The First Century of New England Verse (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

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Excerpt from The First Century of New England Verse

In my fathomless nalveté I was not content simply to present the new discoveries; I felt I needed to find out all that had hitherto been known about our early verse, so that I could see the new parts in their proper setting and perspec tive. The results were disastrous for my spare time and made necessary a thorough revision of my leisurely plans, for it soon became apparent that previous surveys and bibliographies were unacquainted not only with the un published verse but also with a large part of the printed verse. As a result, many of the literary judgments andgeneral conclusions were almost worthless, since they left out of account so much of our finest verse (some of which flatly contradicts their material and critical statements) and gave undue emphasis to certain well-known poems which are strictly mediocre or worse.

The list of previously known Puritan poets was compiled in an amusingly haphazard fashion more than a century ago. An anonymous reviewer in the American Quarterly Review of December, 1827, wrote the first survey of Puritan verse which I have been able to find, including whatever had come to his attention. Leaning heavily on this article, but expanding its contents, Samuel Kettell two years later made the second survey in the introduction to his Specimens of American Poetry, and there we had the almost immutable canon of thirty-odd writers, impartially chosen from among the good, indifferent, and bad versifiers of the period, on which no one has tried to improve except by reduction or by occasional single additions. Moses Coit Tyler's noted History of American Literature, 1878, added not one new name of the slightest importance (though his critical exam ination is on a far higher plane), nor did the Cambridge History of American Literature of over forty years later, nor any of the lesser surveys. Even the surveys and bibliog raphies specifically concerned with the early verse added very little.

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