Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
of the period now known which compare with those of Samuel Sewall and
some of his Massachusetts neighbors. No body of southern verse is extant
comparable to that reprinted in Harrison T. Meserole's recent anthology of
Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, despite its title an almost entirely
New England representation. And it is probable that, allowing for known
and possible lost southern manuscript verses, there never was in quantity
and quality anything equal to the work of Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor,
and a few other seventeenth-century Puritan worthies.
But there was much more belletristic writing than even the indefatigable
Moses Coit Tyler was able to uncover. Irony, humor, and satire compare
favorably with any written elsewhere in British America, for George Alsop
and John Cotton of Queen's Creek are at least peers of Nathaniel Ward,
and the more incidental belletrists (historians, officials, voyagers ), as they
may called for the moment, handle the paradoxes of humor-satire at least
as well as their other New World contemporaries.
In the southern colonies the sense of place, of New World originality
or difference, becomes an aesthetic quality in writing in this century with
the first observers, Percy and Smith and Strachey. It is a sense of natural
abundance, of potential earthly paradise commented upon in earlier chapters.
Then quarrels among settlers which erupt into writing, especially
about the civil wars in Virginia and Maryland, sometimes carry a style
which is conscious art.
Seventeenth-century southern writing may indeed be primarily secular.
It also represents more nearly than that of New England the world from
which its authors came, the land of Elizabeth and the Jameses and the
Charleses and, perhaps almost as much, the land of Cromwell. It is in
several ways a very minor branch of the English literature of the period.
But there are differences other than the sense of place mentioned above.
For here south of the Susquehannah certain beliefs and theories and forms
brought from the Old World began to assume new artistic shapes, among
them the traditional ballad, the tall story, the regional or national dialect
implemented as style (though most of this last came in the next century),
even the charges of evil in red man or white neighbor.
THE EARLY LETTERS
Both a necessity and a comfort to the individual settler and to the
provincial official was the letter, certainly the most abundantly surviving
form of communication which may be frequently called belletristic.
Though addressed to an individual, the letter was usually intended for the
perusal of a circle of friends or colleagues. The Chesapeake colonists of
this century survive most clearly in their letters, and at the end of the