A History of American Literature

36 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

the native and the colonist, the “false” and the “true.” Which is not at all to its disad-

vantage: quite the opposite, that is the source of its interest – the measure of its

dramatic tension and the mark of its authenticity.

Some colonial poetry

While Puritans were willing to concede the usefulness of history of the kind Bradford

wrote or of sermons and rhetorical stratagems of the sort Winthrop favored, they

were often less enthusiastic about poetry. “Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always

poring on the passionate and measured pages,” the New England cleric Cotton

Mather warned; “beware of a boundless and sickly appetite for the reading of ...

poems ... and let not the Circean cup intoxicate you.” Nor were such suspicions

about the seductions of verse confined to Puritan New England. “At this day / All

poetry there’s many to gainsay,” wrote Elizabeth Sowle Bradford (1663?–1731), a

Quaker who settled in New York. “If any book in verse, they chance to spy, /” she

observed, “Away profane, they presently do cry.” Yet Bradford herself wrote verse,

citing the biblical examples of David and Solomon. Poetry, she averred, “hath been

the delight of kings,” “I’m apt to think that angels do embrace it.” The Book of

Revelation, she pointed out, foretold that the saints in heaven would sing “a new

song before the throne” (Rev. 14:5). Or, as she put it, “And though God give’t here

but in part to some, / Saints shall have’t perfect in the world to come.” That was a

characteristic defense of those who disagreed with people like Cotton Mather. Poetry

was to be found in the Bible; it was a resource of saints and angels; it could be a

vehicle for understanding and communicating religious truth. Not all colonists saw

poetry in these terms, of course. Some adopted classical models, or imitated popular

English poets like Ben Jonson and John Donne, John Milton and John Dryden. John

Saffin (1626–1710), an inhabitant of Massachusetts, for instance, wrote poems in

praise of women that mixed classical references with elegant wit. “Fair Venus, and

Minerva both combine: / Resplendently, to make their graces thine,” he wrote in an

“Acrostic on Mrs. Winifred Griffin” (unpublished until 1928); “Each in her proper

station; Wit and Beauty / Take thee for mistress out of bounden duty.” In turn,

George Alsop (1636–1673?) from Maryland wrote a poem in praise of trade,

“Trafique is Earth’s Great Atlas” (1666); “Trafique is Earth’s great Atlas,” it begins,

“that supports / The pay of Armies, and the height of Courts.” Benjamin Tompson

(1642–1714) of Massachusetts composed an epic poem about war with the

Algonquin Indians, New Englands Crisis (1676), revised as New Englands Tears

(1676). Richard Steere (1643?–1721) from Connecticut wrote, among other things,

allegories of nature like “On a Sea-Storm Nigh the Coast” (1700) and The Daniel

Catcher (1713), an anti-Catholic response to the English poem Absalom and

Achitophel by John Dryden. And Sarah Whipple Goodhue (1641–1681) of

Massachusetts left some touching “Lines to Her Family” (1681) to be read after her

death, as a testament to the “natural affection” she said she felt for them all. Verse was

prized among some colonists, at least, as a way of commemorating public events and

personal experiences. It could take the form of lyric, elegy, ballad or epic, acrostic, or

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