The First Century of New England Verse by HAROLD S

The First Century of New England Verse BY HAROLD S. JANTZ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study is indebted immeasurably to the directors and librarians of our great historical societies, to a number of other historians, and to several colleagues, all of whom contributed most generously of their time, and knowledge, and wisdom, to bring unknown material to my attention, to guide me to other possibly fruitful sources, to add to my information from their more specialized knowledge. The list of them is far too long to- print here, and those individuals and institutions whom I here single out, are simply those upon whose time I have made the greatest demands and from whom I have received permission to publish material included in this study. Mr. Clarence S. Brigham and Mr. Clifford K. Shipton of the American Antiquarian Society particularly have nursed along this work from its infancy and shared sympathetically in all its growing pains. With certain materials unavailable to me at this distance from New England, Mr. Shipton had to devote much time at the final completion to filling in blanks and checking details, and he has been most patient and fore- bearing when completion was delayed farther and farther beyond the original date-line. Mr. Allyn B. Forbes and the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society have furthered the work at numberless points, and I have received gracious permission to publish several of their most important pieces in the appended anthology. Mr. S. Foster Damon, curator of the Harris Collection of American Poetry at Brown Uni- versity, put the resources of that splendid collection and of his wide understanding at my disposal; the publication of the important Fiske manuscript from this collection adds a new poet and a new poetic tech- nique to our literature. The Samuel Sewall commonplace book at the New York Historical Society is one of the most important single collections of our early verse; for permission to publish the unknown or incom- pletely known poems from the manuscript, I am deeply indebted tO' that Society. I am grateful to the Boston Public Library and to the- Historical Society of Pennsylvania for permission to publish two im- 22O AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY [Oct., portant little sets of verses. Mr. George E. Duckworth, of the Depart- ment of Classics at Princeton, most patiently unravelled for me many a passage of baroque, unclassical Latin. My two assistants, one at the beginning and one at the end of the work, ably furthered it at the critical times when otherwise its progress would have been almost imperceptible. My most especial gratitude goes to my best, severest, and kindest critic, not only for her able assistance but for her noble for- bearance while this work was being rushed to (or rather beyond) its date-line. Princeton University I. INTRODUCTION O BEGIN with, it was rather an advantage than other- T wise that this study originated as a by-product of totally different investigations, for much of the newly dis- covered verse came to light almost without extra effort in the course of search through various manuscript collections and old libraries for material in another field. This illusion of ease tricked me into consenting to read a paper on my new findings before the American Antiquarian Society. Since the fortunes of war had made it impossible for me to continue with my main project, I thought it might be amusing to find out in my spare time just what there was to our seventeenth-century verse. In my fathomless naivete I was not content simply to present the new discoveries; I felt I needed to find out all that had hitherto been known about our early verse, so that I could see the new parts in their proper setting and perspective. The results were disastrous for my spare time and made necessary a thorough revision of my leisurely plans, for it soon became apparent that previous surveys and bibliographies were unacquainted not only with the un- published verse but also with a large part of the printed verse. As a result, many of the literary judgments and I943-] THE FIRST CENTURY OF NEW ENGLAND VERSE 221 general conclusions were almost worthless, since they left out of account so much of our finest verse (some of which flatly contradicts their material and critical statements) and gave undue emphasis to certain well-known poems which are strictly mediocre or worse. The list of previously known Puritan poets was compiled in an amusingly haphazard fashion more than a century ago. An anonymous reviewer in the American Quarterly Review of December, 1827, wrote the first survey of Puritan verse which Ihave been able to find, including whatever had come to his attention. Leaning heavily on this article, but expanding its contents, Samuel Kettell two years later made the second survey in the introduction to his Specimens of American Poetry, and there we had the almost immutable canon of thirty-odd writers, impartially chosen from among the good, indifferent, and bad versifiers of the period, on which no one has tried to improve except by reduction or by occasional single additions. Moses Coit Tyler's noted History of American Literature, 1878, added not one new name of the slightest importance (though his critical exam- ination is on a far higher plane), nor did the Cambridge History of American Literature of over forty years later, nor any of the lesser surveys. Even the surveys and bibliographies specifically concerned with the early verse added very little. In other ways, however, important new contributions were made. First there were the all-too-rare studies of certain individual poets: from the edition of Anne Brad- street in 1867, through that of Richard Steere in 1907, of Benjamin Tompson in 1924, John Wilson and Samuel Dan- forth in 1927, to that of Edward Taylor in 1939—not to forget Winslow's American Broadside Verse, 1930. Second and fully as important is the verse widely scattered through the various proceedings of historical societies, other his- 222 AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY [Oct., torical periodicals well known and obscure, local histories, genealogies, and even newspapers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the persistently wretched indexing, "buried" is a more accurate word than "published," and scholars will no doubt continue to come upon items com- parable to the Michael Wigglesworth poem (otherwise unknown) which is safely tucked away in one of the lesser periodicals. Several privately printed items are so rare that they seem to have remained virtually unknown. This state of affairs made it necessary first to compile a critical bibliography, an agonizingly difficult task, since more than four-fifths of the material (much of it from un- published manuscripts) had to be newly assembled, and the remainder had to be cleared of errors of every description: misattributions, confusions, bad texts, wrong dates, and so on. Under the circumstances, anything like perfection is still a remote and unattainable ideal, and the best that can be hoped for is that finally enough of the pertinent material has been gathered and arranged in such, a way that the individual poems and poets can be seen in fairly correct perspective and that reasonably valid conclusions can be drawn. From this point onward it is hoped that other stu- dents of the period will contribute corrections and supple- mentary material in order to bring the work to a reasonably definitive state. It is planned to publish such additions and corrections in subsequent volumes of the Proceedings. Aside from the lack of the basic factual knowledge, per- haps the most serious barrier to our understanding of the early Puritan verse has been the traditional critical premise that it is provincial, awkward, dull,- and often involuntarily funny—this in spite of the fact that verse of true quality and originality has long been known and more has recently been brought to light. One reason for our patronizing atti- tude has been the misapplication of the critical standards of 1943•] THE FIRST CENTURY OF NEW ENGLAND VERSE 223 eighteenth-century smoothness and nineteenth-century romantic lyricism to seventeenth-century Baroque verse which had no interest in being either smooth or romantic. The poetic intent, the artistic will of the time was simply different from our own, and, as we shall see, poetic tech- niques were used with which we are no longer familiar. A tentative approach toward understanding the early poets has been to regard them as belated conceptists, fifty or more years after the decline of that poetic fashion in Europe. But here again we must distinguish; there are, it would seem, three different (though overlapping) periods of seventeenth- century Puritan verse, each in its turn containing several age groups: the groups of the early Baroque including the founding fathers, those of the high Baroque including the younger immigrants, and those of the late Baroque including the native poets and later comers. In Restoration Eng- land the transitions from high to late Baroque were overlaid and diverted to a considerable degree in the "upper class" poetry by the influx of French classicism via the exiled court; the old poetic traditions were submerged and did not come to dominance again until the latter part of the next century. New England, however, with its strong anti- French, anti-Catholic, and anti-aristocratic prejudices, and with its already crystallizing indigenous tradition, took be- latedly and reluctantly to the new influences and standards, preferring instead to continue along a normal course of development into late Baroque poetry, though of course traces of the new influences are to be found from the very first.

Load more