Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

....
,-... .I ,-... .I ,-... .I Satire as a literary mode-from the classical origins to
the great English satirists whom the colonials knew well:
Butler, Dryden, Pope, Addison-had ever and always depended
more immediately on having readers than other forms of
literature had done. A lyric or an epic (and some essays and
novels) can wait, but the satire calls for laughter at once.
Colonial satirists seem to have gotten their response. Concerning
their effectiveness in the Southern colonies, about all that is
certain is that the newspapers published their prose and verse
regularly, and little else which pretended to be literary, and the
newspapers flourished ....
Thus drawing on a vein of satire and irony which was
familiar in England, the first generation of printing in the
Southern Colonies found ways to voice its annoyances, its wit,
and its confidence. Although not productive of memorable
writings, that generation does help to make intelligible the
plain-spoken independence of the next generation-the
generation of Jefferson and Patrick Henry and George Mason,
Carroll of Carrollton, Pinckneys, Rutledges ....
-CHARLES A. BARKER, American Convictions: Cycles of
Public Thought, 1600-1850 (Philadelphia, 1970),
pp. 198-199
And as there plenty grows
Of Laurell every where
Apollo's sacred tree,
You it may see
A poets browes
To crowne, that may sing there.
-MICHAEL DRAYTON, "To the Virginian Voyage"