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SOURCE: Harrington, Joseph. “Re-Birthing ‘America’: Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, and the Invention of Modern Poetics.” In Making America/Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper, edited by A. Robert Lee and W. M. Verhoeven, pp. 249-74. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.
In the following essay, Harrington discusses the shift in poetic sensibility between 1800 and 1830 described through the poetic differences between Freneau and Bryant.
… Not as a re-birth of values that had existed previously in America, but as America's way of producing a renaissance, by coming to its first maturity and affirming its rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and culture.
—F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance1
Who reads a book by Philip Freneau? U.S. literary historians have tended to concur with Robert Pinsky's assessment that Freneau was “the first poet of the United States of America.”2 However, one could do worse than the following for a consensus opinion of...
This section contains 8,926 words (approx. 30 pages at 300 words per page) |