Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic '
At mid-century other Virginians who did not publish in provincial or
British journals expressed themselves in satire. One amusing example is
the epistolary exchange of two friends, Benjamin Waller (1716-1786)
and Colonel Henry Wood of Goochland (1696-1757). Waller, resident
of Williamsburg, was secretary of the colony and member of the House
of Burgesses, friend of the blacksmith Virginia poet Charles Hansford, and
a relative of the earlier English poet Edmund Waller. In the archives of
the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation are odd verses and rhymed letters
dated 1745 to about 1755, almost all by Wood to Waller. Most of the
verse rises little above doggerel, as in Wood's letter to his "Dear Brother
Bard" on Christmas Day 1752:
In Hudibrastic Stile I choose
Myself for some short time to loose
What tho' I get into a Maze
'Cause, Butlor like, Milton the great
Few Poets roughly imitate.
He goes on to warn Waller in jocular verses that when next they meet
the latter must bow, for Wood has just been commissioned a "Cornel of
Foot a noble Post Sir." In a postscript to this metrical epistle he sends
compliments to their mutual friend William Stith and mentions Joshua,
"Jemmy," and the Roman Horace. Earlier, on Candlemas Day 1745 /6, in
anapestic tetrameter couplets, Wood refers to the House of Burgesses and
its speaker and to their mutual friends Mercer and Bray and in a postscript
declares that though his verses are homespun they are at least original and
their meaning is clear. On December 4, 1753, Wood wrote a long versified
epistle, deriding Waller's attempts at verse and mentioning former Governor
Gooch, who had made Waller an "Armiger" (official who bore a
coat of arms? ) and several times referring to Don Quixote. On July 9,
1754, Wood wrote in prose, after a severe illness or paralytic stroke, mentioning
Waller's "poetical Epistle" dated the preceding January.
Though Waller's half of the exchange has not turned up, the Williamsburg
gentleman's patronage of poets such as Charles Hansford, what is
presumably his poem "Myrtilla to Damon" in the Gentleman's Magazine
(XXIX [May 1759J, 228-229 ), and the probability that he contributed
other anonymous or pseudonymous verses to the Virginia Gazette, not to
mention his possible part in the "Dinwiddianae" poems to be discussed in
a moment, mark him as a versifier yet to be investigated. The lines by
Wood are sometimes quite good, and they certainly indicate the truth of
a statement made earlier, that poems in manuscript were circulated freely
in the colonial South, in this case as in Byrd's and others' to be mentioned,
even after there were printing presses in the colonies. If "M yrtilla to
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