It is possible to make a modest claim for Timothy Dwight as a poet, but with the proviso that he was a poet only incidentally, in the way of the eighteenth-century man of letters who used the various literary genres selectively in the service of extraliterary ends. He was always something else first, whether teacher, pastor, politician, or college president. His verse (even in representative selections) has disappeared almost entirely from comprehensive college anthologies, and what commentary one finds belongs more to historical scholarship than to literary criticism. One recent editor does, however, include Dwight in "a major-figure anthology of American poetry in the colonial and early national periods," the other figures being Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Philip Freneau, and William Cullen Bryant. Jane Donahue Eberwein believes that these five "were all fine writers and made enduring contributions to American literature" and so has "tried to select and...