Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY VERSE :
INFLUENCES AND TYPES
Although Moses Coit Tyler virtually ignores eighteenth-century southern
verse except for that of Ebenezer Cook, a good deal of poetry or rhyme
was composed, some of it fairly good. As suggested in the discussions of
the satiric and elegiac above, it followed current British forms and to a
lesser extent British subject matter. In the early years of the century, in fact
all the way through to 1764 and beyond, there were produced and usually
printed pindarics, imitations or paraphrases of Horace, Virgilian eclogues
or georgics, amatory lyric verses and songs and laments, ballads and
fabliaux, and normally within these frameworks some meditative nature
poetry. Very little of the metaphysical remains, but at least a few poets
such as Samuel Davies show Herbert's influence. It was in the colonies as
in Britain an Augustan age, and the classics creep in everywhere. Unable
to adapt classical prosody, the versifiers sometimes attempted as jokes
(witness the Tuesday Club ) imitations of Spenser and what they believed
to be the ribaldries of Chaucer. Butler's hudibrastics, as already noticed,
were everywhere in satiric verse, and the poets borrowed other octosyllabic
lines from "1' Allegro" and "n Penseroso." Their blank verse indicates
Miltonic more than Elizabethan models.
The pastoral, used in both the satiric and the elegiac, might be employed
in eclogue form, as in Thomas Cradock's satiric "Maryland Eclogues," and
along with it went the dream-vision, as popular in verse as in prose. There
were songs, epigrams, riddles, paraphrases, and general light verse imita·
tive of what was being printed in Britain. Though there was no great religious
or devotional poetry, there were a number of moving hymns and
other devout lyrics by such men as John Wesley, James Reid, and Samuel
Davies which remind us that this was the great age of English hymn
writing, the age of the Wesleys, Toplady, Cowper, Watts, and Doddridge.
Anticipations of the romantic moods, subjects, and diction are here as
they are in the Britain of the time, in the meditative or rapturous visions
of nature, the kindred sublime, the melancholy graveyard verses. Pope is
not only imitated by the colonial poets and poetasters but directly addressed,
or after his death conventionally mourned in meter.
The diction is normally the artificial, characteristic of the English poetry
of the period. But as the decades succeed one another the return to the past
for language as well as form or subject and the close personal relationship
of poet and subject often produce a far from stilted imagery. The colloquial