Roger Wolcott may have been the first poet of Connecticut, and his Poetical Meditations ... (1725) was indeed the first book of verse published in that colony. Within this historical context Wolcott's meditations and the epic published with them exemplify how the traditions and typological vocabulary of seventeenth-century Puritanism metamorphosed into the more worldly concerns and poetic conventions (especially the use of classical allusion) characteristic of eighteenth-century American writing. Similarly instructive is the important influence of family heritage on Poetical Meditations ..., specifically the Wolcott family's attainment (over three generations) of local and colony-wide power and its acquisition of landholdings in Windsor and elsewhere in central Connecticut, where Roger's paternal grandfather settled several years after his arrival in the New World in 1630.

Born on 4 January 1679 at Windsor, Roger was the youngest child of Martha Pitkin Wolcott and Simon Wolcott. Living in his father's inherited rustic residence in Windsor, along the Connecticut...