SOURCE: Lang, Hans-Joachim. “The Rising Glory of America and the Falling Price of Intellect: The Careers of Brackenridge and Freneau.” In The Transit of Civilization from Europe to America: Essays in Honor of Hans Galinsky, edited by Winfried Herget and Karl Ortseifen, pp. 131-43. Tübingen: Narr, 1986.

In the following essay, Lang examines the collaboration between Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge on the 1772 Princeton commencement poem, The Rising Glory of America.

At a conference devoted to “The Transit of Civilization from Europe to America”, a paper dealing with the plight of the American writer in revolutionary and post-revolutionary times could find no more convenient starting point than A Poem, On “The Rising Glory of America”, published in 1772 by two graduates from the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Philip Freneau.¹ Kenneth Silverman opens his Cultural History of the American Revolution with this idea so...