POETS

"Make room, make room...!"

ANTIMASQUE:

AMERICA'S FIRST POETRY

IN ENGLISH

NOTE: The Works Cited in this essay are fully listed at the end of this website's second article by Jack Dempsey, "Reading The Revels"---That is, Sources/Links, and Sources 2

When any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State such as he are not permitted to exist: the law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our souls' health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers---Plato, The Republic, c. 390 B.C.: 99-100

Who is North America's first poet in English? What is America's first English poem, and can we decide these things with any certainty? As we close the millennium that made English the dominant language on this continent, does anybody care? What will the answers to these questions tell about the earliest colonization of what became The United States? What will they tell about America after 500 years of that story?

It may be that research will place before us no single indisputable name or poem's title for these unclaimed American distinctions. We may also wonder why America should care at all, when Western civilization in general has not missed much---or has it?---being scarcely aware of its own first identifiable poet and her works. (It was a woman, a priestess named Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Ur; who composed erotic lyrics as part of her culture's high worship of its Deities---see Qualls-Corbett.) Perhaps Americans would learn worthwhile things in Greece, where the merest informal recitation of lines from Homer will draw a crowd of all ages and put them in a trance; or in Italy, where a clear majority know at least that old Virgil sang the Gods-given, Roman right to rule for the house of Augustus. (NOTE 1)

Maybe America lost track of its "first English poet" because the colonies, especially in Puritan and Revolutionary times, so deliberately and thoroughly broke with Old World traditions, and poets find it hard to "amount to much" without tradition. But again, did America really make the cultural breaks it thinks it made in this regard? Doesn't its indifference (and sometimes, exile) for poets replicate precisely the contemptuous views of the Old World's Plato, quoted above? As Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. remarked at a tiny grief-gathering in New York City years ago, upon the corporate end of the esteemed Grove Press---Here concern for poetry is "like caring about lacrosse.

But we will find that, as we do explore this in detail, the identity of the person most deserving of the title "first American poet in English" will also bring it home to us why most Americans (even teachers of English) have scarce a good clue about these questions. (NOTE 2)

Literate Western cultures since the honey-tongued "Athenian Bee" have described poesy and its practitioners with a language of mixed fear and contempt. For the author of the toweringly influential The Republic, a work at the very fountainhead of scholarly tradition, the intolerable creations and influences of poets were too likely to have bad effect upon "our guardians" (meaning the combined manpower of the state and senior male property-owning authorities). Too much poetry or too much credence in it would make them "too excitable and effeminate" (84; qtd. further below). Cicero, as Rome's most influential inheritor of Western literary cultural tradition, largely followed his Greek forerunners. For Cicero the poet's definitive endowment was "ardour of imagination," "something similar to frenzy" (De Oratore 275). The poet was supposedly given more than others to "believing" in "fictions" (a term treated below), and even worse, was likely to lead others to believe that there was "substance" to what he/she had to say. Amid the demands of the "real" world as defined by emperors, popes, patriarchs and property, poets and poetry "savor[ed] of madness" when listeners were so overpowered that they lost their true sense of things "important" in the world. No sunshine was to be wasted upon what authorities deemed "empty and ridiculous" language, mere "volubility of words" (147), as opposed to their own well-reasoned and long-enduring plans for propagandizing and/or forcing populations into profitable worldwide empires: "culture" as an elite ruling over obedient warriors, women and laborers. (NOTES 3 and 4)

Societies across historical time and cultural difference have tried to explain this uniquely "overwhelming" power ascribed to poetic language, as a function of everything from meter to "proper morality." The constant has been the anxiety that, as William Webbe (for example) put it in his Discourse of English Poetry (1586), "an apt composition of wordes or clauses, draw[s] as it were by force the hearers' eares even whither soever it listeth...Plato affirmeth [this] to be...an enchantment, as it were to persuade them anything whether they would or no" (spelling modernized, emphasis added: rpt. in Arber ed.) (NOTE 5)

But how should we proceed to search for America's first English poet and poetry? How should we define the crucial terms? (NOTE 6)

"First" here will mean the earliest chronological year in which a given writer composed---not necessarily published---the verse in question.

"American" is of course more difficult to define, and here is no claim to have reached an "objective" standard. But the attempt is necessary. So, here, the term (like "poetry" below) is meant to function as inclusively as possible in our search. "American" will here mean poetry written by an individual who had physical contact with the North American land-mass---who was here, even if only for a day. Thus, "American" poetry will be, in the highest priority of its communication, concerned with North America---It qualifies as "American" because the clear majority of the referents for its words/signifiers are here on this continent; and because, for its (broadly-conceived) intended audience of people who speak, read and write English, most of its linguistic meanings, emotional impact(s), and other "reasons and rewards for reading it," if any, derive from and "depend" upon North American land, peoples, and/or history. The "American" poet knows and is consciously dealing with the fact that he/she is "addressing" America, as a subject of poetry and, perhaps most desirably, for the people(s) on that land.

But why stipulate that "American" poetry can only have come from somebody who was here? Couldn't a Wampanoag write "Italian" poetry if he/she adhered as strictly as anybody else to Italian poetic conventions and subject-matter? In most-inclusive terms---Probably. But few European people would become insistent that a Wampanoag who had never been to Europe had actually made the true full grade of authenticity. Unless we really are as utterly circumscribed by language as some critics claim (previous footnote), it seems to defy "sense" that a Wampanoag could equal or surpass an Italian person at "the most authentic possible" Italian poetry. (NOTE 7)

Perhaps we lay hold of something if, and as, we similarly grant that no poetry could be more "authentically American" than that composed by Native Americans, in their own languages. This is most obvious because even with all arguments about the obstructions of language factored in, "Native people" means that they were here the longest. "Authentic American" must have something to do with being here. Even if all Native peoples crossing the Bering Straits were blinded more by preexisting language than by snow, we know that their languages evolved, like everything else over time, on this land. Those languages grew (the land and its life demanded new sounds/signifiers), and changed (an existing idea/word had to be modified in the light of unfamiliar experience with "reality").

Their languages, then, took on "American authenticity" as they became more able to describe, particularize, or embody the "facts and flavors" of this continent, of this place and no other. In fact, both Native languages and English will more or less forever be in this process. "American" language began when any tongue began to tell about this place, about these peoples and creatures and land, to the degree of particularity that they could not be "blurred into" or "mistaken" for any other. "American" means there were/are actual referents, there, in that place, corresponding to the words/symbols (whatever they may be) in a poem's communication. "American" language denotes and communicates, through the imperfect lens of language, America and American entities as such. An "American poetry in English" must do the same job as every other "American language." (NOTE 8)

As for "poem" and/or "poetry"---In order to keep our considerations as open as we can, we should employ as little as possible "expert" theory or definition. For now let us think not-too-rigidly of "poetry" or "the poetic" as a quality in or achieved by language; and of a "poem" as an at least-apparently "finished" or completed "unit" of communication or expression. The court of consideration can remain wider if, as we survey the contending verses, we absorb from them the differences in conception, and so in results, of "American poetry." We must not exclude the kinds of verse written for "practical" reasons (for example, to "advertise" America, to aid the memory, etc.) nor valorize verses born out of more clearly intellectual, moral, or (as they say) "purely artistic" intent. The admired defender of "ancient learning" in England's "battle of the books," Sir William Temple, cautioned that "After all, the utmost that can be achieved or, I think, pretended by any rules in this art is but to hinder some men from being very ill poets, but not to make any man a very good one" (Of Poetry, 550). The reader must decide when and where both poetry and poem emerge.

But it may not predetermine too much if we do ask for a certain level of "artistic preconception" from contenders. If we know something of how these authors conceived their own actions in taking up the poet's pen, we may the better explain where each of us first sees those forever-arguable entities, the true poem and truly poetic.

At least within the most anciently-known and widely-accepted Western European definitions, a "poet" has been conceived as a "maker," and a "poem" a product of language "made or created" (Oxford English Dictionary). Poetry is some kind of "effect of language" that a person consciously sets out to produce, rather than an apparently-accidental "indefinable quality." Ben Jonson, like his whole generation influenced by Sir Philip Sidney (below), reflected that a poem was not only made---it "feigneth and formeth a fable." "The fable and fiction" were for him "the form and soul" of the art ("What Is A Poet?" in Timber, 1641). Many a contemporary essayist (here, Owen Felltham) agreed that "the words being rather the drossy part, [the] conceit I take to be the principal" (Resolves, 1628: "Of Poets and Poetry"). We can gain useful tools with a brief further look at conceptions of poetry during these English decades between "Discovery" and the 1620s-40s, when English texts about America began to burgeon.

The question was approached from a number of directions, such as whether "true poetry" should have a "Classical" form, should have a particular meter if one at all, should be "moral" or, necessarily, no more than whimsy. Certainly most often, poetry was recognized as something "above" or at least different from "the level of ordinary prose" (OED): poetry stands distinct from ordinary language and writing because it communicates "something more" than the literal sense or sum of words. It is something not always "in" the meaning and/or the form; yet it may require interplay between both to be known at all. Perhaps the above demands for "a well-crafted conceit" near the heart of "true poetry" emerged from this necessity to say more than just literal "reference" can say on its own.

Cicero's De Oratore, a most influential text in Europe's Renaissance, came to this problem in exploring the orator's and the poet's need, as potent communicators, to "illustrate and adorn" their speech with words having "metaphorical" qualities. This became necessary when literal language was found inadequate for experience, "when that which can scarcely be signified by its proper word" had to be somehow communicated, "that the whole nature of any action or design...be more significantly expressed" (376-77, emphasis added).

An English approach to this came from Arthur Golding's 1567 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (a "mythological handbook" for would-be poets including "a short survey...of the nature and value of true poesy"). For Golding, poetry is language so arranged that the reader must "seek a further meaning than the letter gives to see," in order to claim that she/he has fully understood or plumbed the intended message(s) of the words ("Epistle" XV, l. 542; text in Kermode 521). Poetry for Golding is what the reader experiences through this process of seeking.

Sir Philip Sidney's watershed Apology or Defence of Poetry (printed 1595), terms poetry "an imitation," "a speaking picture" (110); an "image" as distinct from "the philosopher's word" (116). For Sidney, as for Greek Aristotle and Roman Horace, poetry was usually both teacher and entertainer, working by imitation (mimesis) and "fiction" (mythos---Howell 158-160; Goldman 68). Sidney's purpose is defense rather than theory, and he does not pursue what radically distinguishes "poetic language" from other forms of it. But he does contrast what he conceives as poetry, with its origins in "divine delightfulness," and a "school art" that he says "philosophers" later made (141). Sidney gently elevates (or perhaps restores) poetic language to the status of religious experience, suggesting that despite the many kinds of hostility to it described in his essay, poetry merits mention in the same breath with the Bible and its Psalms. The Psalms are poetry (106), "nothing but Songs":

For what else is the awaking [of King David's] musical instruments, the often and free changing of persons, his notable prosopopeias [personifications], when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in his majesty, his telling of the beasts' joyfulness, and hills' leaping, but a heavenly poesy, wherein he showeth himself almost a lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith?

The "definition" is itself an imitation: "poetry" is something that feels like hearing David's instruments animistically "awaken," it is like what one may feel in imagining "God," or "the beasts' joyfulness, and hills' leaping." Consistent with our concept here of "American," it was these pictures, crafted into a conceit, that Sidney selected, in order to make "art" from his own urgent surety that that conceit would replicate, in others, what he felt in the presence of his "object" ("poetry").

As we seek more conceptions of "poetry" by the earliest English generations whose offspring colonized America---a period which J. W. H. Atkins' detailed survey found "vague and confused" (138), full of "confusion and poverty of ideas concerning poetry" (156)---we find that many speak in "imitative" terms like the above, of a poetry that reproduces what it strives to describe. Others, for example George Gascoigne's 1575 Notes on English Verse, take a technical approach to recognizing "true poetry" and debate the need for and effects of various techniques of rhetoric in achieving it; usually specifying (in Gascoigne's words) the "most necessarie poynt...to ground [a 'delectable poem'] upon some fine invention" (31). The demand for deliberate craft and a conceit seems to be consistent. But Gascoigne's adjectives (delectable, fine) promise more than anything else to take us into wholly subjective realms.

Another trend sought to identify poetry (or rather, to debate its right to exist) according to moral and/or social agendas. Spanish Catholic Father Jose de Acosta's magisterial Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1588-9) herded together "vain philosophers," "Greeks and Romans," Native Americans and "poets" en masse and proclaimed them "heathens" all, because of the idolatrous confusion they supposedly shared regarding Creator and created thing, born of an "inordinate" love of beauty. On not dissimilar grounds, humanist educators generally regarded poetry as "unwholesome for young boys" and suffered anxiety over "the problem of poetic content" in the Classical authors' texts they so admired (Halpern 47). Poets, like "fire, wind, swift air...stars...[and] the beauty of these things," were dangerously likely to lure the young from duty to God and Empire.

Puritans too, according to Robert Daly (God's Altar 55), strove to define and enjoy poetry as "descriptions of God's world, not creations of the poet's fancy." They had something in common with Anglican readers of The Book of Common Prayer, which (like The Bible's Luke I: 46-55) celebrates the "scattering" of "the proud in the imagination of their hearts." The "growth of Puritan feeling...challenged anew the status and value of poetry" (Atkins 102), and its selfstyled "new creatures" reborn in Biblical literalism became explicitly anxious that, without incessant pounding upon the public psyche, people might resort to imaginative thoughts of their own._ Either that, or "frothy bumbasted words" themselves would break their constant attention to "God" (Higginson's New England's Plantation in Force 1:12). (NOTE 9)

The Ramist revolution in rhetoric of that day, furthermore, had "moved" poetry to a relatively humble place within a scholar's or speaker's inventio. If all went well in the next few Protestant-political decades, poetry in a Puritan world would be considered less the "prideful" ability to "make" or "create," and more the ability (from Jehovah alone) merely "to come upon," "discover" or "lay open to view" His Works and their power to evangelize.

Poetry for this "school" was to be one flank of transnational Puritan "cultural reform" in favor of Biblical values. As Perry Miller sums it up, a Puritan usually "expected that the example set by the Classical poets might guide him to achieve a higher virtue in life...[Poetry should be] a speculum or compendium of the profoundest spiritual mysteries drawn from the most diverse learnings. " And yet, for all that, Miller concludes that "most of them probably gave it little consideration as an art...and remained curiously indifferent to the quintissential breath and finer spirit of the poetic idiom" (Puritans II: 546). We may agree with Bercovitch (2) that Miller "drastically underrated" the Puritan "aesthetic dimension"; but "indifferent" still seems a strange term for people who, if they could have (as A. L. Rowse remarked), would have shut down Shakespeare (A Biography 71). Even the great Renaissance expositor of the "idols of the tribe" Sir Francis Bacon, though he granted that poetry was more than "wine of devils" (Essays, rpt. in Witherspoon/Warnke 40), demanded that its matrix "imagination" be held a subservient handmaid to his definition of "reason"; and "not to oppress it" (qtd. in Howell 157).

Our findings then? "Poetry" as the effect of a "conceit" crafted out of language, that powerfully communicates (that is, replicates in the reader) the effects of coming to perceive, understand, even feel his/her chosen experience, subject, etc. Not forgetting "poetry" as language simply made "delectable," technically sophisticated, socially useful---These were the most agreed-upon concepts at the time of the English birth of American letters.

We should add two of the broadest: George Puttenham's 1589 Arte of English Poesie---although it shared some of the fears seen above and was cited at times by Puritans against the liberal arts (Hammond 9)---described poetry as simply "any witty or delicate conceit" (qtd. in Atkins 160). Edmund Spenser, like a number of "masters," combined all these definitions. For him poetry was "no art, but a divine gift and heavenly instinct," "adorned" with but not "gotten" by "labour and learning," a language touched with "a certain enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration." Spenser's multiple aims hopefully led, he wrote, toward the "fashioning [of] a gentleman," and instilled in him approved moral and social "doctrine by example" (his unpublished English Poet: see Maclean, ed., Faerie Queene 427).

And so we turn to contending examples from primary sources.

It should be mentioned that the learned young scholar Stephen Parmenius, born in Hungary c.1560 and eventually a member of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's 1583 expedition to North America, might have seized the title of "America's first English poet" with relative ease. His American visit came earlier than any (known) poetic contender, and he was, as Quinn and others conclude, without question a "maker" quite likely capable of the "epic of the exploration of eastern North America by the English" (Quinn 3), which he fully intended to write upon seeing the place (and that is why he took ship with Gilbert).

Unfortunately, Parmenius drowned when his ship ran aground off Sable Island (Gilbert's ship, overloaded with weaponry, disappeared on the same voyage home). Secondly, though some of Parmenius' appreciable compositions survived him, these were all pre-American, and written in Latin. Early English-American letters would not have suffered for gaining Parmenius' verse, woven with spiritual as well as geographical explorations, the former including Hermeticist theories of "the dual nature of the function of the human soul" (Quinn 35) that were much debated during the Renaissance. Parmenius imagined himself a Virgil's role in the budding Empire, and filled early pieces with "subjected foreign peoples" and storm-tossed ships:

Now having launched our Ship we plough across

The Ocean; now may you provide fair winds,

Fair goddess. Be both poop and prow to us,

Be our ship's anchor and direct the sails

Of this our craft in all her voyaging....

[1575 poem to Queen Elizabeth, trans. from Latin by and in Quinn, 10]

For all this, however, when Parmenius actually came to write (still on ship off the coast of the Newfoundland), he tried to warm up with several letters home. The expedition (focused on mineral wealth) had so far seen "only the barren shoreland" and failed to penetrate the "thick interior forest": "the wild, impenetrable woods, the high, bare headlands, the dubious minerals, the plentiful fish, the absence of native inhabitants---all these added up to very little" for Parmenius (Quinn 55-6: The "absent" Native people were Beothuk, already despised for refusing European trade and most other contact). Parmenius wrote: "Now I ought to tell you about the customs, territories, and inhabitants; and yet what am I to say, my dear Hakluyt, when I see nothing but desolation?"

Heck of a try. Poetry lost that day perhaps but, as will appear in relevant relation to this story, a major theme of Euro-American art was born.

The elder Richard Hakluyt's editorial efforts to improve (and make more convincing to investors) the writings about America---which, by 1600, had produced "an extensive library of the sea"---can suggest how American poetry slowly emerged from "exploration prose":

The first, immediate impression had, in his eyes, much more interest---usually more value---than the considered and generalized impression of men who had gone over a particular course many times [and took] much indeed for granted....[Haklyut's writers] should not be allowed to spend too much time on the day to day progress of the ship through monotonous seas....[but] describe the people of the strange country in as much detail as possible and make comments on the fitness of the place for trade or settlement....He did not expect assessments of scenery, though he appreciated some indication of the impression it made...

(Quinn England 220-221)

Certainly "the poetic" returned in passages of the first mariners' descriptions of scenery and of Native peoples, by explorers before and after Gilbert and Parmenius. In English these included the promisingly-named "Dionyse Settle," who accompanied Frobisher; Captain Davis' accounts (1585-87); Sir Walter Ralegh's Virginia of the 1580s, which, like Guiana, brought no "American verse" from that accomplished author; and the voyage-accounts of Gosnold, Pring, Brereton and Waymouth between 1602 and 1605. These were at times almost a "Paradise school" of Northeastern writers whose dominant notes John Smith, Captain Levett and Thomas Morton (with others) took up in the following decades. (Best full editions are Burrage, and Quinn's English New England Voyages and North America from Earliest Discovery.) But only "New France" planter Marc Lescarbot wrote or published any deliberately American poetry through this period (The Theatre of Neptune 1606, and Les Muses de la Nouvelle France, published with his History's third edition in 1618). There was grace to some of it, though laced with imperialism's ventriloquoy, as when a colonist-welcoming man in "Indian" costume (one of the players of Neptune) sang

Now, I am about to try

My luck upon this rocky coast.

Perchance upon the shore will lie

Something for your cook to roast.

And now, monseigneur, if you see

Within the locker of your sloop

Some caraconas,* give to me *bread

And I will share it with my troop.

[Richardson trans., 26]

The English struggled on. Captain John Smith's first book, A True Relation of...Virginia, appeared in 1608, and he more than others before him liked to punctuate his prose with couplets and quatrains. But none of it (according to editor Philip L. Barbour) was Smith's own: it came from Martin Fotherbey's Atheomastix, a sententious translation of Ovid (for exs. see Barbour ed., Works II: 125 and III:326). Most of Smith's books were festooned with commendatory poetry, and there may well be a contender among those compositions. We should trouble to find out, if only because we have located scarcely one poet for the first 125 years of England's relationship with North America, from Cabot's 1490s to the 16-tens.

The poem below, first seen in the front of Smith's 1616 A Description of New England, appears to be the work of a trio, Michael and William Phettiplace, and Richard Wiffing, "three "Gentlemen and Souldiers under Captaine Smiths Command: In his deserved honor for his Worke and worth." It recounts one of their and Smith's adventures among the Powhatan and Pamunkey peoples of Virginia; and Smith's capture of the leading werowance Opechancanough, in a skirmish that is also pictured on Smith's maps (text below slightly modernized from Barbour I: 317).

Why may not we in this work have our mite,

That had our share in each black day and night,

When thou [Smith] Virginia foiled, yet kept unstained;

And held the King of Paspeheh enchained.

Thou all alone this savage stern did take.

Pamunkey's king we saw thee captive make.

Among seven hundred of his stoutest men

To murder thee and us resolved; when

Fast by the hand thou led this savage grim,

Thy pistol at his breast to govern him,

Which did infuse such awe in all the rest

(Since their dread Sovereign thou had so distressed)

That thou and we (poor sixteen) safe retired

Unto our helpless ships. Thou (thus admired)

Did make proud Powhatan, his subjects send

To James his town, thy censure to attend;

And all Virginia's lords and petty kings,

Awed by thy virtue, crouch, and presents bring

To gain thy grace, so dreaded thou hast been;

And yet a heart more mild is seldom seen;

So, making Valour Vertue, really;

Who has nought in thee counterfeit, or slie;

If in the sleight be not the truest art,

That makes men famoused for fair desert.

Who saith of thee, this savors of vainglory

Mistakes both thee and us, and this true story.

If it be ill in Thee, so well to do,

Then is it ill in Us, to praise Thee too.

But, if the first be well done, it is well

To say it doth (if so it doth) excel!

Praise is the guerdon of each dear desert,

Making the praised act the praised part

With more alacrity: Honour's Spur is Praise;

Without which, it (regardless) soon decays.

And for this paines of thine we praise thee rather,

That future times may know who was the father

Of this rare Work (New England) which may bring

Praise to thy God, and profit to thy King.

We have three useful terms and points to work with. First, is there above at least enough of any of our three main criteria to make us decide, right-off, that this could be First---the earliest English we can find that seems to be both poetry and, in some definite way, about America?

On promised grounds of inclusiveness (and on this scholar's oath of diligent search for any others whatsoever), let us assume that there is. So, secondly---In what way(s) is the poem American?

To find out, we gather up and look at its elements: "seven hundred stout men," it says, live in Virginia under the "proud" "savage grim" and "dread Sovereign" called "Powhatan," "King of Paspeheh" and "of Pamunkey"; where now, "all Virginia's lords and petty kings" bring "presents" to gain English "grace." What we find of substantial reference is: two accurately-rendered Native American tribal names, one personal name, and a fairly-agreed-upon English-colonial term for Native American political hierarchies ("lords and petty kings"). Their "dread" of Powhatan we cannot confirm. Their dread of the English we can; for the poem commemorates the model of virtue found in Captain John Smith's (and the authors' own) forcible subjection of those tribes, led on by Smith's capture of Opechancanough in battle. Smith's actions and qualities, hence his credibility about America, are the reason for the poem (they will inspire you to believe what he says in this next book about New England). And thirdly, if there is a "fable and fiction" crafted into the verse's "form and soul," it is just that about Smith; supported by some authenticity-bestowing Native language and (English) testimony of "murderous intent." Conclusion goes to the readers.

Hopefully they will find it relevant here, since we have seen Sidney's defense of poetry, to look further at Plato's original attack on it:

The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians...the best of us, you know, delight in giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the poet who stirs our feelings most....But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that we pride ourselves on the oppositequality---we would fain be quiet and patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman....And the same may be said of...all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action---In all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue....[W]e are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets...but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind...but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.

Captain Smith, one of those Thomas Morton might have called a "Martialist" (Canaan 194), continued to publish through the 1620s; and a contending (1631) poem of Smith's own appears below. Meanwhile, however, after the above 1616 publication, the next contender does not appear until 1625: the Anglican Reverend William Morrell, of whom little is known except that he spent a year (1623-24) among the small company of would-be planters at Wessagusset/Weymouth on Massachusetts Bay.

The site's first colonists (under merchant Thomas Weston in 1622) had failed, and a second group under Robert Gorges arrived there with Morrell and fellow-minister William Blackstone along for their spiritual maintenance. Yet within a year most of Robert's people departed, Morrell with them, "having scarcely saluted the country" according to Plimoth's William Bradford (History II: 336).

Morrell, "a good classical scholar...man of observing mind and gentle tastes," busied himself at Weymouth composing "a Latin poem" (Adams Three Episodes 157), which by the time of publication (London 1625) he had also put into English. In Nova Anglia, or New-England....A Briefe Enarration of the Ayre, Earth, Water, Fish and Fowles of that Country, Morrell began by proclaiming his subjects and purposes in a way that, briefly and in parts, fulfilled Ben Jonson's dictum that a "fiction" constitute true poetry. (Morrell's own English translation presents problems this editor cannot ease: slightly modernized below from Mass. Hist. Soc. Colls. I [1792], 125-139.)

Fear not poor Muse, 'cause first to sing her fame

That's yet scarce known, unless by map or name:

A Grand-child to earth's Paradise is born,

Well-limb'd, well-nerv'd, fair, rich, sweet, yet forlorn.

Thou blest Director, so direct my verse

That it may win her people, friends commerce;

Whilst her sweet air, rich soil, blest, seizes my pen

Shall blaze, and tell the natures of her men.

New-England, happy in her new true style [name],

Weary of her cause she's to sad exile

Expos'd by her's unworth of her Land,

Entreats with tears Great Britain to command

Her empire, and to make her know the trine [Trinity]

Whose act and knowledge only makes divine.

A royal work well worthy England's king

These natives to true truth and grace to bring....

Interestingly, Morrell seems aware that (unless somebody counts that 1616 poem in Smith's book) he may well be "first" at least chronologically. He sets out with promising energy to weave together what it feels like to be there ("sweet air, rich soil, blest") with indeed a conceit, that this land is "like" a "sweet, yet forlorn" woman imploring the evangelical and other "command" of "Great Britain." But the fictive female figure of America slips through the minister's fingers, and suddenly above he furnishes flatly literal lists of natural conditions and commodities. A stock touch of merry May respirates a failing fiction:

Blest is this air with what the air can bless,

Yet frequent gusts do much this place distress....

Whose looming greenness joys the seaman's sense,

Invites him to a land if he can see

Worthy the Thrones of stately sovereignty.

The fruitful and well watered earth doth glad

All hearts, when Flora's with her spangles clad....

Is it contradiction or confirmation of Plato that, throughout Nova Anglia, its few arguably-authentic American and poetic breaths fill Morrell's lines mostly in association with women?

Besides, their women, which for the most part are

Of comely forms, not black, nor very fair:

Whose beauty is a beauteous black laid on

Their paler cheek, which they most dote upon.

for they by Nature are both fair and white,

Enriched with graceful presence, and delight;

Deriding laughter, and all prattling, and

Of sober aspect, graced with grave command:

Of man-like courage, stature tall and straight,

Well-nerv'd, with hands and fingers small and right,

Their slender fingers on a grassy twine

Make well-form'd baskets wrought with art and line...

Rare stories, Princes, people, Kingdoms, Towers

In curious finger-work or parchment flowers.....

This recalls Morrell's first imagery; but he can sustain no more-than-literal discourse, no unity beyond that of a catalogue. Morrell has felt the vigor of New England's air, enjoyed its light and climate, glanced over its "aborigines" (as Adams dubbed Native peoples in amplifying Morrell's "disgust" with them, Three Episodes 158). But perhaps he has not in some deeper sense been there, except in an America where, "hopefully," Native American extinction will make his people heirs to clearly-rich land.

If Heavens grant...to see here built I trust

An English Kingdom from this Indian dust.

Is Morell's New-England more American than the poem by Smith's colleagues? It certainly tells more about the place and people; but whether as poetry it should supplant Smith's colleagues in their "firstness" is left to you.

The next contender dispenses with evangelism altogether---He is the "fantastical"-tempered Welshman William Vaughan, an Oxford-trained and thoroughly-traveled gentleman who, with a circle of Elizabethan colleagues, for six years financed an attempted plantation at "Trepassy" (a/k/a Cambriol) on the southern tip of the Newfoundland peninsula. Vaughan voyaged there and bestowed the latter name himself in 1622, hoping that his personal presence might turn the tide of profit his and the new King Charles I's way. Despite his two-year stay, it did not (Rowse details the reports of "idle fellows'" lack of industry there, Elizabethans 172). But after two years more Vaughan found a use for the verses he had apparently written in the New World, turning them into The Golden Fleece (London: Francis Williams 1626), a poetic potpourri gathered to celebrate King Charles' 1626 marriage to Queen Henrietta.

Fleece was "Divided into three Parts, under which are discovered the Errours of Religion, the Vices and Decayes of the Kingdome, and lastly the wayes to get wealth, and to restore Trading so much complayned of" (title page). And, Vaughan promised, this "compound of truth and fiction, quaint prose, and still quainter verse" had been "Transported from Cambrioll Colchos...commonly called the New Found Land, by Orpheus Junior, for the generall and perpetuall Good of Great Britaine." The Dedication told his King,

This no Eutopia is, nor Commaonwealth

Which Plato faign'd. We bring Your Kingdom's health

By true Receipts, which You will rellish well.

But for all the "quaint" literary qualities of The Golden Fleece (including Don Quixote and "Marsilius Ficinus" in the allusive backgrounds, 4), that was all Vaughan had to say about America in verse, passing chapter after chapter instead upon religious factions, on "proving the Pope AntiChrist," explaining "how to restrain lawyers" and the uses of tobacco. Vaughan had fictionalized his authorship as "Orpheus Junior" and then (Pt. 3 Ch. 1) been "required by Apollo to discover where the Golden Fleece lyes," that is, to tell readers what was the substance behind the book's many conceits and ironic poses. In a main sense, it was America's legendary wealth, "reduce[d] into one mayne Trade, to the Plantation and Fishing in the Newfoundland"; and this, he adds, was "the generall cause which [had] moved Orpheus to regard this Golden Fleece" (Part 3 Table of Contents).

This is our Colchos, where the Golden Fleece flourisheth

on the backs of Neptune's sheep [beaver etc.], continually

to be shorn. This is Great Britain's Indies, never to be ex-

hausted dry. This precious Treasure surmounts the Duke

of Burgundy's Golden Fleece, which he called...by reason

of his large customs...received from our English Wools....(10)

An "advertisement poem" in the front of Vaughan's book called this quasi-inspiration "the Golden Fleece moralized." Vaughan, this poet ("Stephen Berrier") meant to say, had transformed a Greek-mythical or "pagan" symbol into what Renaissance authorities of many stripes would deem respectable. These planters, including John Mason and John Guy, had no problem making light of the mercenary motive they shared in hoping to "fleece" America of its wealth. But Berrier emphasized one thing about the Newfoundland as it was symbolically made a wedding-gift to King Charles: it was real, in all "poetic" as well as other senses:

Orpheus but late[ly] our woods did make to ring,

And to his Harp great Charles his Carols sing[s]...

Orpheus now forsaking Easterne Greece

From Westerne Colchos brings the Golden Fleece;

Which no Eutopia is, nor fairy-land,

Yet Colchos in Elisian Fields doth stand....

"American poetry" perhaps, but fragments only, struck off an anvil whose hammer has other purposes. This came more of what Rowse called "exaltation of temperament" (174) than from America. Vaughan and his colleagues, mostly libertine lovers of raucous rhetoric, would have cheered themselves up with poetry and/or fictions wherever they'd planted. Vaughan cast slender ones over what they all wanted from American land and peoples, and both "in their own right" he mentioned no more than you have seen.

Colonizer Thomas Morton did not care for Vaughan's The Golden Fleece, and in disparaging its conception of America, chose the word "respect" as that work's antithesis (see his poetic "Epilog" to Canaan's Book 2).

Speak of the devil(s), it does appear chronologically that Morton and his fellow-planters at "Ma-re Mount" in 1627 were the collaborative authors of the next-contending English-American poetry: New English Canaan claims that "The Poem" and "The Song" at the center of their company's May Day Revels that year (as well as other later verses) were "performed" and sung "with a Chorus" at the "Boston Bay" settlement, whose brief success so troubled the planters of Plimoth. In 1636 Morton told a court that American "writeings" had been taken from him (Biography Ch. 9): perhaps he somehow mentally held onto the parchments once "fixed to the Maypole" (Bradford's History agrees they did exist); or like the later Roger Williams, once exiled by the Puritans he may have "dr[awn] the Materialls in a rude lumpe at Sea, as a private helpe to my owne memory, that I might not...lightly lose what I had so dearely bought in some few yeares hardship" (1643 Key, 83).

Ma-re Mount's "Poem" and "Song" are two parts or phases of a program of calculated entertainments. Like many another early English colonizer (from Davis to Gilbert and the generations of fishermen), Morton and his "servants" were would-be competitors in the fur trade. To help themselves attract both European and Native American traders to their hilltop outpost, they adapted some of the most convenient and enjoyable comforts of home to their cause (including the Maypole itself, country-dance and song, even strains of Neoplatonist theory most likely from Morton, the Inns-trained man of letters). "The Poem," with its "Spenserian mix of history and fiction, Hebrew and Classical mythology" (Bush, "Spenser's Treatment" 592), offers an American-centered fictional narrative within its imagery---This concerns the need to console a "discovered" and grief-stricken woman, "Scilla," who symbolizes Native American culture in the throes of catastrophic "plague" at the time; and to induce her to share a hence-yearly rite of renewal or "hollyday," which will promote English and Native American connection on many levels of life (NOTE 10)

"The Song" then brings all kinds of Classical and Renaissance poetic tropes to serve the same ends on another "easier" level, one surer to be acted upon by people(s) of that frontier: it is the lyric to which the young men and Native "lasses in beaver coats" were to dance and find their way to "marry" each other, human harmonies and demands of trade coalescing in the Song's final images. "Nectar"---the "drink of the gods" in a beloved woman's eyes, which Ben Jonson's "Drink to Me Only" "would not trade," even for immortality---this was the substance, at once spiritual and erotic, behind Morton's metaphor (NOTE 11).

With these two poems alone we suddenly find ourselves in conversation with "climents of a higher nature than are to be found within the habitation of the Mole" (Canaan 137). They are complete, coherent, deftly and thoroughly handled "fictions" in verse that carry on sophisticated multi-leveled play with a substantial number and range of English and Continental cultural traditions; and the same is true of Morton's Bacchanal Triumph, which in couplets sometimes awful, sometimes witty, turns many a cultural form and expectation upside-down, as it weaves perceptive fictions round New England's peoples, events and landscape-settings, and mocks Plimoth's "pitiful perplexity" over Ma-re Mount, chief rival to its trade. (See Canaan for much further detail; but "Triumph" was composed later than the "Poem" and "Song," either in 1629 New England or in 1635-7 England.)

If Morton's 1627 poetry alone was such rich verse focused upon American subjects, why was it so long absent from "the American canon" to the point where virtually no one ever heard of it? Given the kinds of verse assembled by the hugely influential Moses Coit Tyler (like Morrell, a Protestant minister) in his foundational 1880 History of American Literature anthology, it must appear that Morton's poetry did not suit Tyler's personal tastes (or those of many others after him). There was certainly no objective or aesthetic reason that Tyler believed in enough to defend in open debate. He simply led his readers to assume that Morton and Canaan (along with most other contenders in these pages) had never existed, and so forced himself to make the best of Puritan writers; who possessed "little skill in and little regard for" literature "as a fine art...as the voice and the ministress of aesthetic delight" (History 1:8).

It would have been this public-lecturing, university-teaching Christian editor's nightmare to allow the public to experience, before those sober hardworking American-Pilgrim role-models, a rollicking English Renaissance man who laid open the Puritans' deepest vanities and mocked their anxieties as self-induced delusions; and who proved his charges with his own bodily and literary elan in America, coupled with a repeated call for colonizers to use "moderation, and discretion" (Canaan 8) in coming to inevitable terms with Native American humanity. (NOTE 12)

The former Congregational Reverend Tyler was less than interested in Native American peoples. He wished his Americans to understand them as "anthropoid animals" living in "mental childhood" (1:156, 178); as "fierce dull biped[s] standing in our way," "nude patriots and Stoics" who "deserve no history" (1:10, 2:213-215). And so Tyler could not possibly comprehend Canaan's verses, or see them as anything but outrages against the critical code built upon Plato by ardent Christians; which (see Charvat, Elson for ex.) was itself aimed at "teaching" most "good Americans" themselves to remain intellectual children. For Tyler, the one ray of American poetic light until Anne Bradstreet had come "on the banks of the James River" in Virginia (1: 53), from George Sandys' attempted translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Tyler was truly hungry for belles-lettres, but he was also prosaically hungry for a meal every day; and how many American educators could depart the straight narrow critical path and keep getting paid good university-trustees' money? (See Vanderbilt on Tyler's career-transition from minister to public speaker to professor: he very much felt "the eyes of propriety" upon him.) So Tyler indulged as he could with seven pages on Sandys' effort to become "the morning-star at once of poetry and of scholarship in the new world" (1: 55); an effort made especially admirable, Tyler wrote, by its defiance of the "rough desert" all around Sandys, by America's "oppressive tasks of...official position" and by the "frightful Indian massacre[s]" of the 1620s (prompted by an unmentioned English invasion of Virginia). Tyler crowned Sandys' Ovid (London 1626) as "the very first expression of elaborate poetry...the first utterance of the conscious literary spirit articulated in America" (1: 54).

Sandys at least helps us see what was already on paper as (for example) Morton composed his poem "The Author's Prologue" (Canaan 7), which combined (deliberately or not) the conceits of Morrell's American "woman" and Sandys' first-page "Argument" from Ovid:

Fire, Aire, Earth, Water, all the Opposites

That strove in Chaos, powerful LOVE unites

And from this Discord drew this Harmonie

Which smiles in Nature....

All this was "in" America. But not "of" it. Sandys informed "Prince Charles" that this work was "a double Stranger: Sprung from the Stocke of the ancient Romanes, but bred in the New-World, of the rudenesse thereof it cannot but participate; especially having Warres and Tumults to bring it to light instead of the Muses." For Sandys, America was the opposite of inspiration (reason for writing). America may have added "rude tumult"---wild energy?---to his lines about Hercules. But his Niobe weeps for nothing American. America is in no way part of this Ovid's intended meanings, impacts, and/or rewards for reading. Sandys' "morning star" heralds The Parmenius Problem, the colonizers' ongoing mirage of "desolation."

Contemporary critic Frank Kermode followed Tyler in calling Sandys' translation America's "first literary poetry (balladry aside)" (523). Literary, and poetry, perhaps: America's, not likely. Sandys was a speaker of English in North America translating Latin writing about Greek myth. If a Japanese-speaking-and-writing scholar is ordered to inhabit a Berlin library, and there translates Egyptian songs of Babylon into couplets, the result is not likely "German poetry.

We return to the final phases of our survey. The next possible "first American poetry" came from that same William Vaughan's small company of gentlemen who briefly affiliated themselves with Northeastern plantations. This was Quodlibets (London 1628) by one Robert Hayman, like Morton a Devonshire gentleman and 1590s Inns of Court graduate, who somehow after 1621 succeeded Captain John Mason as "governor-general" of the Newfoundland's "swarming fishermen." Like his colleagues, Hayman styled himself "Lately Come Over from New Britaniola, Old New Found Land" with "Epigrams and other small parcels, both Moral and Divine," which he had "composed and done at Harbor Grace." His Latin title means "What You Will"---or, as Sir Philip Sidney explained the word in other context, "Whatever I shall try to say shall become verse" (Defence 147: recall Puttenham's idea of poetry as simply "any witty or delicate conceit"). Hayman's work included four "books" of original work and a pair of translated "epistles" from "that excellently wittie doctor Francis Rabelais"; and behind some of his briefer "Whatevers" were some of Morton's social values. Hayman advised a "good friend" and fellow-planter,"

Sterne, cruell usage may bad servants fetter;

Wise gentle usage, keepes good servants better. (30)

Hayman and Thomas Morton might have shared beverages if they had met:

Though Puritanes the Litany deride

Yet out of it they best may be descried;

They are blind-hearted, Proud, Vaine-glorious,

Deepe Hypocrites, Hateful and Envious,

Malicious, in a full high excesse,

And full of all Uncharitablenesse. (5)

And "To One of the Elders of the Sanctified Parlor of Amsterdam" he wrote,

Though thou maist call my merriments, my folly

They are my Pills to purge my melancholly,

They would purge thine too, wert not thou Foole-holy.

But these things did not bring Hayman to the same poetic pitch as they did Morton. Hayman found the air "salubrious, constant, cleere" and worked three prosaic couplets on it into his page 53. Near the end of Quodlibets' first "book" he then attempted a whole "Skeltonicall continued rhyme, in praise of my New Found Land" (first below from his page 19); and he made one further attempt to address the New World (below, from 34). Such was "the American-English tradition" when Morton came to it:

Although in cloaths, company, buildings faire,

With England, New Found Land cannot compare:

Did some know what contentment I found there,

Alwayes enough, most times somewhat to spare,

With little paines, lesse toyle, and lesser care,

Exempt from taxings, ill newes, Lawing, feare,

If cleane, and warme, no matter what you weare,

Healthy, and wealthy, if men carefull are,

With much much more, then I will now declare,

(I say) if some wise men knew what this were,

(I do beleeve) they'd live no other where.

Witty? Delicate? And yet, Hayman tried again.

'Tis said, wise Socrates look't like an Asse;

Yet he with wondrous sapience filled was;

So though our New Found Land look wild, salvage,

She hath much wealth penn'd in her rustie Cage.

So have I seene a leane-cheekes, bare, and ragged,

Who of his private thousands could have bragged.

Indeed she now looks rude, untowardly;

She must be decked with neat husbandry.

So have I seen a plaine swarth, sluttish Joan

Looke pretty pert, and neat with good cloathes on.

As Thackeray put it in Vanity Fair, Them was his sentiments. For others who noticed how much was lacking, Hayman provided "A Napkin[,] to wipe his mouth that waters at these deserved Commendations":

Thus for this hopefull Countrie at this Time,

As it growes better, Ile have better Ryme.

But it was hardly America's growing "better" that might improve English poetry about it.

By 1631, the publication-year of the next remotely-possible poetic contender, Captain John Smith's careers as colonist and author were over: his True Travels had appeared the year before, and his last work, 1631's brief Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, or Anywhere, included his only known original poem, "The Sea Marke" (in Barbour, ed., III: 265). The poem appears to dramatize the act of passing by a shipwreck, and offers clear meanings beyond the literal about the American voyager John Smith's difficult final years:

Aloofe, aloofe, and come no neare,

the dangers doe appeare;

Which if my ruine had not beene

you had not seene:

I onely lie upon this shelfe

to be a marke to all

which on the same might fall,

Than none may perish but my selfe....

Every word and beyond-literal meaning in the poem has its referent not in America but, again, in John Smith, old explorer of New World lands and waters. That is the extent of its three-stanza description of, connection or reference to, America: the "sea-mark" is a shipwreck awash off any coast. Only the reader can nominate/ disqualify it, but likelier candidates seem apparent.

We have now considered seven contenders before reaching the full-publication year of Canaan's array of American poetry; which included, besides the "Poem" and "Song" of 1627, Bacchanall Triumph possibly of 1629, and the 1630s "Author's Prologue"; which we shall not examine, in order to make room for others. Such as? We should include the rhymes within William Wood's 1634 prose survey, New England's Prospect: Wood broke up his pages with four versified lists of New England trees, animals, birds and fish (39, 41, 49, 54), and, true to his promise to avoid "voluptuous discourse" (19), he let none come closer to sensuality than this:

Kinds of All Shellfish.

The luscious lobster, with the crabfish raw,

The brinish oyster, mussle, periwig,

And tortoise sought by the Indian's squaw,

Which to the flats dance many a winter jig,

To dive for cockles, and to dig for clams,

Whereby her lazy husband's guts she crams. (54)

It was a mark worth shooting at. Few wasted their bullets in that direction. We begin to understand the Eli, Eli, lama sabbechthani? of American critics for "something more"; though they were not so nailed to their crosses that they could not have brought themselves, in Morton's late phrase, to "crawl out of this condition," and admit (to the peril of tenure) that Canaan had been written.

Anne Bradstreet, according to critics cited below, began her poetic "apprenticeship" at this time (the early 1630s), having survived a "lingering sickness" and settled at Ipswich and Andover, Massachusetts. She cannot be left out, but we should treat other shorter contenders first. One is William Bradford of Plimoth Plantation, who arrived in 1620 and began his prose History circa 1630: Westbrook's review of documents (111-12) shows that Bradford wrote little or no verse before perhaps 1647, and then (into the 1650s) a small "Verse History" among other "poetic dialogues" on religious issues. Before this, Bradford apparently had composed "six quatrains" on the death of his beloved pastor John Robinson in 1626. But, as above, we may question whether there is sufficient indispensable connection to anything American in the basic "conceit" of that work, the death of a beloved friend one "missed"---because of residence not in America, but simply "far away.

But because we cannot be certain when he wrote stanzas such as the following, they should be included here. These lines appear to concern events of the early 1620s, when control of New England seemed especially undecided because Native Americans were beginning to demand and acquire firearms for their trade and services. "The gain hereof to make they know so well," poet Bradford rued,

The fowl to kill, and us the feathers sell.

For us to seek for deer it doth not boot,

Since now with guns themselves at them can shoot.

That garbage, of which we no use did make,

They have been glad to gather up and take;

But now they can themselves fully supply,

And the English of them are glad to buy....

And that is the entire field of English-American poetic contenders up through the 1637 publication of Morton's New English Canaan. Given the sheer volume of undeniable poetry in that book, it must be obvious that, if we have not been able by this chronological point to proclaim "America's first poet and/or poem in English," we can only construct those things upon wholly ideological grounds, rather than on historical sequence and record.

To challenge this, let us extend this search at least to include the little-known Puritan Thomas Tillam, whose "Upon the first sight of New-England June 29, 1638" expresses, according to critic and editor Harrison T. Meserole, "dedication mixed with wonder as he viewed the land that was to be shaped into the modern Canaan." And, Meserole adds, "none other recorded his response in lines so unmistakably inspired and genuinely lyrical" (397).

Hail holy land wherein our holy lord

Hath planted his most true and holy word:

Hail, happy people who have dispossest

Yourselves of friends, and means, to find some rest

For your poor wearied soules, opprest of late

For Jesus' sake..

Poetry alright. But Tillam's ship could be anchored off Sidon or Tyre. He sees Palestine, not America: he sees a representation, a hopeful mirage or overlay, produced by his ideological commitment to Puritanism---in fact, a mirror, that can protect his fragile (easily "tempted" or threatened) sense of identity and purpose from the overwhelming actualities that teem with life upon the continent before him ("untamed" Nature, plus unknown multitudes of human beings both different from and indifferent to himself). Few Native Americans would argue with Bercovitch about the Puritans' "breathtaking" gifts for "sweeping assertion": Tillam's poem demonstrates how they "created America in their own image" (9).

This is something quite different from Thomas Morton's use of European mythological language(s) to describe, articulate and address American subjects. The "Poem" and "Song" reach out: Tillam's immersion in a Biblical worldview, the very fabric of his poem, inscribes his fellow community-members ("among you"), as well as the new land, as the habitations of "Satan's wily baits." Whatever their respective "individ-ualities," they and this are to be feared and distrusted (as much as the "self") in all relations. "Ideally" here, nothing but Christianity will "reach" Tillam.

Does any of this disqualify Tillam's work and/or all Puritan poetry here? Certainly not. But, beyond this, "America" in Tillam's poem and Puritan poetry is mostly blank, there "to be shaped" to what Roger Williams was beginning to call a "delusion" (with reference to England's utterly-invented "rights" to Native American soil: see his Key 167). (NOTE 13)

We might predictably assume here that changes in historical perspective have merely changed "the" idea of literary quality; but the discriminations attempted in these pages have little to do with setting up any new model of "great" poetry. That is forever best left to the reader. What needs to be recognized is that Tillam's "inspiration" is not America, but a Puritan Parmenius Problem he expresses in couplets: his reason for "singing" is to cry in the "waste," like those before who "scarcely saluted" the land.