Early American Literature and Its Exclusions

Abstract

James Allen, the author of an “epic poem” entitled “Bunker Hill,” of which but a few fragments have been published, lived in the same period. The world lost nothing by “his neglect of fame.”—Rufus Griswold, The Poets and Poetry of AmericaAcross several of his influential anthologies of american literature, rufus griswold—nineteenth-century anthologist, poet, and erstwhile editor of Edgar Allan Poe—offers conflicting measures of what we now call early American literature. In The Prose Writers of America, for example, which first appeared in 1847 and later went into multiple editions, Griswold offers a familiar and currently derided set of parameters for this corpus of writing. In his prefatory remarks, dated May 1847, he explains that he has chosen not to include “the merely successful writers” who precede him. Although success might appear a high enough bar to warrant inclusion, he emphasizes that he has focused on writers who “have evinced unusual powers in controlling the national mind, or in forming the national character …” (5). This emphasis on what has been nationally consequential echoes other moments in Prose Writers, as well as paratextual material in his earlier The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) and his Female Poets of America (1848). In his several miniature screeds condemning the lack of international copyright, as well as the consequent flooding of the American market with cheap reprints, Griswold explains the “difficulties and dangers” this lack poses to “American literature”: “Injurious as it is to the foreign author, it is more so to the American [people,] whom it deprives of that nationality of feeling which is among the first and most powerful incentives to every feat of greatness” (Prose Writers 6). In The Poets and Poetry of America, he similarly complains that America's “national tastes and feelings are fashioned by the subject of kings; and they will continue so to be, until [there is] an honest and political system of reciprocalcopyright …” (v). Even in The Female Poets of America, the subject of which one might think would change the nature of this conversation, Griswold returns to the national project, examining the significance of women writers for it. He cites the fact that several of the poets included in this volume have written from lives that were “no holydays of leisure” but defined rather by everything from “practical duties” to the experience of slavery. He also responds to those carping “foreign critics” who propose that “our citizens are too much devoted to business and politics to feel interest in pursuits which adorn but do not profit”; these home-laboring women writers, he argues, may end up being the source of that which is most genuinely American and most correctly poetic: “Those who cherish a belief that the progress of society in this country is destined to develop a school of art, original and special, will perhaps find more decided indications of the infusion of our domestic spirit and temper in literature, in the poetry of our female authors, than in that of our men” (8). As it turns out, even women poets are held to the standard of national self-expression and national self-realization; the surprise lies only in the fact that they live up to this standard.