Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
THE SOUTHERN ELEGIAC TRADITION
The editor of the first fairly comprehensive anthology of colonial
American verse, a book published within the past decade, states that the
southern provinces "developed no elegiac tradition." 102 He clearly had
not read much even of easily available southern printed poetry, not to
mention some remarkable manuscript pieces not really difficult to obtain,
for they are all in public repositories. But even if he had, from his definitions
and examples of the New England funeral elegy, one would agree
that the southeast produced "no such elegiac tradition" as did the saints of
Massachusetts and Connecticut. For strongly biblical in phrase, lugubrious
in tone, crabbed in figure and meter, at least as intricate and paradoxically
styled as the so-called Puritan sermon, the epitaph or elegy composed east
of the Hudson rarely was to be found, and then only among a few Presbyterians,
south of the Susquehannah. That is, such a poem as Samuell
Torrey's "Epitaph . .. Upon the Death of Mr William Tompson" had almost
no place in southern writing:
Here lies his corps, who, while he drew his breath,
He lived the lively portrature of Death,
A walking tomb, a living sepulcher,
In which blak melancholy did interr
A blessed soule, which god & nature have
By Death deliver'd from yt liveing grave.loa
The "communal" Puritan elegies, as Silverman characterizes those written
before 1720, have no real counterpart in the South. But the mourning
poem transformed to burlesque or satire, as Joseph Green's A Mournful
Lamentation (broadside ) of 1750, does have its parallel in the regions
from Maryland to Georgia. In the seventeenth century, when the Puritan
elegy was in its heyday, one recalls that in the South there were no presses
which might have printed any sort of belles lettres. Yet a few surviving
tombstone epitaphs and the two "elegies" on Nathaniel Bacon in this
period hint that there were many more verses written of these kinds. In
fact, as has already been noted, the author of the two on Bacon asserts
that they were only a pair among many on that particular subject written
in the one year 1676.
The truth is that a strong funeral elegiac tradition persists in the colonial
South, a double-edged tradition well anticipated or represented by the
two poems on Bacon. There are scores of examples of eighteenth-century
mourning poems in the South, gravestone or printed epitaphs and full-