Publisher's Synopsis
"Poetry", once despaired W.H.Auden, "makes nothing happen". That, however, is a modern condition, argues William Dowling, for in the 18th century poets helped topple corrupt governments and fuel revolutions. In this work on the creation and early days of the American republic, Dowling revives the literary and intellectual atmosphere of the period by examining major works of four early American poets of the circle known as the Connecticut Wits and their British forerunners.;Understanding the work of John Trumbull, David Humphreys, Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow, says Dowling, requires a knowledge of the underlying assumptions about poetry and society that gave their work meaning in their own time - namely that ideology was an autonomous and dynamic force in the historical process and that language and literature were potent ideological weapons.;These Connecticut poets, he argues, saw themselves as the inheritors of the tradition of the English Opposition poets of the Augustan period. In fact, Opposition poets such as Pope, Swift and Thomson must be seen as the moving spirits of the American Revolution, for their warfare against Sir Robert Walpole's government not only set an example for the Connecticut poets but also contributed to the political climate in England that allowed the revolution in the American colonies to flourish.;Like their Opposition predecessors, the Connecticut poets drew inspiration from the classical republican tradition of Horace, Livy and Virgil. They viewed their country as both new and old - as an original creation inspired by the vision of a virtuous past that served as a disinterested model for the moral regeneration of society.;In addition to the classical republican tradition, Dowling discusses other ideologies and myths of the Opposition and Connecticut poets - from the alliance of "commonwealthman", Tory and Leicester House opposition in England and the ideology of the enlightenment to the myth of "translation" and the Puritan mythology of the completion of the Reformation and the beginning of the millennium in America.;As he traces the ideological connections between the Opposition and Connecticut poets, Dowling denies any distinctions between "American" and "British" 18th century-literature, claiming that the writers inhabited a single transatlantic universe of thought. Only when read in this light, he says, can one appreciate the power of the Connecticut poets' language and understand their linuistic and prosodic borrowings from the Opposition poets. It is also through this recovered significance of the Connecticut poets that one can best understand the importance of Joel Barlow's break from the group's Federalism to align himself with the Jeffersonians.
