Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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• 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 I472
· Literature, Principally Belletristic . life of William Byrd II, who died in I744, there centered in Williamsburg in public times two or three dozen professional men who were interested in the drama and in rhyming, among other things. And in the twenty-odd years after Byrd's death there continued to gather upon occasion in the little capital men, and a few women, who continued to express themselves in verse. These people normally resided in many different places from the banks of the Potomac to the North Carolina border counties or to the lower Eastern Shore, or west at least as far as Goochland and Albemarle. The lyric to ladies was the most persistent and obviously popular poem of eighteenth-century Virginia. At the very dawn of the period, in I700 or I701, no less a person than William and Mary College's planner and promoter, Governor Francis Nicholson, was pouring out his feeling in verse addressed to Lucy Burwell, an aristocratic young lady who would have none of him. Within the past generation some of his effusions have been printed from the manuscripts in the archives of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Along with the poetry went ardent letters from the middleaged suitor to the sixteen-year-old fair one. One poetic plea is sufficient to indicate his ability: Hasten to Lucy young and fair. Fly to her soft Engaging air. Say to her vertuous Self so rare Wast not yor youth in Coy disdain Think not yor beauties Pleasing reign By wayes of Rigor to Maintain. For thoh to Queens we homage owe And to the Goddesses with incense goe 'Tis for the Blessings they Bestow Neither do they require that we Should to their Courts and Altars flee But for our own felicity Thus if before it bee too late You bless me wth yr Marryed State In love you them will imitate And I to you shall Constant prove With Sacred Pledges of true Love Which Age nor time shall ever move.283 The carpe diem motif, though as old as the lyric form itself, here suggests the verse of the century in which Nicholson was born rather than that in which he was enditing. At about the same time, lines of a native Virginian writing in England, William Byrd II, are far less serious, almost vers de societe, celebrating the ladies promenading at Tunbridge in 1700 in much the same manner he later in 1719 used in paying witty and graceful tribute to various of the noble fair in T unbrigalia: or Tunbridge Miscellanies. 1473
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Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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