The Poetry of Freneau by Philip Freneau

First published:A Poem on the Rising Glory of American, 1772 (with H. H. Brackenridge); The American Village, 1772; General Gage’s Confession, 1775; The British Prison Ship, 1781; The Poems of Philip Freneau, 1786; Poems Written Between the Years 1786 and 1794, 1795; Poems Written and Published During the Revolutionary War, 1809; A Collection of Poems . . . Written Between the Year 1797 and the Present Time, 1815

Type of work: Poetry

Critical Evaluation:

The fact that Freneau’s collected poetic works, at least in a definitive edition, were not published until over a hundred years after he had stirred the American conscience heightens the irony of the title of the best biography of the poet, That Rascal Freneau: A Study in Literary Failure (1941). The phrase comes from George Washington, who more than anyone had occasion to be grateful to Freneau, not only for the several laudatory poems addressed to him but also for lifting soldier morale during the nadir of the Revolution. Freneau’s political poetry served the same purpose as Paine’s incendiary essays, and was perhaps more effective.

These facts alone would make Freneau interesting historically, but his poetry of nature, of American life and culture, add an important dimension to his memory. Most literary historians and critics consider Freneau our first outstanding poet, a liberal in form as well as content. He dared to introduce native themes and idioms into poetry at a time when other writers remained slavishly Anglophile. While a student at Princeton he wrote a poem in collaboration with Hugh Henry Brackenridge, “A Poem on the Rising Glory of America,” a cue to later cleverly designed propagandist pieces, written first in praise of British imperialism and then revised to express sharp denunciation of British usurpation. Significantly, the account that the poem was received at commencement, 1771, “with great applause,” mentions only Brackenridge’s name. In blank verse and dramatic dialogue, the work traces the history of America as the story of freedom-seeking men, establishing on this Eden-like continent, prophetically, a haven for all the oppressed:

And when a train of rolling years arepast,(So sung the exiled seer in Patmos isle)A new Jerusalem, sent down fromheaven,Shall grace our happy earth,—perhapsthis land,and such America at last shall haveWhen ages yet to come, have run theirround,and future years of bliss alone remain.

From this patriotic writing Freneau turned to the often-quoted “The American Village,” a poem in praise of this land in contrast to “The Deserted Village” of a decadent England. Though written in heroic couplets, the sentiments expressed, the names, and the idiom are American.

To yonder village then will I descend,There spend my days, and there my ev’-nings spend;Sweet haunt of peace whose mud’wall’d sides delight,The rural mind beyond the city bright.

Perhaps the neglect of his early poems caused him to retreat to a more romantic life in the West Indies. Some memorable verse came out of this period in the 1770’s, notably “The House of Night,” a poem worthy of Poe with its vivid description of death attended by weird phantasms and graveyard symbols:

Around his bed, by the dull flambeaux’glare,I saw pale phantoms—Rage to madnessvext,Wan, wasting grief, and ever musingcare,Distressful pain, and poverty perplext.

Several times Freneau was captured by the British while going to and fro among his island paradises. Finally he was so incensed over the ruthless war on the sea and the sad disposition of prisoners that he wrote in 1781 his most powerful early work of condemnation, “The British Prison Ship,” which contains a notable picture of horror on the high seas:

The various horrors of these hulks totell,These Prison Ships where pain andhorror dwell,Where death in tenfold vengeanceholds his reign,And injur’d ghosts, yet unaveng’d,complain;This be my talk—ungenerous Britons,youConspire to murder those you can’tsubdue.

Though these were not Freneau’s first satiric thrusts, his earlier diatribes had not the stuff of conviction. But the war on the sea he had suffered at first hand and he wrote about it from personal knowledge.

From that time on, Freneau followed closely the progress, or lack of it, of the Revolution, writing stirring patriotic pieces to boost morale, scourging lines to incense the colonials against their oppressors, rollicking ballads and celebrations of American victory or British defeat. He edited and editorialized during the latter days of the war, his poems being a special feature of various journals with which he was associated. For this work he was credited by Jefferson with saving the Constitution from the Monarchists and the Federalists. Attacked by critics and forgotten by his countrymen, he abandoned poetry and spent the years immediately following the war as a captain of coastal vessels. A collection of his early poetry and essays was published in 1786. He was aroused to celebrate the French Revolution to some memorable lines written in 1793, on Bastille Day:

The chiefs that bow to Capet’s reign,In mourning, now, their weeds display;But we, that scorn a monarch’s chain,Combine to celebrate the DAYOf Freedom’s birth that put the seal,And laid in dust the proud Bastille.

This partisan feeling eventually gave rise to the Probationary Odes by Jonathan Pindar, Esq., some of the most mature of Freneau’s satires against the decay of liberal, democratic sentiments. At the same time he wrote masterful, idiomatic prose under the pseudonym of Robert Slender. These together brought the wrath of the pompous against him, a prelude to the journalistic battle of the United States Gazette vs. the National Gazette, Hamilton vs. Freneau. From this affair came the abuse from which Freneau never recovered during his lifetime.

Freneau was first a poet, then a politician and patriot, as these very late lines in “The Brook in the Valley” reveal:

The world has wrangled half an age,And we again in war engage,While this sweet, sequestr’d rillMurmurs through the valley still. . . .But, with all your quiet flow,Do you not some quarrels know!Lately, angry, how you ran!All at war—and much like man.

Of his work, the poems remembered and anthologized today are his unpretentious, indigenous nature lyrics such as “The Wild Honey Suckle” (“Fair flower, that dost so comely grow”) or “On a Honey Bee” (“Thou, born to sip the lake or spring”). Also, his celebration of the first Americans deserves mention, especially “The Indian Burying Ground”:

In spite of all the learned have said,I still my old opinion keep;The posture that we give the deadPoints out the soul’s eternal sleep.

Recently, Freneau’s verse has been reclaimed from neglect, very much as his reputation has been cleared of calumnious attacks by his contemporaries. Near his former home at Mount Pleasant, New Jersey, stands a monument inscribed:

Heaven lifts its everlasting portals highAnd bids the pure in heart behold their God.

Bibliography

Andrews, William D. “Philip Freneau and Francis Hopkinson.” In American Literature, 1764-1789: The Revolutionary Years, edited by Everett Emerson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.

Elliott, Emory. “Philip Freneau: Poetry of Social Commitment.” In Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Leary, Lewis. “Philip Freneau.” In Major Writers of Early American Literature, edited by Everett Emerson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. “Antecedents: The Case of Freneau.” In The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961.

Ronnick, Michele Valerie. “A Note on the Text of Philip Freneau’s ’Columbus to Ferdinand’: From Plato to Seneca.” Early American Literature 29, no. 1 (1994): 81.

Tichi, Cecelia. New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans Through Whitman. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.

Wertheimer, Eric. “Commencement Ceremonies: History and Identity in ’The Rising Glory of America,’ 1771 and 1786.” Early American Literature 29, no. 1 (1994): 35.