SOURCE: Austin, Mary S. “Freneau as an Author.” In Philip Freneau, The Poet of the Revolution: A History of his Life and Times, edited by Helen Kearny Vreeland, pp. 211-26. New York: A. Wessels Company, 1901.

In the following excerpt, Austin provides examples of nineteenth-century criticism of Freneau's poetry.

For reasons already given, we deem it best to give the criticisms of others upon the poetry of Freneau, and begin with the remarks of a London publisher¹ who, notwithstanding Freneau's hostile feeling towards all that savored in the least of Great Britain, has had the magnanimity to overlook all such sentiment, and bring before the public, of his own free will, a reproduction of the volume of Freneau's poems, as published by Francis Bailey of Philadelphia in the year 1786. In his introduction to the British public he says:

It has been remarked with justice that, in the states which...