Philip Morin Freneau Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Joseph Harrington

Critical Essay by Joseph Harrington

SOURCE: Harrington, Joseph. “Re-Birthing ‘America’: Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, and the Invention of Modern Poetics.” In Making America/Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper, edited by A. Robert Lee and W. M. Verhoeven, pp. 249-74. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.

In the following essay, Harrington discusses the shift in poetic sensibility between 1800 and 1830 described through the poetic differences between Freneau and Bryant.

… Not as a re-birth of values that had existed previously in America, but as America's way of producing a renaissance, by coming to its first maturity and affirming its rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and culture.

—F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance¹

Who reads a book by Philip Freneau? U.S. literary historians have tended to concur with Robert Pinsky's assessment that Freneau was “the first poet of the United States of America.”² However, one could do worse than the following for a consensus opinion of...
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