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...