78 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periodsnever be thought to have learning or grace /,” Freneau asks here, “Unless it be brought
from that damnable place.” The “damnable place” was, of course, Britain; and
Freneau must have suspected that his own literary importations of style and manner
answered him in the negative. He was writing, as he perhaps sensed, in the wrong
place and time. There was the continuing cultural influence of the Old World. And
there was also, as Freneau intimates in another poem, “To An Author” (1788), the
problem of writing poetry at a moment of conflict and in a society dedicated to
common sense and use. “On these bleak climes by Fortune thrown, / Where rigid
Reason reigns alone,” Freneau asks the “Author” (who is, almost certainly, himself ),
“Tell me, what has the muse to do?” “An age employed in edging steel /,” he adds bit-
terly, “Can no poetic raptures feel.” Yet, despite that, Freneau continued to indulge in
“poetic raptures.” There are poems on philosophical issues (“On the Universality
and Other Attributes of God in Nature” (1815)), on politics (“On the Causes of
Political Degeneracy” (1798)), on nature (“On Observing a Large Red-Streak Apple”
(1827)), and on moral and social issues such as his attack on slavery (“To Sir Toby”
(1792)). There are also pieces in which Freneau makes a genuine attempt to arrive at
universal significance in and through a firm sense of the local. “The Indian Burying
Ground” (1788) is an instance, one of the first attempts made by any poet to under-
stand the new country in terms of a people who had themselves become an integral
part of it – those who are called here “the ancients of the lands.” So is “The Wild
Honey Suckle” (1788), in which Freneau focuses his attention on a detail of the
American scene, the “fair flower” of the title, and discovers in that detail one possible
truth about the American psyche: its fundamental loneliness and privacy, the apart-
ness of what Walt Whitman was to call “the essential me.” As Freneau meditates on
this one, small, frail plant, that chooses to “shun the vulgar eye” in its “silent, dull
retreat,” he also adopts a quieter style and more attentive tone. In contrast to the
florid gestures of his early couplets, there is an inclination toward a more precise and
simpler language here, concrete and appropriate to the delineation of minute
particulars. In some of his poetry, at least, Freneau was working toward a form of
literary emancipation, an approach and aesthetic less obviously learned from “that
damnable place.”
This modest degree of success was not achieved by Dwight and Barlow, at least
not in what they considered their major work. A grandson of Jonathan Edwards,
Dwight wrote much and variously, including some attacks on slavery in both prose
and verse. His most ambitious work, however, was a poem written in imitation of
the pastoral and elegiac modes of British writers of the Augustan period like
Alexander Pope and Oliver Goldsmith. Titled Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Seven Parts,
it was published in 1794, and it offers an idyllic portrait of life in the American
countryside. In and around a “sweet-smiling village,” the narrator introduces us to a
world where “every farmer reigns a little king,” where there are no extremes of wealth
or poverty and “one extended class embraces all.” The poem becomes a hymn to an
ideal of self-reliance and modest sufficiency that Franklin and Jefferson also cele-
brated. Dwight describes it as “Competence.” The hymn allows the narrator to attack
various social iniquities in passing – and, in particular, what he calls the “luxury,” theGGray_c01.indd 78ray_c 01 .indd 78 8 8/1/2011 7:54:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 57 AM