SOURCE: "Criticism, Magazines, and Critics," in The Origins of American Colonial Thought, 1810-1835, A. S. Barnes and Company, Inc., 1961, pp. 164-205.

In the following excerpt, Charvat provides an overview of Dana's work as a literary critic and examines the critical value of Dana's unpublished lectures on Shakespeare.

Dana was a . . . militant romantic . . . , and his utterances were loud as well as strong. His life was full of stridencies and contradictions, beginning with his expulsion from Harvard in 1807. This literary rebel was a confirmed Federalist and a trinitarian tending toward high-church Episcopalianism. As poet and novelist he was of the Gothic school, and his son records that from boyhood his father's interest was in "the Gothic mind and the Gothic poetry, architecture, legends and superstitions." As a critic he followed Coleridge, Schlegel, Lamb, and Hartley Coleridge, though he imitated no one.

His work in the North American began in 1817 with...