References
1 Bradstreet, A. (1650). The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America. London. Stephen Bowtell at the sign of the Bible in Popes Head-Alley. Early English Books Online. Accessed December 27, 2021. http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/books/tenth-muse-lately-sprung-up-america-severall/docview/2240958787/se-2?accountid=14541
2 Bradstreet, A. (1678). Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight. Boston, John Foster. Early English Books Online. Accessed December 27, 2021. http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/books/several-poems-compiled-with-great-variety-wit/docview/2240923245/se-2?accountid=14541
3 Derounian-Stodola, K. (1990). “The Excellency of the Inferior Sex”: The Commendatory Writings on Anne Bradstreet. Studies in Puritan Spirituality 1: 129–147.
4 Eberwein, J.D. (1991). “Civil War and Bradstreet’s ‘Monarchies’.” Early American Literature 26 (2): 119–144.
5 Egan, J. (2011). Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
6 Fallon, S. (2018). Lately sprung up in America: Anne Bradstreet’s untimely worldmaking. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18 (4): 100–123.
7 Fergusson, E.G. (1768). The dream. Ed. C.Wigginton. Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life. Accessed June 14, 2021. http://commonplace.online/article/dream-1768-1790-elizabeth-graeme-fergusson
8 Juana Inés De La Cruz, S. (1997). Poems, Protest, and a Dream. Trans. M.S. Peden. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
9 Jung, S. (2009). The Fragmentary Poetic: Eighteenth-Century Uses of an Experimental Mode. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press.
10 Morton, S.W. (1790). Ouâbi: Or the Virtues of Nature. Boston. America’s Historical Imprints. Accessed December 27, 2021. https://docs.newsbank.com/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.newsbank.com:EAIX&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=0F301AA716D62930&svc_dat=Evans:eaidoc&req_dat=0D7AB4CAB745C82A.
11 Morton, S.W. (1797). Beacon Hill. A Local Poem. Boston. America’s Historical Imprints. Accessed December 27, 2021. https://docs.newsbank.com/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.newsbank.com:EAIX&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=0F2FD4ACCC0262F8&svc_dat=Evans:eaidoc&req_dat=0D7AB4CAB745C82A.
12 Morton, S.W. (1799). The Virtues of Society. Boston. America's Historical Imprints. Accessed December 27, 2021. https://docs.newsbank.com/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.newsbank.com:EAIX&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=0F301A1A14FA7FA8&svc_dat=Evans:eaidoc&req_dat=0D7AB4CAB745C82A.
13 Phillips, C.N. (2011). Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
14 Pizan, C. (1982). The Book of the City of Ladies. Trans. E.J. Richards. New York: Persea Books.
15 Pollard, R. (1784). Lady Harriet Ackland [Print]. The British Museum, London, UK. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1854-1020-65.
16 Popper, N. (2012). Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
17 Ralegh, W. (1652). The Historie of the World in Five Bookes. London: R. Best, Jo. Place & Sam. Cartwright. Early English Books Online. Accessed December 27, 2021. http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url= https://www.proquest.com/books/historie-world-five-bookes-1-intreating-beginning/docview/2240908945/se-2?accountid=14541.
18 Ramachandran, A. (2015). The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
19 Stronk, J.P. (2017). Semiramis’ Legacy: The History of Persia according to Diodorus of Sicily. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
20 Suzuki, M. (2009). What’s political in seventeenth-century women’s political writing? Literature Compass 6/4: 927–941.
21 Webster, N. (1797). An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking. 12th edition. Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin. America's Historical Imprints. Accessed December 27, 2021. https://docs.newsbank.com/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.newsbank.com:EAIX&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=0F2FD4C69802F130&svc_dat=Evans:eaidoc&req_dat=0D7AB4CAB745C82A.
22 Wheatley, P. (2001). Complete Writings. Ed. V.Carretta. London: Penguin Books.
23 Wiseman, S. (2006). Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
24 Wright, G. (2013). Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600–1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print. New York: Cambridge University Press.
3 Before Poetry: Revival Verse and Sermonic Address in Eighteenth-Century America
Wendy Raphael RobertsState University of New York at Albany
Verse abounded in eighteenth-century British North America. From almanacs to newspapers, from school notebooks to commonplace books, from letters to literary salons, from hymnbooks to broadsides, from sermons to plays, from religious revivals to taverns, from funerals to executions to barn dances, early American culture was saturated with poetry. Some poetry spread news, some entertained with fantastic and sensational accounts of travel or crime, some tantalized with local gossip, some urged moral reflection. Other poetry memorialized neighbors, loved ones, and events, or served as literary games to solidify friendships, romances, or social status. Some poetry activated and sustained new religious forms and communities; some measured intellectual capacity and served as litmus tests for civilizations. The forms, occasions, and uses of eighteenth-century poetry felt right to the people who lived with and through these vibrant verse practices, and they often had a very different sense of what made poetry good, or even what made poetry poetry than later generations of poets and scholars.
The notion of poetry itself as a distinct genre, as well as the proper way to read it, has been an open question for scholars of historic poetics. Virginia Jackson argues that the “lyricization of poetry” occurred unevenly over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and effectively subsumed a whole field of verse genres into what we now recognize as lyric poetry—or simply poetry (2005). Reading lyrically rather than historically, she argues, eclipses the diverse verse forms that came before. Attending to the various forms, media, and communities in their specificity has helped early American scholars recuperate forgotten ways of reading and engaging with verse.
The many people who wrote, printed, declaimed, sang, and exchanged verse did so in a context in which poetry was widely considered crucial to politics and society. Much of eighteenth-century British North American poetry aimed to do things in the world not to earn the respect of posterity as a participant in a great literary tradition. Max Cavitch traces one of the most enduring occasional verse forms, the elegy, and reveals how mourning verse practices were essential to nation building (2007). Colin Wells shows how a vigorous political poetry, now largely forgotten, actively shaped political opinions and institutions during the American Revolution and early United States (2018). David Shields’s groundbreaking work on the centrality of manuscript poetry to early American culture argues that eighteenth-century poetry has been largely missing from