Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
and the dialectal figure or phrase or dialogue is fairly frequent. In rhymes
there is little innovation.
To get a general idea of the quantity and subjects of southern verse in this
period one should begin by going through J.A. Leo Lemay's A Calendar of
American Poetry in the Colonial Newspapers and Magazines and in the
Major English Magazines through I763 (Worcester, Mass., 1972), where
he cites hundreds of separate poems, nearly all of colonial composition.
But there are in addition a number of southern pieces or collections of
verses published separately in book or pamphlet or broadside form in this
country or in Britain, and a considerable group recently printed for the
first time or still remaining in manuscript.
THE MARYLAND POETS
By the time the first issues of Parks' Maryland Gazette appeared in 1727
the colony had already, in George Alsop and Ebenezer Cook, produced two
poets who had been published in London, and in its first years both Cook
and his contemporary Richard Lewis were composing good verse, some
of it printed in other places than the newspaper. Lewis at least by 1731-
1733 was reprinted from the Gazette in Pennsylvania, New York, and
London. As already noted, he and Cook were first known for their satires
and elegies, but Lewis was to enlarge his interests and become in technique
and subject matter the principal neoclassical poet of his colony and perhaps
of all America in the period before 1764.22 1
Little more need be said of Ebenezer Cook, for he has been considered
in his two major poetic roles, but Richard Lewis is far more significant
for other kinds of poetry than his satire Muscipula or his elegies on the
Calverts. Lewis (1700 ?-1734 ), schoolmaster in Annapolis, formerly instructor
or student at Eton and perhaps student at Balliol College, Oxford,
was in Maryland probably before 1719, working hard to promote a colonial
system of education and sending to the Royal Society reports of his scientific
observations. The Muscipula, his first known published poem (Annapolis,
1727 ), indicates that he was competent in his use of the heroic couplet
and was already varying his prosody with triplets and alexandrines and
other departures from the strict form. In 1729 there was published in the
American Weekly Mercury an anonymous poem of forty-three lines developing
the translatio mundi or studii idea of Bishop Berkeley made
practically popular in his "Verses on the Prospect of Planting the Arts and
Sciences in America," though the idea itself is as old as western settlement.
Its motif and diction cause Lemay to assign it to Lewis' hand. Perhaps more
certainly Lewis' is the anonymous undated poem on the launching of the
Maryland-Merchant at Annapolis, verses published in the Maryland Ga-
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