SOURCE: Rielly, Edward J. “Joseph Warton, ‘Genuine Poesy,’ and the American Indian: The Search for a Poetic Ideal.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 40, no. 1-2 (1986): 35-47.

In the following essay, Rielly considers Joseph Warton's aesthetic ideals of the sublime and the pathetic, and connects his poetic theory to the Native American Indian, who, in Warton's mind represented the primitivism that belongs to true and natural poetry.

The poetic world of the mid-eighteenth century was still heavily mimetic, with the poet looking in a variety of places for a poetic model to imitate or an ideal to champion. At the same time, the primitive urge, so strong throughout the century, led him in this search to what today might be called underdeveloped regions. Foremost among these regions was America, or more properly, the Americas. The American Indian, especially when viewed as a Noble Savage, thus became a...