Colonial American Poetry

Spanning the years from 1607 to 1765, the American Colonial period includes poetry reflecting the problematic early years of the English colonies, the growth of Puritanism in America, and the social change and dissension leading up to the American Revolution. While texts in other genres were written and published, American Colonial poetry best addresses and reflects the period's major concerns: the difficulties of cultural interaction, the lure and zeal of religion, the precarious social position of women and slaves, and the growing revolutionary fervor that characterizes the period's final years.

Author Supplied Keywords: Allegory; American Colonial Era; Iambic Couplet; Interregnum; Lyric Poem; Religion; Renaissance

The American Colonial Period

Poems Discussed in this Essay

Bay Psalm Book by Anonymous

"Before the Birth of One of Her Children" by Anne Bradstreet

The Day of Doom by Michael Wigglesworth

"Huswifery" by Edward Taylor

"Liberty Song" by John Dickinson

New England Primer by Anonymous

"On Being Brought from Africa to America" by Phyllis Wheatley

"A Poem Written by a Captive Damsel" by Mary French

"Preface" to God's Determinations by Edward Taylor

"The Prologue" by Anne Bradstreet

"The Sot-Weed Factor" by Ebenezer Cook

"To My Dear and Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet

"To Sylvia, on Approach of Winter" by William Dawson

"Upon the Burning of Our House" by Anne Bradstreet

"Upon a Spider Catching a Fly" by Edward Taylor

"Upon Wedlock, & Death of Children" by Edward Taylor

Overview

Poetry of the American Colonial period emerges from the often discordant and chaotic contact between different cultures and divergent beliefs. From the start, the literature of this period reflects a sense of divided purpose; while British interests in the colonies advanced commercial interests, the colonists themselves often exhibited fervently religious motivations and a growing sense of nationalism. Poets also used their work to reflect on the particular challenges of life in the New World, describing issues both serious, like raids by groups of Native Americans, and personal, as in poetry dealing with domestic issues and everyday life.

Cross-Cultural Poetry

As the poet Ebenezer Cook (1667-1733) well knew, British interest in the nascent colonies was hardly altruistic. In fact, as both British and Early American literary works suggest and history reveals, the colonies were created for explicitly commercial purposes. Indeed, the American Colonial Period dates from 1607, when the English colony at Jamestown was first established in what is, today, Virginia, and ends in 1765, when tensions leading up the American Revolution had begun to build. This first continuous English colony was very nearly a disaster. Named after King James I, Jamestown was established by the London Company, a group permitted by the king with the express purpose of finding gold and settling the promising New World. The early years of the colony were fraught with difficulty, but eventually Jamestown did find a promising export -- not gold, but tobacco. Jamestown thus clearly indicates the commercial interest compelling colonial development.

It is this venal attraction to the New World that Ebenezer Cook parodies in his 1708 poem The Sot-Weed Factor. Mocking British assumptions about the New World, Cook showcases both the commercial interest driving settlement in the American colonies and the vast ignorance about the hardships accompanying that habitation. Telling the story of a "sot-weed factor," or tobacco merchant, the poem begins by emphasizing his mercantile interest in the New World:

The clearly bitter speaker regards his visit to the New World as the result of a "Curse" that has made him penniless, and forced him to flee Albion, or England, in search of a means of recovering his fortune. Notably, the poem implies that such settlers viewed the American colonies as nothing more than an easy source of revenue -- an idea that Cook puts to flight in the poem, as he sends the speaker on a literal and figurative journey of the colonies. The speaker's closed mind and ready contempt for the colonies results in his own humiliation and abrupt departure from the Americas. Reflective of a precipitous tension between the colonies and the country that funded their creation, the poem also hints at a growing sense of an American identity, separate from that of its European founders.

Despite that nascent sense of nationalism, Early American poetry remained heavily influenced by British cultural and literary traditions. For example, the poems of William Dawson (1704-52), a Virginian poet, are shaped by Jacobean poetic traditions, as "To Sylvia, on Approach of Winter" reveals. This poem, published in 1736, utilizes the same carpe diem, or "seize the day" traditions that the seventeenth-century British poet Andrew Marvell also employed. In lines typical of the tradition, the poem begins by warning the listener, a woman named Sylvia, that "Youth and Beauty will not stay" (2) and inviting her to "come away" (1), presumably to indulge the "Warmth of our Desires" (18). Dawson's poem reveals the extensive contributions British culture made to American poetry, but such exchange hardly went one way.

Indeed, the play The Tempest by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) owes much to accounts of exploration of the New World -- and suggests another problematic aspect of cultural contact in the New World, exploitation of and struggle with Native American communities. Drawing upon those accounts of the New World, Shakespeare crafted the character of the "savage" Caliban, a native island inhabitant, with tales of Native Americans in mind. Intentionally or not, Shakespeare puts into Caliban's mouth the words of a colonized native. Angrily, Caliban describes his relationship with the Europeans, Prospero and his daughter Miranda, who have taken over his island:

On Shakespeare's fictionalized island, the relationship between native and Europeans is initially harmonious, with at least the pretense of sharing on both sides; by the time the play begins, however, the native has been enslaved, and the Europeans depend on the exploitation of his labor. Thus, in its treatment of Caliban, the enslaved, exploited, caricatured native, Shakespeare's play foreshadows the history of the American Colonial Period.

Unlike Caliban, who at least manages to voice his complaints, Native Americans found their voices strangled as the invasion of settlers cause long-lasting cultural devastation. Because Native American cultures depended on oral rather than written traditions, the oral poetry of the very disparate and different Native American communities was only very poorly preserved during the American Colonial Period. It wasn't until much later, when many Native American languages and traditions were nearly extinct, that a concerted effort was made to preserve them.

However, works written from the perspective of settlers do emphasize the mutual exchange of violence and animosity between colonists and Native Americans. For example, a captivity narrative by Mary Rowlandson (c. 1637-1711) tells the story of her brief, but traumatic, abduction and imprisonment by a group of Native Americans. Kidnapped a few years previously in 1676, along with her three children, Rowlandson published her story in 1682. This work, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, emphasizes the trauma of Rowlandson's experience, but it also reveals a typically Puritan attitude towards the natives. Rowlandson employs animal imagery to depersonalize her captors, repeatedly characterizing them as "hell-hounds", "ravenous Beasts", and "Barbarous Creatures" (Lauter 344-345). Even as Rowlandson demonizes the Native Americans, she idealizes her own beliefs, stressing the comfort that she found in her religious beliefs. Similarly, a short and barely extant poem by Mary French (1687-?), "A Poem Written by a Captive Damsel," concludes that the only support to be found in the face of kidnapping by Native Americans derived from God. The poem exhorts the speaker's sister to commend herself "to the care of God on high" (33) especially since she fears that they will soon part. Such religious devotion is typical of the Puritan influence so central to the formation of the American Colonial Period.

Didactic & Religious Poetry

While funding for the American colonies often derived from mercantile aspirations, some colonists were driven by very different, religious goals. Established a little later than Jamestown in 1620, the colony of Plymouth was settled predominately by Puritan Separatists who had traveled on the famous Mayflower. The colony almost immediately produced an early work of literature -- a settlement narrative. As its name suggests, the work details the history of the colony. Written by William Bradford (1590-1657) and titled Of Plymouth Plantation, the work recounts the struggles, interactions with Native Americans, and faith of the colonists living in Plymouth. But the growing Puritan community also actively produced poetry, initially for didactic reasons. For example, largely poetic works like The Bay Psalm Book (1640) and The New England Primer (c. 1683) disseminated fundamental Puritan values. Individual poets, like Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705) also found poetry a convenient medium for the teaching of their faith.

Wigglesworth's didactic poem The Day of Doom (1662) describes, as its title suggests, the coming of Judgment Day and the end of the world. Using the form of a debate between Christ and frightened sinners, the poem instills basic Puritan tenets, such as the inevitability and justice of grave punishment for unrepentant sinners. In stanza 141 of the poem, Christ explains that, although the eternal suffering of those in hell seems excessive, it, in fact, fits the crime:

Having established that punishment is a necessary aspect of God's unbiased, objective decree, the poem proceeds to describe with fairly graphic detail -- and a bit of relish -- the sufferings of those condemned to hell, relating their terror and screaming. In contrast, those literally blessed to ascend to heaven are properly grateful and chastened by the fate of the sinners. Therefore, the poem offers an obvious lesson to its readers, encouraging them by example to avoid the ultimately fiery path of the sinners.

As with Wigglesworth, the Puritan faith provided a solid foundation for the works of the writer Edward Taylor (1642-1729), whose many and varied poems demonstrate wide-ranging styles and themes beyond religious conversion. His "Preface" to the volume God's Determinations (c. 1680) indicates an absolute confidence in God's omnipotence and man's contrasting corruption. Beginning with a series of questions, asking who has done a series of monumental actions, the poem informs its reader that "Its Onely Might Almighty this did doe" (20). In contrast, Taylor uses the metaphor of an internal gem to indicate man's sin: "now his Brightest Diamond is grown / Darker by far than any Coalpit stone" (43-44). This fairly typical statement of Puritan values gives way to more novel metaphors and allegories in Bradford's volume Occasional Poems (c. 1680-1682). In one poem from this collection, "Upon a Spider Catching a Fly," the image of a spider having caught a fly and killed it becomes a moral for "Hells Spider" (32) and the webs it weaves "To tangle Adams race" (36). Another allegorical poem, "Huswifery," depends upon a typically female activity -- weaving -- perhaps a surprising choice given the patriarchal structure of the Puritan household.

The poem, however, draws upon the unequal relationship between God and man; clearly and undeniably the superior, God retains all of the power and man is merely his instrument. Consequently, Taylor's choice of the weaving imagery underscores, rather than undercuts, the patriarchal structure of Puritan society. In the poem the speaker asks God to "Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleat" (1) and emphasizes that initial metaphor for the rest of the poem. Consequently, the poem suggests a basic analogy; man is to God as woman is to man. Thus, the poem's use of a female activity to describe man's relationship with God emphasizes God's superiority, but it in no way challenges the period's standard of man's supremacy over woman.

Another poem from Occasional Poems, "Upon Wedlock, & Death of Children," stands out for its stark depiction of the hardship of Puritan lives. With heavy imagery and use of metaphor, the poem describes Taylor's repeated losses of children. Comparing his children to a series of flowers blooming, Taylor describes the experience of having many of those same offspring cut down and taken up to Heaven. Despite the suggestion of bitter, painful loss, the pervasive tone in the poem is one of resignation, and the poem ends with a reminder of Taylor's complete submission to his God:

Taylor's losses of children -- and of his first wife -- would not have been extraordinary, given the challenges he and the others faced in an often-hostile New World.

Taylor's canon also mirrors the growth of the Puritan community in the colonies; from 1620 to 1640, the colonies experienced growth through what has come to be known as the Great Migration, a massive influx of Puritan settlers from England who established themselves primarily in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the Puritan community stabilized into a cohesive, united force -- with a few exceptions. However, this initially rock-solid faith eventually experienced weakening due to the constant influx of new settlers and some dissension from within. Yet, in the 1730s and 1740s, the movement known as the Great Awakening inspired renewed religious fervor. Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) actively participated in -- and helped to drive -- the Great Awakening with sermons like "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." This sermon directly targeted the unsaved with a graphic depiction of the hell awaiting them. Edwards warned that the unsaved "are held in the hand of God, over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, His anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of His wrath in hell" (Lauter 596). Although prose, Edward's sermon relied on imagery popularized by works like Wigglesworth's Day of Doom to elicit strong reactions from his listeners.

Yet, despite the degree of faith provoked by Puritanism in writers like Edwards, the religion had its critics, in no small part because of its treatment of African-American slaves and women. Significantly, as Wigglesworth's poetry implies, the Puritans believed in predestination, a doctrine whereby God has already, before birth, appointed the saved and the damned. Those destined for salvation, the elect, must demonstrate their status to themselves and to their peers through hard work, actions, and constant examination of the state of their minds and souls. In their home lives, Puritans imitated the patriarchal power structure of Christianity. Just as all power and all good flowed down from God, the Puritans believed, so too should all authority in a household derive from husband and father whose absolute rule rendered a static and unquestionable social hierarchy. This particular truism proved especially problematic for slaves and female writers like Anne Bradstreet.

Domestic Issues: Poetry of Women and Slaves

Because of the immense prejudice against African-Americans, slave or freed, and the low rates of literacy amongst the growing African-American population, it was not until the American Revolutionary period that African-American writers began to gain a voice. Even then, the African-American poet Phillis Wheatley (1753-84), who began to publish in 1767, was very poorly received by her audience of white readers. One notable poem, "On Being Brought from Africa to America," published in 1773, challenges a prevailing opinion that blacks are automatically excluded from salvation, advising: "Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin'd, and join th'angelic train" (7-8). While these lines are remarkable for their blatant criticism of racist Christians, their affirmation that blacks need to be "refin'd" suggests that Wheatley has internalized some, at least, of the racist attitudes that resulted in the rejection of her poetry. Admittedly, some writers, including Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), had begun to question aspects of those very attitudes towards Native Americans and African-Americans. Quakers, too, condemned the practice in growing numbers. Yet, in poetry, James Grainger's The Sugar Cane (1764) describes slave labor as an uncomfortable necessity for the successful plantation. Grainger (c. 1721-1766) surveys copious details of life on a plantation, including the human workforce, and concludes that, while it seems a pity that the slaves have been stolen from their native countries, they differ in mind and body from their owners. Grainger's characteristically racist assumption that the slaves were inferior to white men in intellect, while superior in brute strength, still does not completely allow him to stomach their (mis)use in the plantation described in the poem.

Like slaves, women were also regarded as, in some ways, inferior -- at least in social position -- to men. In fact, the Puritan culture consistently posed difficulties for creative women. Infamous for the Salem Witch Trials, which occurred in the 1690s and first targeted a black female slave, the Puritans had, decades earlier, expelled Anne Hutchinson from their ranks for daring, as a woman, to hold prayer sessions in her own home and speak her own views about her religion. Obviously, the Puritan environment was not a welcoming one for women, which makes it all the more surprising that Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672), a Puritan woman, holds the distinction of being the first published American poet. Of course, Bradstreet is only one of a number of Puritan woman poets -- others included Anna Hayden, Susanna Rogers, and Mary French. But Bradstreet's poetry, unlike that of her peers, made it out of the private domestic sphere considered appropriate for women, and into publication.

Born in England, Bradstreet emigrated to the colonies in 1630 in response to the increasingly uncomfortable political environment for Puritan reformers. She brought with her, however, an extensive knowledge of the poets of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages, influences that soon informed her own early lyric poetry. The first collection of Bradstreet's poetry was published in her native England in 1650 as The Tenth Muse. In "The Prologue," Bradstreet recognized that the criticism that she would have been faced with as a Puritan female author. Indeed, Bradstreet's poem gently challenges the expectations of a culture that confined women's roles to the domestic, not the intellectual, arena. Nonetheless, many of Bradstreet's poems reflect the deeply engrained religious beliefs that she had inherited from that very culture. For example, the poem "Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our House July 10, 1666," often simply abbreviated to "Upon the Burning of Our House," takes the occasion of a personal loss to reflect upon her relationship with God. Arguing that the goods she lost were not truly hers, but God's, she comments that "all's vanity" (36) because earthly things are ultimately just "mold'ring dust" (39). In contrast to the house she lost, Bradstreet affirms her belief in a far more valuable dwelling, the "house on high erect, / Framed by that mighty Architect" (43-44) in heaven. The poem ends with a characteristic and basic Puritan statement that "My hope and treasure lies above" (54). Therefore, the poem suggests that, no matter how much Bradstreet might have mildly challenged her culture's view of the role of women, she ultimately embraced its deepest truisms.

Bradstreet's poetry deals with other themes than just her religious faith, however. Poems like "Before the Birth of One of Her Children" reflect the difficulties and challenges of being a woman; the poem reveals Bradstreet's realistic concern that she might die in childbed and attempts to prepare her husband to deal with her death. Other poems, like "To My Dear and Loving Husband," reflect the romantic and loving relationship she shared with her husband. This short poem, composed of iambic couplets, uses metaphors to emphasize the depth and enduring nature of their love. Despite the challenges of raising eight children and acclimating to the New World in which she found herself, Bradford found the time, energy, and dedication necessary to produce a wide-ranging corpus of poetry.

Revolutionary Poetry

As the eighteenth century progressed, religious concerns gave way, notwithstanding occasional revivals, to greater interest in individual liberty and freedom. Ironically, it was those very pressures that initially created the colonies that drove fissures between colonial America and the British government. Initially seen as opportunities for economic expansion, the colonies grew to resist what they, more and more, saw as British exploitation. Increasing taxation of the colonies by the British, beginning in the 1760s, engendered a wave of anti-British sentiment that eventually matured into revolution. Ironically, the descendants of former colonists had become natives hoping to build their own nation. While much of the literature and culture produced by that new nation in the Revolutionary period and after merits attention and value, Caliban's complaint should not be forgotten. Thus, the first stanza of the "Liberty Song," a lyrical and patriotic song appearing around 1768, is unintentionally ironic:

The young country, as splendid as its hopes for liberty and justice were, had already been tainted from its very beginnings by exploitation of Native Americans, slavery, and suppression of female voices. Like the early Puritans and other settlers, who balanced extraordinary hope and faith with the pain and suffering of their daily existence, the poetry of the new nation reflects an uneasy reconciliation of aspiration and reality.

Bibliography

Anonymous. Bay Psalm Book. Lauter 331-336. Print.

---. New England Primer. Lauter 337-340. Print.

Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation. Lauter 247-266. Print.

Bradstreet, Anne. "Before the Birth of One of Her Children." Eberwein 40-41. Print.

---. "The Prologue." Eberwein 14-15. Print.

---. "To My Dear and Loving Husband." Eberwein 41. Print.

---. "Upon the Burning of Our House." Eberwein 59-60. Print.

Cook, Ebenezer. The Sot-Weed Factor. Lauter 641-658. Print.

Dawson, William. "To Sylvia, on Approach of Winter." Lauter 668. Print.

Dickinson, John. "The Liberty Song." Lauter 949-950. Print.

Edwards, Jonathan. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Lauter 592-603. Print.

Eberwein, Jane Donahue, ed. Early American Poetry: Selections from Bradstreet, Taylor, Dwight, Freneau, and Bryant. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. Print.

Grainger, James. The Sugar Cane. Lauter 821-841. Print.

Lauter, Paul, et al. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. Print.

Rowlandson, Mary. A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Lauter 343-366. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 1661-1686. Print.

Taylor, Edward. "Huswifery." Lauter 385-386. Print.

---. Preface to God's Determinations. Lauter 373-375. Print.

---. "Upon a Spider Catching a Fly." Lauter 384-385. Print.

---. "Upon Wedlock, & Death of Children." 386-388. Print.

Wheatley, Phyllis. "On Being Brought from Africa to Americ." Lauter 1104. Print.

Wigglesworth, Michael. Excerpt from The Day of Doom. Lauter 317-326. Print.