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SOURCE: Gigliotti, Gilbert L. “Off a ‘Strange, Uncoasted Strand’: Navigating the Ship of State through Freneau's Hurricane.” Classical and Modern Literature 15, no. 4 (1995): 357-66.
In the following essay, Gigliotti examines Freneau's “The Hurricane” as a ship of state poem that draws on classical tradition while making a case for the unique quality of the American experiment.
The first of two editorial footnotes1 to Philip Freneau's “The Hurricane” in the second edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature (1994) reads:
Also titled, “Verses, made at Sea, in a Heavy Gale.” Composed in 1784 when Freneau was a ship captain plying the West Indian trade. Freneau's poem belongs to a tradition of sublime poetry depicting Caribbean storms dating back to Edmund Waller's famous poem on Bermuda, “The Battle of the Summer Islands”
(1645).2
While “The Hurricane” certainly participates in the sublime tradition of English Caribbean verse, literary critics have yet to observe that...
This section contains 3,686 words (approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page) |
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