Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature}
Principally Belletristic .
its author's best works and one of the best of colonial neoclassical poems.
The 1729 verses of "John Smith" on determining longitude have been
mentioned. Another poem possibly from Sterling's Irish period is A
Friend in Need is a Friend in Deed, or, A Project, at this Critical /unction,
to gain the Nation a hundred thousand Pounds per Annum from the Dutch:
by an Irish Whale Fishery, Inscrib'd to Arthur Dobbs, Esq. (Dublin 1737).
At least it is on a subject which was to become popular in the colonies, and
it is dedicated to a future southern governor. Compared with South Carolina
and Virginia, however, Maryland and its poets were little interested in
following the eighteenth-century fashion of celebrating or discussing scientific
problems or technology in verse.
Sterling contributed to the American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle
two Latin poems, one commending the soldiers participating in the Canadian
campaign, the other commending the Latin verse of John Beveridge
of Philadelphia which appeared in the same magazine. In the journal's
final issue, for October 1758, was printed "The 22d Ode of the first
Book of Horace imitated; and inscrib'd to the Lady of his late Excellency
SAMUEL OGLE, Esquire," anonymous but datelined from "Kent in
Maryland," undoubtedly composed by Sterling. The "christian hero" is
defined in stanza one and then depicted for his bravery against "the
French sword and Indian Knife," and the second stanza takes him through
Appalachian rocks, Canadian forests, and bleak Ontario. Stanza three presents
the narrator in meditation in Ogle's gardens when a hugh buffalo
suddenly rushes upon him, a creature such as the Ohio country or Virginia's
woods never saw. But the narrator-hero, protected by his virtue, strikes such
awe into the beast that it turns and flees. The eight-line iambic tetrameter
stanza does not seem entirely appropriate for the somewhat awkwardly
expressed progression in the poem. If William Byrd II had written this, or
Ebenezer Cook, one might suspect tongue-in-cheek relation or irony or
mock-heroic of some variety, but here there seem to be no clues suggesting
humorous intent. The piece is of some interest for the domesticated buffalo
inference, and for its patriotic assertions and suggestions that the rugged
grandeur of western American nature might contribute to sublime effects.232
In the verse of eighteenth-century Maryland are a number of printed
pieces on the translatio studti theme, showing a high consciousness of the
future of this part of the New World as it took up the torch of civilization
inferentially now merely sputtering in Europe. The province's poetry included
classical adaptation and imitation, and the meditative-moral usually
involved in the contemplation of the more beautiful or grander aspects of
American nature. Sensibility and sublimity were already there, as they were
in Britain. Most of these qualities were present also in the poetry composed
in other colonies, but the sophisticated high seriousness of Richard
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