Christopher N. Phillips
Poetry dominated the early American literary world, whether through the prestige of verse forms like the epic, ode, and philosophical poem prior to 1800, or the ubiquity of elegies and other occasional verse, hymns, psalms, biblical imitations, and topical verse from the biting satire to the sensational ballad. Yet the study of early American poetry has been slow to develop. The main problem has not been a lack of source material; poems were far more plentiful, both in print and manuscript, than the captivity narratives and novels that have dominated anthologies and syllabi for decades in American literature survey courses. Rather, the main difficulty has been what Virginia Jackson (2005) has described as the “lyricization of poetry,” a process begun in the nineteenth century and ratified by the New Critics in the early twentieth century that privileged the values of the modern expressive lyric and judged all poetry by those values – originality, individual genius, and independence – from the need to meet an audience’s expectations. These values made the vast majority of conventional, socially aware, and instrumental poems of the Anglophone Americas background noise for the rare soloists that early critics like Moses Coit Tyler sought in vain. At first, only two poets received any focused attention: Anne Bradstreet and Philip Freneau were both identified as major figures for their perceived historical importance (the first book of American poetry, the poet of the Revolution), not for their lyric attainments. The discovery of Edward Taylor’s manuscripts at Yale in 1937 brought a new major figure to critical notice, one whose private poetry and extravagantly dense style made him an ideal forerunner for Emily Dickinson. Like Dickinson, Taylor appeared so far from the norm of his time’s poetic practice that his discovery made virtually no change in the assumption that his era was a lyrical wasteland. As recently as the 1980s, most scholarship on colonial poetry treated the subject from a historical or bibliographical approach, rather than one of literary criticism.
In the meantime, Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley became increasingly focal figures in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. The writer most responsible for the renaissance of interest in Bradstreet’s work was not a scholar but the poet Adrienne Rich (1967), who read in Bradstreet (refracted through Dickinson) the voice of an early feminist, bearing witness to the same existential struggles as a woman poet that Rich experienced. When Wendy Martin (1984) declared Bradstreet, Dickinson, and Rich an “American Triptych,” she articulated an ur‐feminist tradition in American literature that divested itself of historical particularity in the name of a compelling political and pedagogical narrative of the woman straining to create her voice out of the pressures of patriarchal domesticity. Wheatley’s status as the first published African American poet has fused her reception history to that of African American poetry en masse. Critics have debated whether Wheatley wielded a powerful lyric voice or a decided lack of one, but everyone attributes what they perceive to Wheatley’s identity as an enslaved woman. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2003) has pointed out, Wheatley has generally been read not for aesthetics but for evidence.
The conversation around early American poetry, thus focused on a very few writers for rather particular ends, took a decisive turn in the early 1990s in the wake of two key studies. Ivy Schweitzer’s The Work of Self‐Representation (1991) turned a sophisticated lyric lens on the writings of Bradstreet, Taylor, and other Puritans, bringing Puritan poetics into the larger realm of poetry studies, while David S. Shields’s Oracles of Empire (1990) drew on New Historicist methods to connect the political and economic content of colonial poetry to the events and forces that gave rise to that writing. Shields’s study in particular opened new paths for locating early American verse beyond New England; his later work Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (1997) recovered a wide range of manuscript poetry, especially from the mid‐Atlantic, that engaged in the sociability of coterie culture involving men and women. Women’s coterie culture in the Delaware Valley became especially prominent through the work of scholars such as Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin Wulf (1997) and Carla Mulford (1995). The interplay between politics and poetry also grew more central in scholarship, following the work of Paul C. Dowling (1990) on satire and Eric Wertheimer’s (1999) on prospect poetry and epic. By the turn of the millennium, the poetry of the early republic was receiving increased attention, from renewed interest in the Connecticut Wits to studies of Massachusetts magazine culture that fostered dialogue among poets such as Wheatley, Sarah Wentworth Morton, Judith Sargent Murray, Mather Byles, and Robert Treat Paine. Curiously, Freneau’s importance as the poet of the Revolution has faded in comparison to the rise of interest in circles of poets across the years of Freneau’s career. Indeed, scholarship has brought to light how indebted Freneau himself was to collaboration and cooperation, as in the joint authorship of his famous poem “The Rising Glory of America” with Princeton classmate Hugh Henry Brackenridge (Wertheimer 1999).
A growing number of poets have come to light in recent years, including poet‐compilers such as the Mohegan minister Samson Occom and African Methodist Church founder Richard Allen. While scholarship on Occom and Allen still tends to emphasize their prose writing, these authors have opened new windows into the dissemination and reception of minority poetic traditions as well as the production of those traditions. While the importance of the hymn for early American poetry, for Euro‐American as well as Native and African American writers and readers, will be discussed later in this essay, it is worth pointing out here that renewed interest in early American religions, book history, and gender and racial dynamics in early American literature has fueled much of the best recent scholarship in the field. The next section gives what has increasingly become a standard account (with a few key updates) of the narrative of early American poetry, and that account will lead into the new scholarly horizons that give a “vision of futurity” to this growing field.
Colonial poetry in English was rather a latecomer to the literary ecology of the western hemisphere. Alongside the robust range of Native American traditions, Hispanophone poets had already developed a vibrant if contentious tradition of representing the Spanish imperial project in verse. French, Dutch, and German traditions would all take shape across the seventeenth century while Anglophone writers translated their British literary practices into new subject matter and social situations. The first major work with a colonial provenance came not from New England but from Jamestown, where the colony’s treasurer George Sandys wrote a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Sandys’s tenure at Jamestown proved to be disastrous; the entire administration was recalled to London following a massacre at the hands of the Powhatans. The Metamorphosis, as Sandys called it, became a lens for the instability of the English colonial experience even as the poet quickly published his translation in London as a form of damage control. In his dedication to King Charles I, he stated: “had it proved as fortunate as faithfull, in me, and others more worthy; we had hoped, ere many yeares had turned about, to have presented you with a rich and wel‐peopled Kingdome; from whence now, with my selfe, I onely bring this Composure” (quoted in Phillips 2012: 23). If the poem was a consolation prize, it also established how closely politics, learning, and literary expression would be bound up with each other in colonial poetry.
The next two printed books of American‐produced verse hint at some of the other expectations seventeenth‐century readers had of poetry, as well as the hazards of print at the time. The Whole Booke of Psalmes, better known today as the Bay Psalm Book, was the first book printed at the press in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1640. Translated by a committee of local clergy, the book was a response to the perceived poetic license in the popular versions of the day, such as Sternhold and Hopkins’s 1562 translation. Often ridiculed by later generations for its style, the Bay Psalm Book embraced the tension between dueling imperatives. On the one hand, like other Reformed communities Puritans followed John Calvin’s teaching that only the Word of God, not mere human writings, was appropriate for use in corporate worship; thus, like Anglicans, Huguenots, and Calvinist Separatists, the Puritans were a psalm‐singing people. Since the Bible was the source of congregational song, faithful translation facilitated proper worship. On the other hand, along with many of the tunes brought from the Church of England and from continental Calvinists came the expectation of rhymed lines in standard English meters, formal expectations that had nothing to do with the original Hebrew texts. The classic call to praise in Psalm 100 can serve as a good example of the singability, the literal translation, and the challenges of finding today what we might consider lyric expression:
Make yee a joyfull sounding noyse
unto Iehovah, all the earth:
Serve yee Iehovah with gladnes;
before his presence come with mirth.
(Bay Psalm Book 1956: n.p.)
The book met its congregational purposes well and was very widely adopted region‐wide for the next century, even as individual texts were frequently revised in local settings, and appendices of hymns, full revisions, and competing new translations in the eighteenth century evolved American psalmody toward the revival‐fed shift to hymnody.
Among the thousands of Puritans conversant with the Bay Psalm Book was Anne Bradstreet, whose poems comprised the next book of American poems rendered into print. Even before the publication of The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in America (1650), Bradstreet was well known as a poet in Massachusetts Bay Colony, where her education and status as wife to the colony’s lieutenant governor gave her a certain amount of public status. Her brother‐in‐law arranged for the printing in London, and likely suggested the title. The poet voiced her discomfort at the news of publication in “The Author to Her Book,” even as the fact that she placed this poem at the start of a new printed volume she personally arranged for publication indicates that she had her uses for the publicity of print. The discovery nearly two hundred years later of a set of poems known collectively as the Andover Manuscript indicates that Bradstreet’s attitudes toward publication reflected that of John Donne and other English contemporaries: some material was allowed for posthumous print, but other texts were meant to remain in the more familiar, and controllable, manuscript form. For Bradstreet, the most print‐worthy poems were those dealing with historical and philosophical topics such as “The Four Ages” and “A Dialogue Between Old England and New,” or with illustrious personages ranging from Queen Elizabeth to her father. Many of her most family‐oriented poems, such as those about her children and “Lines on the Burning of Our House,” were left out of Bradstreet’s prepared second volume, and it is worth keeping in mind that the poems to her husband that she does include in print were addressed to a leading pioneer of the towns beyond Boston, and who after years of serving on influential councils and tribunes would become governor of Massachusetts Bay. The line between private and public for Bradstreet was very real, but often quite thin as well.
As singular and remarkable a figure as Bradstreet has been in American literary studies, both her allusive, learned works and her more direct poems about home life and family ties were of a piece with the multilayered poetic practices of her contemporaries. Poetry was a way of thinking for those immersed in the philosophical and theological debates of the day; it was an aid to personal devotion as read and written text on sacred topics, and it offered a controlled, meaningful way of bridging private emotion and public engagement in narratives like Benjamin Tompson’s account of King Philip’s War in New‐Englands Crisis and in the hundreds of elegies produced for the famous and the obscure across the colonies. Those elegies, whether recorded in diaries, scratched onto scraps of paper to be laid on a coffin at graveside, or printed in newspapers or broadsides, were such a common feature of the culture’s deathways that one of the teenage Benjamin Franklin’s first publications (under the pseudonym Silence Dogood) was a comic “receipt” for writing such an elegy. Franklin’s send‐up has been used as evidence for how awful the colonists thought their own poetry was. For a writer who later indulged in his own lucrative, imitative versifying as Poor Richard, a more relevant point was, as in Alexander Pope’s “Receipt to Make an Epic Poem” (Franklin’s model), the extent to which the genre had taken hold of its literary culture. Franklin’s receipt evoked a sense not simply of the predictable but of the inevitable.
Yet for all of poetry’s ubiquity in the colonial era, the story of Edward Taylor has fed the “lone genius” narrative favored by post‐Romantic critics more than that of any other early American poet. Until 1937, Taylor’s only place in history was as a Harvard graduate and obscure minister in the frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts. Thomas H. Johnson’s discovery of thousands of pages of Taylor’s manuscripts was received as a revelation in American literary history. Taylor wrote his poems as devotional exercises and ordered them destroyed upon his death; they survived through his grandson Ezra Stiles, who secretly deposited the manuscripts in Yale’s library, likely during his tenure as president there. The poems offer a dense, heady blend of sustained conceits, archaic vocabulary, and domestic imagery that put Taylor in company with New Critical favorites John Donne and Emily Dickinson; it is hardly a coincidence that Johnson would later move from Puritan studies to become an authority on Dickinson. Taylor’s obscurity, his physical isolation in Westfield, Massachusetts, and his seeming rejection of the famous Puritan “plain style” made him a perfect forerunner to Dickinson as an American lyrical isolato, even as David Hall (2008) has pointed out that Taylor did actively share some of his works with colleagues and friends; “For Taylor as for so many others, reticence and privacy were relative, not absolute, conditions of writing” (72).
Yet other ways of conceiving of American poetry’s history already existed by the time Johnson made Taylor a New Critic’s delight. Leon Howard’s The Connecticut Wits (1943) built on Vernon Parrington’s work in the 1920s to trace the careers of a group of Yale graduates who, if they didn’t find Taylor’s poems in the recesses of the college library, formed the most famous circle of printed authors in the early United States. John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, and Joel Barlow were the leading lights of this group, often joined by others such as David Humphreys and Lemuel Hopkins. All of these writers had public careers in law or politics (no American poet before Lydia Sigourney would successfully live on their writings). Trumbull, who shared a name with his painter cousin, served in the Connecticut legislature and later served for several decades as a judge. Humphreys was a successful diplomat, and Barlow saw repeated diplomatic service and died while attempting to contact Napoleon during the latter’s Russia campaign. Dwight succeeded Ezra Stiles as president of Yale, where he introduced the teaching of medical science and made the first (failed) attempt to remove classics from the core of the curriculum. An ambitious group that had enjoyed fame at college as commencement poets, the Wits wrote collaboratively and individually on American history and politics, generally from a staunch Federalist standpoint (except for Barlow, who late in life was considered an apostate by his classmates). Drawing poetic models from Milton and Pope via Lord Kames’s critical writings, they wrote satires such as M’Fingal and The Anarchiad, epics such as The Conquest of Canäan and The Vision of Columbus, elegies on the heroes of the Revolution, and celebrations of local customs (“The Hasty Pudding”) and scenery (Greenfield Hill). Later blamed for hewing too closely to neoclassical models for their work, the Wits sought to produce a distinctly public poetry, recognizable at home and abroad, accessible yet elevated in style, performing as well as narrating what American identity could mean in the new nation’s early years. The generic range of the Wits’ output, anchored by the visionary mode, is considerable, but even more remarkable was the extent to which the writers helped generate and promote each other’s works. Trumbull had tutored the others at Yale, introducing them to Kames’s works and encouraging them to serious study of modern literature, a topic not yet in the college classroom. Barlow went into publishing in the 1780s, using the proceeds of his lucrative newspaper the Mercury to underwrite the publication of Dwight’s Conquest, the first American epic printed in the United States. If poetic production by known authors was to succeed, it seemed, authors would have to work together for their mutual success in a nation where reprinting from elsewhere was, and would for some time remain, the default of the publishing industry.
Other circles and modes of publication thrived before and after the Revolution as well. The one that has received the most attention in recent scholarship is the Delaware Valley coterie, centered around Philadelphia but with links reaching to London and to New England. Though some of these writers saw printed publication in their lifetime, their reputations largely rested on the circulation of correspondence and commonplace books, through which poetry was shared among gossip, news, clippings (both paper and hair), visual art, and other bonds of sociability. Prominent Quakers such as Hannah Griffitts might be found in a middle‐class woman’s commonplace book alongside Elizabeth Graeme (later Fergusson), Annis Boudinot (later Stockton), Nathaniel Evans, Francis Hopkinson, Benjamin Franklin (generally copied from print), and Esther Edwards Burr – the latter bridging regions as the daughter of Jonathan Edwards and the wife of his Princeton successor, Aaron Burr, Sr. Elegies, odes, and pastoral fantasies (in which the various authors and addressees formed a cast a pseudonyms) generally outnumbered the satires, responses to literature or art, and travel accounts that nevertheless gave a venue for discussing political and cultural issues in female or mixed company.
If manuscript was the dominant medium among Delaware Valley writers, another mixed‐gender circle in Boston flourished after the Revolution. The leading lights were Judith Sargent Murray and Sarah Wentworth Morton. Both women wrote under the name “Constantia” in the Massachusetts Magazine for a brief time before Morton switched to “Philenia,” showing her learning by evoking a little‐known episode in the Roman wars with Phoenicia. Murray relied on income from her writing and made her biggest success with a series of prose essays and other works titled The Gleaner. Morton, on the other hand, married into a leading Patriot family and pursued her writing as a cultural attainment. In magazines and newspapers, she exchanged verse epistles with Robert Treat Paine and Gilbert Stuart – the latter painted Morton’s portrait several times and seemed to be infatuated with the woman who would gain the moniker of “the American Sappho.” Morton made her reputation mainly through the writing of long narrative and prospect poems. Much of this writing dealt with American origins, both in legends of Native American encounter and in the Revolution that served her husband’s family so well (many of her own relations were Loyalists). Morton repeatedly addressed issues of gender in these poems, beginning with a story of cross‐racial male bonding in Ouâbi (1790), in which the eponymous Illinois chief gives his beautiful wife Azakîa to a French exile who saved the chief’s life. Morton based her narrative on a prose account published in Mathew Carey’s Philadelphia‐based American Museum; while Morton’s source closes with a dual wedding (the chief chooses a nubile new wife in the wake of his generosity), Morton cuts the wedding feast short with Ouâbi falling suddenly and unexplainably dead. This poem appeared a year after an incest scandal involving Morton’s husband and sister had provided the plot for William Brown Hill’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), and while Morton had sided with her husband against her own family, her feelings toward a husband’s widening sexual circle were likely difficult to suppress. In a later poem, The Virtues of Society (1799), Morton makes a young British wife the heroine; braving a picket guard to rescue her wounded husband after the Battle of Saratoga, she inspires her husband to resign his commission in the British army and come home to London with her. While Morton would continue writing into the 1820s, her poem that best survived into the new century was “The African Chief,” an account of the death of a noble‐born slave that helped galvanize the early abolitionist movement in Boston. John Greenleaf Whittier recalled in his bestselling Snow‐Bound (1866) encountering Morton’s poem as a boy, inspiring his later reform efforts – though he misattributed the poem to Morton’s contemporary Mercy Otis Warren. As the Whittier example suggests, more eighteenth‐century poetry found continuity with the nineteenth than the “rise of Romanticism” narrative would suggest. That continuity simply didn’t translate into the monumental status of individual authors.
Indeed, before the 1820s, poetry circulated most effectively in the new nation in periodicals and broadsides, not in weighty books that made a material claim for their authors’ greatness. While anthologies of American poetry were produced from the 1780s and schoolbooks like Noah Webster’s Grammatical Institutes excerpted American verse to guide young readers’ development, few original books found a ready audience. The most ambitious attempt to reach an American audience in the early national period was Joel Barlow’s publication of The Columbiad in 1807. An expanded version of his earlier Vision of Columbus, Barlow’s poem was an event in the history of American publishing: using American‐made paper, type designed and cast in the United States, sumptuously illustrated with full‐page engravings (from the Royal Academician Robert Smirke, a backup choice after negotiations with American painter John Vanderlyn fell through), printed in a lavish quarto format, and wielding an array of learned footnotes and spelling reforms recommended by Barlow’s classmate Noah Webster, the Columbiad was a gorgeous enough book to capture the attention of British critics as well as American ones. It also cost $20 in plain boards (binding cost extra), a prohibitively expensive price at the time that resulted in sales so poor that the publisher, despite Barlow and his friend Robert Fulton fronting much of the cost, descended into bankruptcy (Phillips 2012: 34–35). The early national period was an era of rich poetic experimentation, but like the Columbiad, most of those experiments await full recognition. Fortunately, new methods and questions in the field now promise to bring more of these early works to light.
Several new directions in the study of early American poetry have emerged in recent years, with perhaps the best representation of the range of new work appearing in a 2013 special issue of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America on “Poetry and Print.” Building from a symposium marking the publication of Roger Stoddard and David Whitesell’s A Bibliographical Description of Books and Pamphlets of American Verse Printed from 1610 through 1820 (2012), the papers encompass manuscript poetry as well as the printed matter covered in the bibliography. As Paul Erickson (2013) points out in the introduction to the issue, the main interest across papers is “use”: to what ends did people in and around early America write and read poetry? This topic has received a great deal of attention in the nineteenth century, most notably in Michael Cohen’s The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth‐Century America (2015). For early American texts, questions of use carry scholarship into histories of race, gender, translation, slavery, and missions; into the field of lived religion; into the history of the book, including print, script, and oral cultures that surround and transcend the codex; and theoretical modes of inquiry that early American studies as a whole have been slow to assimilate, such as psychoanalysis and the New Formalism.
The first category in this list is the most familiar to students of early America, but the scholarship on race and its institutionalization has focused overwhelmingly on prose – letters, oratory, official records, autobiography – relying on historians’ perceptions as to what genres provide the most desirable evidence for the care and feeding of historical argument. Both Shields’s (2013) reading of John Rastell’s “The IIII Elements” and Laura Stevens’s (2013) treatment of “A POEM, On the Rise and Progress of Moor’s Indian CHARITY‐SCHOOL” highlight poetry’s capacity to do crucial work among institutions as well as individuals invested in the projects of colonialism and the evolution of race relations in North America. As poetry offers new insight into the political and cultural history of early America, it also can lend itself to the methods of theoretical critique that more modern canons of poetry have mobilized, from the feminist interventions of poetess to the problematics of the lyric speaker. Max Cavitch’s (2013) work on Richard Nesbitt, a poet who produced (and published) most of his work while confined as a mental patient in the Philadelphia hospital in the early nineteenth century, is exemplary of the need for, and promise of, theory in early America. Analyzing a printed poetic correspondence between the “lunatick” Nesbitt and leading Calvinist theologian Nathaniel W. Taylor, Cavitch raises questions about the role of poetry in psychiatric treatment and diagnosis, and the problem of whether Nesbitt did (or could) consent to his poems’ publication in the Port‐folio magazine. These are questions that the archive does not readily answer. The conceptual frameworks of Foucault, Lacan, and Agamben are a few possible places to begin the search for insights that, at the risk of making our ubiquitous presentisms more visible, can’t illuminate our current understandings of the problems of consent, disability, expression, and incarceration.
These are all value‐laden issues, and one of the benefits of bringing early American poetry into dialogue with the range of conversations labeled as New Formalism is a fresh opportunity to raise the issue of aesthetic value with texts for which value has generally been either deferred or assumed inferior (Levinson 2007). The poems that have received the most attention for their aesthetics are those by the Big Three, Bradstreet, Taylor, and Wheatley, and generally only when dealing with individual poems we can readily recognize as lyric. The philosophical poems of Bradstreet and Wheatley, the long narrative of Taylor’s Gods Determinations, have fallen into a category that Meredith Neuman (2013b) has helpfully named the “acknowledged visible” of the lyrics. Most early American poetry Falls into either Neuman’s “acknowledged visible” category or what she calls “invisible” – the latter comprised of manuscript and obscure print poems, particularly those not put into books (355). Long‐standing aesthetic standards in literary criticism have been mutually constitutive with the canon of texts used to develop and affirm those standards. New Formalism’s willingness to address the topic of value and to historicize it at the same time gives scholars an opportunity to experiment with reconstructing an aesthetics of early American poetry that takes seriously the naming of what eighteenth‐century readers would call the “beauties” of the texts while asking what kinds of beauties might be legible for what kinds of readers.
As a trial and example of what this reconstructed aesthetic might entail, let us read an anonymous American hymn from Joshua Smith and Samuel Sleeper’s often‐reprinted Divine Hymns, or Spiritual Songs, first published in 1784:
1 The tree of life, my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit, and always green;
The trees of nature fruitless be,
Compar’d with Christ the Appletree.
2 This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell
The glory which I now can see,
In Jesus Christ the Appletree.
3 For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly have I bought;
I miss’d of all, but now I see
’Tis found in Christ the Appletree.
4 I’m weary’d mith [sic] my former toil –
Here I will sit and rest awhile,
Under the shadow I will be,
Of Jesus Christ the Appletree.
5 With great delight I’ll make my stay,
There’s none shall fright my soul away;
Among the sons of men I see
There’s none like Christ the Appletree.
6 I’ll sit and eat this fruit divine,
It cheers my heart like spirit[u]al wine –
And now this fruit is sweet to me,
That grows on Christ the Appletree.
7 This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying faith alive;
Which makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the Appletree.
(Smith and Sleeper 1793: 4–5)
A first consideration in understanding the text’s aesthetic is that of use. Smith and Sleeper’s collection has a distinctly New England Baptist bent to it, preferring striking, repetitive, familiar imagery to the doctrinal explications of Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, and others of the English Independent tradition that formed the core of New Light Congregational and Presbyterian hymnody in the wake of the Great Awakening, though Watts and Doddridge are well represented in Divine Hymns. The long meter or iambic tetrameter of the text would easily match a range of well‐known tunes at the time, including the Old Hundred tune traditionally paired with the Bay Psalm Book text quoted earlier. A text like “Christ the Appletree” would have been used in prayer services, possibly in a revival context, before being collected and included in a print collection like this. It may have had one author, or have been the work of several authors, either working collaboratively or independently on the various stanzas. (It’s worth mentioning that the particular state of the text quoted here appears in no other edition of Divine Hymns; nearly all instances are textually unique.) In any case, attributions of authorship are beside the point in a hymnbook like this, as the reader/singer’s interaction with the text is paramount. The subtitle of the book, “for the use of religious assemblies and private Christians,” signals that the book would have been part of individual and family devotional life, either read or sung, in addition to being used in larger religious gatherings, possibly (but not necessarily) including formal congregational services: Baptists adapted to hymn singing more quickly than other New England denominations, but in a Calvinist framework non‐scriptural songs in church could still be controversial. The texts were indexed by first line, indicating that the standard use of the book was to locate a desired text based on prior familiarity with it, or else a random browsing technique to find something that spoke to the reader, sortes‐style. Such an index would not have been expected in collections of secular or even religious poetry of the eighteenth century unless the purpose was strictly devotional; even then, the first‐line index was very much a product of the eighteenth century, as was the congregational hymn. Texts would often have been encountered aurally before they were met as visual texts. Stanzas could be rewritten, rearranged, removed, or added at will, but the relative stability of the first line ensured findability.
“Christ the Appletree” was thus a text that inhabited a multimodal, multisensory world, one that would have given it significant dissemination as a text but that would have made individual readers’/singers’ expectations somewhat dependent on the experience of local variations and redactions. It would have provided material for private meditation and public performance, both categories allowing for considerable flexibility. It spoke particularly to Christians of certain denominational commitments and sensibilities, though not exclusively so. And the source for the text mattered very little to its audience. With these things in mind, I will note just a few points toward an aesthetic.
The apple‐tree symbolism plays on a tradition of Christ as the tree of life that runs back to the patristic era and would have been readily available to college‐trained clergy in their studies of Christian history and biblical commentary. It also had direct biblical parallels, most clearly in the Song of Solomon 2:3: “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.” The erotic overtones of that book, as well as this particular passage in the voice of a woman speaking of her lover, would not have been lost on eighteenth‐century New England Christians, and this dimension of the imagery is clearly at play in the hymn text: the “beauty” of Christ “doth all things excel,” beyond language’s capacity to explain that which “by faith I know.” The speaker seeks to rest “under the shadow […] [w]ith great delight,” finding the fruit “cheers” like “wine.” The taste of the fruit and the energy that comes from it inspires further desire of the soul “in haste to be / With Christ the Appletree,” an expression that closes the poem. Yet this is not so much a poem of ecstasy as of the at‐times arduous journey to it. The seven stanzas trace a progression, from the testimony of witness and acknowledged truth of Christ’s excellence and an admitted failure of that testimony to give the whole truth, to a recollection of past failed pursuits of pleasure, contrasting with a realization of finding the one lasting pleasure. From here, the poem expresses an intent or desire for the most part: “I will sit,” “under the shadow I will be,” “I’ll make my stay,” “I’ll sit and eat” – but at this last moment, in stanza 6, the fruit desired already acts on the speaker, as if it’s already eaten.
This tension between the already‐enjoyed and the not‐yet‐fulfilled contributes to the poem’s eroticism, but it also helps to capture in‐between temporality of Christian conversion, already completed and yet waiting for a hoped future, most often associated with Augustine’s Confessions. Thus the soul’s desire for union with Christ at the hymn’s end signals both a discrete choice in the present moment and a vision of the eschaton, that moment after death, even after history, when all is at last fulfilled. The “weary […] former toil,” the “dying faith,” highlight the speaker’s embrace of mortality, even as that very real limit allows for a reaching past it, signified in a reach for an apple off a tree. The poem, in true Protestant form, collapses the everyday into the eternal, and a simple act of plucking food offers a window into divine mystery and union. Other narratives might be constructed by rearranging or dropping stanzas, and new ones could certainly be composed, either on paper or in the mind. This profoundly personal, intimate expression of the soul’s desire for Christ is, after all, public property.
The above analysis participates in the kind of book history scholarship exemplified by Matthew Brown’s (2007) work on devotional reading in Puritan New England. In The Pilgrim and the Bee, Brown argues for a “Reader‐based literary history,” one that focuses on the texts available to readers of a given time and place and those readers’ uses of those texts to understand the gradual unfolding of literary history as it was lived (1–20). These concerns with reading practices, alongside studies of the material and social conditions of textual publication, open promising new avenues for research. The rise in interest in African American print culture, for instance, has already begun to yield new insights into the verse of Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, and Richard Allen. Wendy Roberts (2013) finds not only a new source but a potential female mentor for Wheatley in Sarah Moorhead, a poet known for addressing leading figures of the Great Awakening in print whose slave, Scipio Moorhead, is credited with engraving Wheatley’s iconic frontispiece portrait. Roberts’s mix of biographical work and analysis of evangelical print culture places Wheatley in the community of local poets that help establish her as a Boston poet, highlighting how much that community included women writers, something often hidden by emphases on Boston minister Mather Byles’s influence on Wheatley. Meredith Neuman (2013b) in the same issue offers a close reading of poetic and material form to demonstrate psycho‐theological dynamics of Puritan manuscript verse. As Neuman’s book Jeremiah’s Scribes (2013a) suggests, understanding early American poetry involves being attuned to the logics of prose genres such as sermons and conversion narratives, which Bradstreet, Taylor, and their contemporaries deeply engaged in their poetry, as well as the poetic genres of elegy, acrostic and anagram, vision poems, and verse narratives.
Book history also facilitates a transatlantic, indeed transnational, understanding of early American poetry. Poems built from European texts which were imported, reprinted, or transcribed across the Atlantic (even written en route, as George Sandys’s account of his Ovid translation may have been). Those poems came into being on paper which was also carried across the ocean, then sent back to enter print culture via London presses more often than not, and moved in a blend of gift and market economies that shaped American literary awareness, and literary awareness of America, one household at a time.
Book history, possibly in combination with New Formalism, offers a way to explore a phenomenon long acknowledged but seldom analyzed in scholarship: the dominance of Isaac Watts in the history of early American poetry. While Alexander Pope, James Thomson, and John Milton were unquestionably major influences on American poetry in and beyond the colonial era, their combined presence – whether measured by imports, American reprints, or frequency of reading – was dwarfed by Watts’s Psalms (1719) and Hymns (1707, rev. 1709). Shields (1997) identifies Watts as typifying and inspiring a mode he calls the “religious sublime” (229–231), a mode common to many hymns of the eighteenth century as well as other poetic genres. The combined influence of Watts and Milton helped keep religious verse big business in literary publishing, but the everyday experience of this poetry among colonial and early national Americans has yet to be grappled with. The works of Watts, John Mason, Joseph Hart, and Charles and John Wesley were some of the more popular texts that found places in the devotional lives of individuals and families; the educational schemas of children, slaves, and Indigenous converts; the aural cultures of churches, schools, and social gatherings; and the development of (vocal) music cultures with the growing presence of singing schools starting in the 1720s. Hymnbooks, like psalmbooks before them, lived with their users, carried between church and home, gifted and purchased and marked with favorite texts and traces of provenance, ephemeral enough to risk being read to death while personal enough to function as a family heirloom. Alongside the profusion of broadside ballads, magazine and newspaper verse, commonplace books, and circulated manuscript poetry, hymns were the everyday poetry of colonial British America.
As the work of Neuman, Roberts, Stevens, and Cavitch discussed here suggests, the nexus between religious life, material culture, and poetic form is becoming one of the richest in early American poetic studies, in part because this heady combination has been hidden in plain sight for so long. The Perry Miller school of Puritan studies celebrated the theological rigor and philosophical density of colonial texts, while those influenced by David Hall’s turn to lived religion in colonial New England have focused on prose as the index of everyday life, following arguments shaped by Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word (1986) placing the novel as the typical genre of everyday reading. Amid the sea of hymnbooks, newspapers, and devotional works, the novel was anything but typical until well into the nineteenth century. Poetic genres such as the elegy, the hymn, the ballad, and the ode were flexible enough to mark a special occasion and provide common reading, sometimes (though not necessarily) with the same text – Wheatley’s elegy to George Whitefield being just one example of an occasional poem that has had a very long afterlife beyond its moment of exigency. We would do well to make our own approaches to and conceptions of American poetry more flexible so as to make more visible the array of “invisible” texts and “forgotten poems” that may in fact hold keys to better understanding the aesthetic development, as well as the historical experience, of early American thought and life. And such flexibility would undoubtedly open us to new mysteries, ones we have not yet imagined but that I hope will occupy the minds of future commentators on the state of this still‐forming field.
See also: chapter 19 (early american evangelical print culture); chapter 21 (manuscripts, manufacts, and social authorship); chapter 25 (from the wharf to the woods).