The American Spirit in Literature: A Chronicle of Great InterpretersPerry, Bliss
History
The American Spirit in Literature: A Chronicle of Great Interpreters
Perry, Bliss
American literature -- History and criticism
Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers have
imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little
parson. But no living poet can move his readers to the fascinated horror
once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless
gaze into the future of the soul's destiny.
Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other
verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are
not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic
themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in England, the
daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet,
chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moralizing poets of England
and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today
the inevitable outcome of her own experience in the New World. For
readers who like roughly mischievous satire, of a type initiated in
England by Bishop Hall and Donne, there is The Simple Cobbler of Agawam
written by the roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a
dozen years in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcely
more "American" than the satire upon German professors in Sartor
Resartus is "German." Like Charles Dickens's American Notes, Ward's give
the reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of the sights and the
talk and the personages of the transatlantic world.
Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have
lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are narratives
of struggles with the Indians. The image of the "bloody savage" has
always hovered in the background of the American imagination. Our boys
and girls have "played Indian" from the beginning, and the actual Indian
is still found, as for three hundred years past, upon the frontier
fringe of our civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like
Parkman, poets like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material
offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with
the scribbled story of colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain
narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the
inevitable alienation of the two races and the doom of the native.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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