Benjamin Tompson was the first native-born American poet of note. He wrote the first volume of American poetry to be republished in England (there is some evidence that his New Englands Crisis ... (1676) was the first American book of any kind to be republished in England); he was called upon by Cotton Mather and William Hubbard to write prefatory poems for their colonial histories; he greeted Lord Bellamont in Boston in 1699 with a pastoral skit and poetic recitation that parodied Nathaniel Ward's The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam ... (1647); and he was lauded by his contemporaries as "the Renouned Poet of New England." About thirty of his poems exist today, roughly half in manuscript form. He is particularly noted for his ability to describe the spiritual emptiness of the second generation of American Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and for his talent in legendizing the famous patriarchs of the first...