Language and Literature in an Integrated Culture

Abstract

James C. Gaston. London Poets and the American Revolution. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1979. 285 + x pp. Michael T. Gilmore. Early American Literature: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. 184 + vii pp. Mason I. Lowance, Jr. The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 335 + xiv pp. Richard C. Vitzthum. Land and Sea: The Lyric Poetry of Philip Freneau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.197 + vi pp. Donald Yanella and John H. Roch. American Prose to 1820: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale, 1979. 653 + xxii pp. National cultures in the early years of their perceived independence tend to generate what might be called classical periods; classical not in terms of the culture's overt imitation of Greek and Roman models, but classical in terms of the unified sensibility and purpose of verbal and artistic expression. This unity is perhaps what distinguishes the great ages of Pericles and Augustus. Yeats's definition of the ideal culture of Byzantium is the paradigm— that in such a classical age, the artisans of all sorts work out of a common, single impulse. History, political theory, verse, architecture and theology all interrelate, and each forms a necessary commentary on the other. Naturally, then, the student of classical literature reads philosophy, scientists and the general rubric of "civilization," while, on the contrary, the student of, say, nineteenth-century British literature confines himself to belles-lettres, with only the occasional footnote-directed smattering of Thomas Huxley, Mayhew, Bentham and the Chartists.