Regarded during his lifetime and for a century after his death chiefly as a political propagandist, Philip Morin Freneau has come to be seen in recent decades as an accomplished informal essayist and as a gifted and versatile lyric poet. His current reputation rests more on the excellence of several dozen nonpolitical or at most quasipolitical poems than on his political writing, which, though good enough on its own grounds to have established him as one of the leading men of letters of the Revolutionary era and important enough from a political point of view to guarantee him a permanent place in American history, has not been the focus of recent favorable reassessments of his literary importance. These reassessments have uncovered a complexity, variety, and richness in his best work which challenge comparison with that of any American poet before Whitman.

Descended from French Huguenot ancestors on his...