Philip Morin Freneau Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Phillip Round

Critical Essay by Phillip Round

SOURCE: Round, Phillip. “‘The Posture That We Give the Dead’: Freneau's ‘Indian Burying Ground’ in Ethnohistorical Context.” Arizona Quarterly 50, no. 3 (autumn 1994): 1-30.

In the following essay, Round explores Freneau's poem “Indian Burying Ground” in the context of both Christian and Native American mythology, focusing on Freneau's changing use of the figure of the Native American as an emblem of American culture.

Philip Freneau's “Lines Occasioned by a Visit to an Old Indian Burying Ground” (1787) is most often read as an imitation of a British graveyard poem—its Native American subject, “merely a ruse behind which Freneau questions the Christian mythology of death.”¹ But although Freneau's poem does echo William Collins' “Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Thomson” (1749), its cultural resonance is more fully understood within a local array of post-revolutionary and post-colonial rhetoric and poetics. Likewise, its Native American subject is no rhetorical “ruse,” but...
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