SOURCE: "Connecticut Georgic," in Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut, The University of Georgia Press, 1990, pp. 63-94.

In the following excerpt, Dowling analyses Dwight's Greenfield Hill as a poem about American independence—moral and political—and the dangers of losing it.

Perhaps nothing so vividly reveals the degree to which the American Revolution had been based on an imaginary or illusory consensus, or the degree to which the illusion had been sustained by Country ideology as a mainly negative or demystifying strategy without concrete content of its own, as the speeches made by Patrick Henry against the United States Constitution. For when the Revolution is over and the time has arrived to declare what positive vision of the new republic has animated their struggle, its leading spirits discover again and again that the vision to which they have appealed has all along meant different things to different people...