SOURCE: "The Concept of Ancients and Moderns in American Poetry of the Federal Period," in Early American Literature: A Comparatist Approach, Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 158-85.

The editor of Comparative Literature Studies, Aldridge is an American educator and author. Among his works on the eighteenth century are Benjamin Franklin and His French Contemporaries (1957) and Man of Reason: Life of Thomas Paine (1959). Here, he analyses "the literary traditions affirmed by [the Federal period poets" and the ideological effects of their embracing of Augustan Age values.]

Ordinarily the expression Augustan Age when applied to the modern world comprises English literature during the first half of the eighteenth century, but an essayist under the name of the Meddler in a Connecticut newspaper of 1791 remarked that "the Augustan age bears greater resemblance to the present, than to any intermediate period." In reference to what is now called the Federal period of American...