A journalist of New York city who, during the Revolution, produced much patriotic verse that was very effective as well as popular, though none of it is marked by any high degree of excellence. “Poems of Philip Freneau, written chiefly during the Late War” (1786); “Poems Written between the Years 1768 and 1794;” “Poems Written and Published during the American Revolution;” “Collection of Poems on American Affairs.” Among his prose writings are, “The Philosopher of the Forest;” “Essays by Robert Slender.”
Personal
On the eighteenth of December, 1832, an old man, sprightly and vigorous under the weight of nearly eighty-one years, started, just as the evening was coming on, to walk from the village of Monmouth, in New Jersey, to his home in the open country, a distance of about two miles. At that home, a paternal estate of a thousand acres, this man had passed, at intervals, many years of his long life—filled as it had been with manifold employments on land and sea. He was still a fine specimen of active and manly old age; in person somewhat below the ordinary height, but muscular and compact; his face pensive in expression and with a care-worn look; his dark gray eyes sunken deep in their sockets, but sending out gleams and flashes of fire when aroused in talk; his hair once abundant and beautiful, now thinned and bleached by time; stooping a little as he walked; to those who knew him, accustomed to give delight by a conversation abounding in anecdotes of the great age of the American Revolution. On the evening just referred to, he had started alone on his walk towards his home, but the night passed away without his arrival there; and the next morning his lifeless body was found in a swampy meadow, into which, as it seemed, he must have wandered,—missing his way in the darkness, and in his exhaustion and bewilderment surrendering at last to death. That dead old man was Philip Freneau, incomparably the bitterest and the most unrelenting, and, in some respects the most powerful, of the satirical poets belonging to the insurgent side of the Revolution.
Extremely hospitable, Freneau always warmly welcomed his friends at Mount Pleasant, where he devoted his declining years to reading and answering his numerous correspondents, and in occasionally penning an article for the press. He always retained his original frankness in expressing himself, but it was softened down considerably as he advanced in years. In fact it was his pen, as some author has said, more than his heart that was so acrimonious in his early years; no personal malice ever rested in his mind, and he was ever ready to pardon those who had injured him. Even his adversaries, some of whom he had treated pretty roughly with his pen in early days, in later times claimed him as a friend. In his friendships he was ardent and sincere, and they were usually life-long.
General
Philip Freneau was the most distinguished poet of our revolutionary time. He was a voluminous writer, and many of his compositions are intrinsically worthless, or, relating to persons and events now forgotten, are no longer interesting; but enough remain to show that he had more genius and more enthusiasm than any other bard whose powers were called into action during the great struggle for liberty.
He wrote many songs and ballads in a patriotic and historical vein, which attracted and somewhat reflected the feelings of his contemporaries, and were not destitute of merit. Their success was owing, in part, to the immediate interest of the subjects, and in part to musical versification and pathetic sentiment. One of his Indian ballads has survived the general neglect to which more artistic skill and deeper significance in poetry have banished the mass of his verses; to the curious in the metrical writings, however, they yet afford a characteristic illustration of the taste and spirit of the times.
The poems of Philip Freneau represent his times, the war of wit and verse no less than of sword and stratagem of the Revolution; and he superadds to this material a humorous, homely simplicity peculiarly his own, in which he paints the life of village rustics, with their local manners fresh about them, of days when tavern delights were to be freely spoken of, before temperance societies and Maine laws were thought of; when men went to prison at the summons of inexorable creditors, and when Connecticut deacons rushed out of meeting to arrest and waylay the passing Sunday traveller. When these humors of the day were exhausted, and the impulses of patriotism were gratified in song, when he had paid his respects to Rivington and Hugh Gaine, he solaced himself with higher themes, in the version of an ode of Horace, a visionary meditation on the antiquities of America, or a sentimental effusion on the loves of Sappho. These show the fine tact and delicate handling of Freneau, who deserves much more consideration in this respect from critics than he has ever received.
The headlong mass of his verse far exceeded his powers to keep it up to the highest standard of that age, far less to escape the anathemas of our own when every graduate can make fair jingle on moon or glacier, on love or war. Nine-tenths of his patriotic hymns, of his odes valedictory, worshipful, or comminative, are such as are consigned to the corners of weekly newspapers. Some half dozen pieces, however, remain to prove that Philip Freneau was a poet.
Freneau was a genius in his way, and had brilliant instincts. Some of his poetry sprung from the intense flame of oppression, and as a poet he blew it to a white heat. He was possessed of an impetuous flow of song for freedom, and his wit was pungent and stinging. That he used this with effect can be readily seen by any person who reads his supposed interview with King George and Fox. Then take his exquisite dirge of the heroes of Eutaw Springs, his odes like “Benedict Arnold’s Departure;” some parts of them unrivalled. His works show that he imitated in some degree both Gray and Shelley.
Perhaps the most versatile of our early writers of verse was Philip Freneau, a man of French extraction, possessing the talents of a ready writer, and endowed with that brightness and elasticity of mind which makes even shallowness of thought and emotion pleasing.
Philip Freneau is talked about, but is not read. His name is known, in a vague way, as that of “the Poet of the Revolution;” and those unfamiliar with his voluminous verse are ready to believe that he was a patriot, a wit, and a successful lyrist…. Freneau’s masterpiece, which seems to me the best poem written in America before 1800, is “The House of Night, a Vision,” in one hundred and thirty-six four-line stanzas, which appeared in his 1786 collection. Its occasional faults of expression and versification are manifest, but in thought and execution, notwithstanding the influence of Gray, it is surprisingly original and strong, distinctly anticipating some of the methods of Coleridge, Poe, and the English pre-Raphaelite poets, none of whom, probably, ever read a line of it. To those who enjoy a literary “find,” and like to read and praise a bit of bizarre genius unknown to the multitude, I confidently commend “The House of Night.”
“Wild-Honeysuckle”—the first stammer of poetry in America. We delight to linger over this little piece, consisting of only four stanzas of the sort known as “sesta rima,” and in spite of its imperfections, read it over and over again until we find that we have learned it by heart. And it is worthy of our praise; the delight it shows in the simple beauty of the flower, embosomed in nature; the thought of the frosts of autumn, and regret for death,—are a foretaste of Bryant and a host of followers. We may read Freneau’s volumes through, and find nothing to compare with this; some few pieces faintly recall it, but the vast majority of them are satirical and partisan in spirit.
Lived to more than twice the age of Brown, but, with the exception of one imaginative poem, “The House of Night,” wrote nothing of more than temporary value. But his political, humorous, and society verses were voluminous, and, in their way and for their time, telling and entertaining. His perceptions were quick, his feelings lively, he wrote rapidly and heedlessly; but now and then he struck a true note or expressed a memorable thought.
Freneau’s patriotic verses and political lampoons are now unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by virtue of his “Wild Honeysuckle,” “Indian Burying-Ground,” “Indian Student,” and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood. Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the “poets” hitherto mentioned were nothing but rhymers; but in Freneau we meet with something of beauty and artistic feeling; something which still keeps his verses fresh.
Many of his forgotten poems show high imaginative range—touching the landscape (where it appears) with rare tact and grace.
The review of our early poetry would be disheartening indeed, were it not for the name of Philip Freneau…. Captain Freneau’s political verse, whether satiric or eulogistic, has vigor and a certain rough originality, but no charm. It is the rare lyric, the sudden grace of phrase or image that the long-baffled seeker for American poetry hails as birdnotes in March. Here and there, the French blood tells. When this noisy sailor softens his tones to sing how
| “At Eutaw Springs the valiant died,” |
The poet who was capable of producing lines fit to be thus blended with their own by Thomas Campbell and Walter Scott, and of such true lustre as to catch the eye of any critical reader, as they sparkled among those gems of poetic strass with which they were intermingled by the honorable lady who had condescended to claim them as her own, was not forced into the field of satire for lack of genius to succeed in some higher sphere of poetry.
Philip Freneau, who turned out much doggerel and indifferent verse for the newspapers, reaches at times, in some lyric like his “Indian Burying Ground,” a level higher than that to which any of his more ambitious brethren attained. His best work is indeed small in quantity, and shines out from a mass of rubbish, but gems like the poem just mentioned, “The Wild Honeysuckle,” and “Eutaw Springs” may be said to hold a permanent place in our literature. Such poems bear the stamp of that originality which is one of the marks of a true poet, and they have an unmistakable grace and delicacy of touch.
In one or two of his poems, it now seems probable, we can find more literary merit than in any other work produced in America before the nineteenth century.
“The Wild Honeysuckle” is the high-water mark of American poetry of the eighteenth century, in delicacy of feeling and felicity of expression being at least the equal of Bryant’s “To the Fringed Gentian.” When such lines were possible in the very infancy of the national life, there was no reason to despair for the future of American literature.
