A History of American Literature

Although it is generally said of the Puritans that they were actually hostile to all the arts, there is abundant proof that they had a liking for verse and a widespread inclination to try their hands at it. They wrote memorial verses of the most intricate and ingenious sorts, sometimes carving them in stone as epitaphs. There is less verse sprinkled through the unregenerate Morton’s “Canaan” than there is in the intolerant Ward’s “Cobler.” The old conservative never wrote more wisely than in this so-called “song”:

The first whole volume in English printed in the Western Hemisphere (printing of Spanish books in Mexico had long preceded) was “The Bay Psalm Book,” Cambridge, 1640. This represented a conscientious attempt to put into the service of worship a literal translation of the Psalms. The worst passages are all too frequently cited as evidence of the inability of the Puritans to compose or appreciate good verse. And this in spite of the often-quoted and charmingly written prose comment in the editors’ preface:

If therefore the verses are not alwayes so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect; let them consider that God’s Altar needs not our pollishings: Ex. 20. for wee have respected rather a plaine translation, then to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather then poetry, in translating the hebrew words into english language, and David’s poetry into english meetre; that soe wee may sing in Sion the Lords songs of prayse according to his owne will; untill hee take us from hence and wipe away all our teares, & bid us enter into our masters joye to sing eternall Halleluliahs.

Some historians, moreover, seem to derive satisfaction from quoting passages from Michael Wigglesworth’s (1631-1705) “Day of Doom” as added proof that the Puritans were never able to write verse that was beautiful or even graceful. It must be admitted that this grave and pretentious piece of work was hardly more lovely than the name of the author. Wigglesworth was a devoted Puritan who came to America at the age of seven; graduated from Harvard College; qualified to practice medicine; and then became a preacher, serving, with intermissions of ill health, as pastor in Malden, Massachusetts, from 1657 until his death in 1705. He was a gentle, kindly minister, unfailing in his care for both the bodies and the souls of his parishioners.

He had the “lurking propensity” for verse-writing which was common among the men of his time, but instead of venting it merely in the composing of acrostics, anagrams, and epitaphs, he dedicated it to the Lord in the writing of a sort of rimed sermon on the subject of the Day of Judgment. The full title reads, “The Day of Doom or, a Description Of the Great and Last Judgment with a short discourse about Eternity. Eccles. 12. 14. For God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.” It was printed, probably in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1662. The poem is composed of two hundred and twenty-four eight-line stanzas. After an invocation and the announcement of the day of doom, the dead come from their graves before the throne of Christ. There the “sheep” who have been chosen for salvation are placed on the right, and the wicked “goats” come in groups to hear the judge’s verdict. These include hypocrites, civil, honest men, those who died in youth before they were converted, those who were misled by the example of the good, those who did not understand the Bible, those who feared martyrdom more than hell-torment, those who thought salvation was hopeless, and, finally, those who died as babes. All are sternly answered from the throne, and all are swept off to a common eternal doom except the infants, for whom is reserved “the easiest room in hell.”

Two facts should be remembered in criticizing “The Day of Doom” as poetry. The first is that Wigglesworth wrote it consciously as a teacher and preacher and not as a poet. In his introduction he said:

The second point is that in writing a rimed sermon for Christian worshipers he had a model supplied him in the popular “Bay Psalm Book,” which had appeared some twenty years before and which was familiar to all the people who were likely to be his readers. The translators of the 121st Psalm wrote, for example:

And Wigglesworth took up the strain with

To any modern reader the use of this light-footed meter for so grave a subject seems utterly ill-considered, and the whole idea of the day of doom as he presented it seems so unnatural as to be amusing. But Wigglesworth was trying to write a rimed summary of what everybody thought, in a meter with which everybody was familiar, and he was unqualifiedly successful. A final verdict on Michael Wigglesworth is often superciliously pronounced on the basis of this one poem, or, if any further attention is conceded him, the worst of his remaining output is produced for evidence that he and all Puritan preachers were clumsy and prosaic verse-writers.

Yet in the never-quoted lines immediately following “The Day of Doom” – a poem without a title, on the vanity of human wishes – Michael Wigglesworth gave proofs of human kindliness and of poetic power. In these earnest lines Wigglesworth showed a mastery of fluent verse, a control of poetic imagery, and a gentle yearning for the souls’ welfare of his parishioners which is the utterance of the pastor rather than of the theologian. For a moment God ceases to be angry, Christ stands pleading without the gate, and the good pastor utters a poem upon the neglected theme “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”:

“The Day of Doom,” however, was far more popular than the better poetry that Wigglesworth wrote at other times. It was the most popular book of the century in America. People memorized its easy, jingling meter just as they might have memorized ballads or, at a later day, Mother Goose rimes; and the grim description became “the solace,” as Lowell says, “of every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to its premonitions of eternal combustion.” The popularity of “The Day of Doom” shows that in the very years when the Royalists were returning to power in England the Puritans were greatly in the majority in New England. The reaction marked by Morton, Ward, and Roger Williams was only beginning. Moreover, if it had been the only “poetry” of the period, we should have to admit that the Puritans were almost hopelessly unpoetical.

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) proves the contrary, and in doing so she proves how the love of beauty can manage to bloom under the bleakest skies. Her talent was assuredly a “flower in a crannied wall.” She was born in England in 1612 and was married at the age of sixteen, as girls often were in those days, to a man several years older, Simon Bradstreet. In 1630 she came to Massachusetts with her husband and her father. Both became eminent in the affairs of the colony. In the family they were doubtless sober and probably dull. Mrs. Bradstreet kept house under pioneer conditions in one place after another, and when still less than forty years old had become the mother of eight children. Yet somewhere in the rare moments of her crowded days – and one can imagine how far apart those moments must have been – she put into verse “a compleat Discourse and Description of The Four Elements, Constitutions, Ages of Man, Seasons of the Year; Together with an exact Epitome of the four Monarchies, viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman” [this means five long poems, and not two]; “also a dialogue between Old England and New concerning the late troubles; with divers other pleasant and serious poems.” All these she wrote without apparent thought of publication, for the purely artistic reason that she enjoyed doing so; and in 1650 – halfway between “The Bay Psalm Book” and “The Day of Doom" – they were taken over to London by a friend, and there put into print as the work of "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America.”

Poetry was more than a diversion for Anne Bradstreet; it must have been a passion. As a girl she had been allowed to read in the library of the Puritan Earl of Lincoln, over whose estate her father was steward. And here she had fallen under the spell of the lesser poets of her age, naturally not the dramatists, whom the Puritans opposed. So, after their fashion, and particularly in the fashion of a Frenchman, Du Bartas, whose works were popular in an English translation, she wrote her quaint “quarternions,” or poems on the four elements, the four seasons, the four ages, and the four “humours,” and capped them all with the four monarchies. These are interesting to the modern reader only as examples of how the human mind used to work. Chaucer had juggled with the same materials; Ben Jonson had been fascinated with them. It was a literary tradition to develop them one by one, to set them in debate against each other, and to interweave them into corresponding groups: childhood, water, winter, phlegm; youth, air, spring, blood; manhood, fire, summer, choler; and old age, earth, autumn, melancholy.

Yet her chief claim on our interest is founded on the shorter poems, in which she took least pride. In these she showed her real command of word and measure to express poetic thought. Her “Contemplations,” for example, is as poetic in thought as Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” or as Lanier’s “The Marshes of Glynn,” to which it stands in suggestive contrast (see pp. 161 and 357). The former two are on the idea that nature endures but man passes away. This was never long absent from the Puritan mind, but when it came to the ordinary Puritan it was likely to be cast into homely and prosaic verse, as in the epitaph:

Anne Bradstreet, taking the same observation, wrote with noble dignity:

Yet as a strictly Puritan poetess she did only one part of her work. She was even more interesting as an early champion of her sex. She did not go so far as to assert equality of the sexes; that was too far in advance of the age for her imagination. But she did contend that women should be given credit for whatever was worth “small praise.” This appears again and again in her shorter poems.

Naturally she was full of pride in the achievements of Queen Elizabeth, a pride which she expressed in a fine song “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess”:

Then follows a recital of Elizabeth’s proudest triumphs, and assertions of how far she surpassed Tomris, Dido, Cleopatra, Zenobya, and the conclusion:

Anne Bradstreet foreshadowed the “woman’s movement” of to-day by two full centuries, and thus showed how even the daughter of one Puritan governor of Massachusetts and the wife of another could be thinking and aspiring far in advance of her times.

BOOK LIST

General References

Otis, W. B. American Verse, 1625–1807. 1909. (A full and valuable bibliography appended.)

Tucker, S. M. In chap. ix of Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, Bk. I.

Tyler, M. C. A History of American Literature. Colonial Period (1607–1765), Vol. I, chaps. x, xi. 1878.

Individual Authors

The Bay Psalm Book. The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre, etc. 1640.

Available Editions

A Reprint, 1862.

Facsimile Reprint for the New England Society in the City of New York, 1903.

Collections

Cairns, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 73–81.

Duyckinck, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 16–18.

Stedman and Hutchinson. Library of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 211–216.

Michael Wigglesworth. The Day of Doom; or, a Description of the Great and Last Judgment, etc. (1662). Meat out of the Eater: or, Meditations concerning the necessity, end and usefulness of Afflictions unto God’s Children, etc. (1670). God’s Controversy with New England (1662). Vanity of Vanities (appended to 3d edition of The Day of Doom).

Available Editions

The Day of Doom, 1867.

God’s Controversy with New England. Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. Soc., 1871.

Biography

Memoir of Michael Wigglesworth. J. W. Dean. 1871. See also M. W.,* earliest poet among Harvard graduates. Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. Soc., 1895.

Collections

Boynton, Percy H. American Poetry, pp. 18–23, 598–600.

Cairns, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 163–177.

Duyckinck, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 57–59.

Stedman and Hutchinson. Library of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 3–19.

Anne Bradstreet. The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America, or Several Poems, compiled with great Variety of Wit and Learning, full of Delight – by a Gentlewoman in those parts. 1650.

Available Editions

The Club of Odd Volumes, 1897.

The Works of Anne Bradstreet, in Prose and Verse. J. H. Ellis, editor. 1867. This contains a valuable memoir.

The Works of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, together with her prose remains, and with an introduction by Charles Eliot Norton.

Biography and Criticism

Campbell, Helen. Anne Bradstreet and her Time. 1891.

Tyler, M. C. American Literature. Colonial Period, Vol. I, chap. x.

Collections

Boynton, Percy H. American Poetry, pp. 1–8, 594–598.

Cairns, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 146–164.

Duyckinck, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 47–52.

Stedman and Hutchinson. Library of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 311–315.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Confirm the comparison of meters in the “Bay Psalm Book” and “The Day of Doom.”

Read the opening and closing passages in “The Day of Doom” (Boynton, “American Poetry,” pp. 18–21) for the genuinely poetic material. Compare with Milton’s use of the same material in “Paradise Lost,” Bk. I.

Read Anne Bradstreet’s verses to Queen Elizabeth, the Prologue to the long poems, the rimed epistles to her husband, and the tributary poems of Nathaniel Ward and others (Boynton, “American Poetry,” pp. 1–13 passim) for the difference – even with her liberalism – between her point of view and that of the modern woman.