Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
description of the luxuriant countryside, somewhat suggestive of the earlier
Herrick and the later Keats in their sensuous presentation of natural
beauty in fecundity.
Lewis' final poem may be his 1734 elegy on former Governor Charles
Calvert already mentioned, preceded by verses celebrating St. David's Day,
a poem of 125 lines signed "Philo Cambrensis" and published in the
Philadelphia American Weekly Mercury for March 1733/34. The latter
shows an interest in the old story of Prince Madoc as the first explorer of
North America and considerable general interest in early Welsh history.
Classical allusion, variations in couplet form, and other features suggest
that it is Lewis'. After this date there is no more evidence that he wrote,
and there is proof that he died intestate in late March 1734, leaving a wife
and son. His death did not go unnoticed, for W. Byfield, "late of New
Castle upon Tine," published in the Pennsylvania Gazette of December 5,
I734, a lament on his passing. Conventional and mediocre verse, the
mourning lines at least show that he was highly regarded as a man of
letters.
Recent criticism has given Lewis greater reputation as a meditative poet
than as an elegist or satirist. Eugene 1. Huddleston, in a survey of slightly
later American topographical verse (in AL, XXXVIII [1966), 310 ff.)
points out that claims for Freneau as our first nature poet must be reassessed,
for Lewis appears a better nature poet than Freneau, perhaps the
best before Bryant. Incidentally, Lewis' work also renders absurd the
assertions made by a recent anthologist of colonial poetry that no southern
poet showed an interest in or affection for the natural world around him.
Lewis impressed not only contemporary colonials of Pennsylvania and
Maryland but English writers such as Edward Kimber, who quoted from
his "A Journey" and may have adapted some of his poetic nature imagery
for his own prose. The editors of British journals reprinted several of the
Marylander's poems. As the story of colonial American writing is unfolding
he is beginning to take his place among the significant versifiers not
simply of his colony or region but of all early British America.
The mid-eighteenth century in Maryland verse is the age of the Tuesday
Club burlesques and other satires and of the miscellaneous more serious
verse Jonas Green was printing in his Maryland Gazette, which
journal he revived in 1745. Green had become public printer for the province
in 1738, and gradually there gathered about him in Annapolis, and
through his acquaintance in Baltimore and Oxford and other smaller towns,
a remarkable group of intellectuals who en joyed writing. As they can now
be identified, his personal prose and poetic pieces, especially the latter,
seem all to be in the witty or satiric tradition. Green's predecessor Parks is
not known for poetic authorship at all, though his earlier newspaper car-