Richard Lewis was the foremost poet of American nature before Philip Freneau. But even today Lewis's works remain nearly as obscure as the details surrounding his early life. Lewis was perhaps the son of Richard Lewis of Llanfair, Montgomeryshire, Wales; perhaps the same Richard Lewis who matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, on 3 April 1718, at the age of nineteen, staying only thirteen weeks before leaving for Maryland in the same year; and probably the same Richard Lewis who married Elizabeth Batee in January 1719, at All Hallows Parish, Anne Arundel Country, Maryland. But the earliest positive identification of Lewis as a Marylander was his own report to the Royal Society in October 1725 on an explosion of air at Patapsco (near present-day Baltimore). And in a letter from Benedict Leonard Calvert, governor of Maryland, to the antiquarian Thomas Hearne, dated 18 March 1728/9, Lewis is identified as a schoolmaster in Annapolis.

The first...