3 - How to Read Early American Poetry

Summary

How do you get to grips with an early American poem? A good toolbox of critical approaches and perspectives will include formal analysis, material texts, cultural work, race and gender, reception and reading practices, together with an inquisitiveness about the various ways in which a poem makes connections. It also helps to know some of the key uses to which poetry was put by English-speaking colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Worn pages show Puritan readers using devotional poems to support their daily piety in early New England. Manuscript elegies offered consolation to bereaved family members, and published broadsides shaped the values of the wider community. Commemorating a public figure could enable a socially marginalized writer, such as Phillis Wheatley, to find an authoritative poetic voice. Epistolary exchanges of poems among coteries allowed some educated eighteenth-century women to pursue their friendships and intellectual development despite being barred from public careers. Throughout the period, allusions ranging from homage to parody, illustrate the transatlantic adaptation of British genres and styles to American circumstances. In the revolutionary period, anonymous and ephemeral newsprint poetry whipped up patriotic feeling, while a handful of poets published their work in elegant volumes.