

Two poets from the Maryland Colony, Ebenezer Cook and Richard Lewis, wrote accomplished satirical poems based on British pastoral models. But their poems cleverly undermine those models by poking fun at the British. Cook’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1708) is a long narrative poem written in rhyming couplets that mocks Americans as a backward people but aims its satire most effectively at the poem’s narrator, who is a British snob. Americans may be laughable, Cook suggests, but they are not as ridiculous as the British with their ignorance and prejudice about Americans.

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