Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
from the 1720S to the Revolution, does there seem to have been a society
in which a number of literate men, and several women, felt impelled to
express themselves in meter. Even then southern prose, rhetorical and
satiric and occasional, is far more competent and frequent. Yet the considerable
body of verse here surveyed proves without question, with library
inventories to back it up, that the southern colonial thoroughly enjoyed
metrical expression, his own or someone else's.
Much more than his New England contemporary, the southern colonial
poet or poetaster followed contemporary English models, sometimes so
closely that there is no clue within the verse to indicate its American origin.
On the other hand, at least in the eighteenth century, he was developing
a humorous, whimsical semi-satiric tone which was distinct from its European
origins. And he was also learning to look about him and to describe
what he saw, fauna and flora, rivers and mountains and bays, red men and
white (still rarely black), which were in themselves quite different from
their parallels in Great Britain or New England. Thus there came to be
southern nature poetry, a southern elegy, and a southern satirical tradition
compounded of whimsy and tolerance more often than vehemence. The
southern colonial developed letter writing as an art, and in his journals
and diaries as well as his poems he is frequently more introspective than
intellectual historians have hitherto discovered.
Finally, southern colonial writing which is principally belletristic leads
straight into the literature of the first national period, and from there on
to Faulkner. Southern hedonism, southern violence, southern expression in
dialect, certain varieties of southern religion, southern backwoods and frontier
humor, southern affinities with certain aspects of Old World cerebration,
and pec:uliar combinations of the conservative and liberal in politics
and economics, are among the qualities evident in our own time which
show their roots in the writing from Maryland through Georgia in the
period ending between 1763 and the Declaration of Independence.