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Timothy Dwight |
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It is possible to make a modest claim for Timothy Dwight as a poet, but with the proviso that he was a poet only incidentally, in the way of the eighteenth-century man of letters who used the various literary genres selectively in the service of extraliterary ends. He was always something else first, whether teacher, pastor, politician, or college president. His verse (even in representative selections) has disappeared almost entirely from comprehensive college anthologies, and what commentary one finds belongs more to historical scholarship than to literary criticism. One recent editor does, however, include Dwight in "a major-figure anthology of American poetry in the colonial and early national periods," the other figures being Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Philip Freneau, and William Cullen Bryant. Jane Donahue Eberwein believes that these five "were all fine writers and made enduring contributions to American literature" and so has "tried to select and emphasize their best poems, confident that literary value transcends historical considerations." Even so, she concedes that "Dwight's main interest for the modern reader may well be his paradoxical situation as a transitional figure who managed, fairly successfully, to express latently Puritan ideas in the language of the Age of Reason."
Timothy Dwight was a member of a network of families that, connected by religious and political interests as well as by blood and marriage, produced many leaders or had ready access to those in power.
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