The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 55genius of the American Enlightenment, was inclined to dismiss it because it was not
immediately useful, functional; it did not help in the clearing of woods or the build-
ing of farms, schoolhouses, and character. “To America, one schoolmaster is worth a
dozen poets,” Franklin argued, “and the invention of a machine or the improvement
of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael.” “Nothing is
good or beautiful but in the measure that it is useful,” he explained, and a “more
refined state of society” would have to emerge before “poetry, painting, music (and
the stage as their embodiment)” could become “necessary and proper gratifications.”
However, to this charge that poetry makes nothing happen, others replied to the
contrary: that it did clear the ground and break new wood – in short, that it helped
in the making of Americans. The full force of that reply had to wait until the
Revolution, when writers and critics began to insist that the new American nation
needed an American literature, and more specifically an American poetry, in order
to announce and understand itself. But, even before that, there were poets in the
colonies who were trying to turn the old European forms to new American uses.
Even Cotton Mather, after all, tried to identify and celebrate the “Wonders” of the
New World and so wrote a proto-epic, Magnalia Christi Americana. Another writer,
Joel Barlow, was to make his own attempt, toward the end of the eighteenth century,
at a more specifically poetic epic in Vision of Columbus, a much enlarged and revised
version of which was to appear early in the next century as The Columbiad. And two
notable writers, well before that, tried their hands at producing American versions
of the two other most common forms of early eighteenth-century poetry besides the
epic, both of them also derived from neoclassical models, the satire and the pastoral.
The two writers were Ebenezer Cook (1667–1733) and Richard Lewis (1700?–1734).
Cook divided his time between London and Maryland. He was a prolific writer, as
well as a planter and tobacco merchant, but his claim to fame rests on a satirical
poem he published in 1708, The Sot-weed Factor; or, a Voyage to Maryland &c.
Written in the form of Hudibrastic verse – so named after the English poet Samuel
Butler’s satire of the Puritans, Hudibras – The Sot-weed Factor presents us with a nar-
rator who visits America only to be robbed, cheated, stripped of his guide, horse,
and clothes, and, in general, appalled by what he sees as the anarchy and squalor of
his new surroundings. The rollicking tetrameter lines, odd rhymes and syntax help
to paint a carnival portrait of life on the frontier and in the backwoods, in small
towns and in “Annapolis... / A City Situate on a Plain.” And, having left “Albion’s
Rocks” in the opening lines, the narrator eagerly returns there at the conclusion
some seven hundred lines later. “Embarqu’d and waiting for a Wind, / I left this
dreadful Curse behind,” he declares, damning America as he departs. Rising to new
heights of invective, he then prays for America to be “left abandon’d by the World to
starve” and for Americans to “sustain the Fate they will deserve” by turning “Savage,
or as Indians Wild.” Finally, he calls on God to complete the damnation of America.
“May Wrath Divine then lay those regions wast /,” he prays, “Where no Mans faithful,
nor a Woman Chast.” The bombastic character of the curses, like the representation
of the narrator throughout The Sot-weed Factor, alerts the reader to what is happen-
ing here. The satire apparently directed at American vulgarity is, in fact, being leveledGGray_c01.indd 55ray_c 01 .indd 55 8 8/1/2011 7:54:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 56 AM