Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH'
British home government are in some instances revealing or charming
examples of the rhetorical styles of the periods in which they were written.
And the present-state-of-the-colony reports frequently develop into neat
little histories or promotion pamphlets with belletristic features.
Of the major southern colonial histories only that of Hartwell-Blair­
Chilton may in any sense be considered an official record. And it is at once
the least interesting and useful and well-written of the group. The personal
letter is at times a real work of art, as will be demonstrated, and from Jamestown
to the threshold of the Revolution reflects changing fashions in
epistolary communication, especially as these fashions are reflected in the
writing manuals of each age. TIle last wills and testaments of many thought­
ful men are frequently, especially in their preambles, little essays ex­
pressing in cadenced phrases the attitude toward living and dying of their
respective authors. Fiction, captivity and travel narration, and moral alle­
gories, in some way or to some extent purposeful, are in several respects
belletristic. And the few plays by colonial authors, perhaps all written with
propagandistic or at least generally satirical purpose, as has been seen in
the chapter just above, are in most respects representative of belles lettres.
Verse is composed at least from Jamestown, blatantly propagandistic,
purely belletristic, or sometimes a little of both. It took the forms charac­
teristic or popular in the age in which it was written, whatever stylistic
cultural lag it seems to have shown (at least to nineteenth- and twentieth­
century commentators) actually being qualities as characteristic of Eng­
land in the same period as of the colonies. That is, the sometimes labeled
"belated" euphuism or baroque style of George Alsop and John Cotton of
Queen's Creek in the 1660s and 1670S was in the same year popular in
British publications, though Milton and Dryden might be suggesting and
exemplifying new or different styles and forms. So in the eighteenth century
Ebenezer Cook and Richard Lewis and William Byrd as poets were
hardly old-fashioned. Byrd's verse was published in popular English
collections of the first quarter of the century, and Lewis' was printed
or reprinted repeatedly in the Gentleman's and other magazines as rep­
resentative Augustan poetry. When the three major southern colonial
Gazettes came into being in the 1720S and 1730s, they published both
contemporary British verse and locally written poetry. It has been difficult,
unless there are external clues or the subject is obviously colonial, to dis­
tinguish most of the New W orId lines from those of the Old W orId.
Translation from the classics, paraphrases of the Psalms, news ballads,
riddles, anagrams, lyrics to ladies, or verse narratives of the same kind might
have been written on either side of the Atlantic. Poems on the transtatio
studii theme, or the westward transit of culture, are likely to be colonial
but are not always so. Occasional verses--eulogies, elegies, nature poems,
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