Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH ·
Lewis and the patriotic equally sophisticated awareness of the potential
of the Chesapeake wilderness-paradise of James Sterling are hardly
paralleled in the verse of the other southern colonies of mid-century. When
one remembers with these two Cradock and Bacon, Hamilton and Green,
and lesser poetasters such as Adam Thomson and Thomas Brerewood, Jr.,
and dozens of other versifiers such as "Juba," he realizes that Maryland
between I700 and I764 had an unusually large number of educated men
who enjoyed writing in meter and who produced metrical literature which
is in subject matter and imagery and humor often peculiarly American.
THE VIRGINIA POETS
The poetic satire and the elegy in Virginia before the Revolution were
on the whole inferior in quality to those of Maryland, but in other forms
of poetry of the eighteenth century the more southern colony was represented
by a wider variety, some of it good but little really superior verse.
From Governor Francis Nicholson at the very beginning of the century to
I766, when the first era of the Virginia Gazette concluded, there were Virginians
who turned to metrical composition to express love and gallantry,
patriotism, religion, the interesting occasion, and other subjects close to
their hearts or representative of the favorite literary forms of their era.
Some of their lines remain in manuscript, others were first printed only
recently, but a number were printed within the century of their composition.
Virginia had no one to match Richard Lewis as neoclassical bard, but
the later Robert Bolling of Chellowe, definitely pre-Romantic in his tastes,
may show when his work has been collected and published that he is worthy
of attention as a sensitive and imaginative poet. Virginia also had college
professors such as William Dawson and Goronwy Owen who wrote with
grace and verve, and other lyricists in Byrd, Kimber (who wrote in other
colonies as well), and several pseudonymous contributors to the Gazette
such as the recently discovered James Reid. Samuel Davies, called the Virginia
Pindar, produced better than respectable verse even when he was not
composing hymns or other devout meditations. Charles Hansford's poems
are both patriotic and religious. There is plenty of evidence that prominent
public figures such as Richard Bland, Landon Carter, Thomas Burke, Benjamin
Waller, John Mercer, Godfrey Pole, Arthur Blackamore and George
Seagood, as well as the lesser-known Scottish Reverend John Lowe and
Dr. Mark Bannerman and the Reverend Richard Hewitt experimented
with meter, though as noted their best-known or even sole surviving poems
are most often satiric.
There seems to be no record in Virginia of a group of organized poetasters
such as the Annapolis Tuesday Club, but in the last two decades of the
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