Waiting to Be Found: The Citizen Poets of Philadelphia and New York

Disparaging poetry written in the American colonies and then in the early national period is a venerable tradition that can be traced back at least to Benjamin Franklin’s seventh Silence Dogood essay. In it Franklin seems to praise “An Elegy upon the Much Lamented Death of Mrs. Mehitebell Kitel.” Described as “[e]xtraordinary” and “moving,” it turns out, when quoted, to be extraordinarily risible: “Come let us mourn, for we have lost a Wife, a Daughter, and a Sister, / Who has lately taken Flight, and greatly we have mist her” (1). The challenges of distinguishing native from imported poems in early national magazines, a postRomantic bias against anonymous writing, and a formalist aesthetic sensibility have long led literary historians to offer negative assessments of poetry published in the United States before 1830. Lyon N. Richardson insisted that the first volume of the Massachusetts Magazine, in 1789, featured “original poetry” by “persons . . . lacking creative power and the higher associative qualities of the mind” (360). Frank Luther Mott emphasized the preference among late eighteenthand early nineteenthcentury American readers for imported work by British writers and concluded that, “[i]n verse the period was deficient, so far as America is concerned” (176). And Mott’s view has been echoed or implicitly assumed even by more recent critics who see the cultural significance of the first periodicals published in the United States. In a study of American magazines that appeared between 1810 and 1820, Neal L. Edgar regards the search for American poetry in this decade as “unrewarding,” insofar as it “was not done by skillful hands” (33–34). Jared Gardner, whose study The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture describes and celebrates the genrecrossing combinations of fiction and nonfiction in these periodicals, pays little attention to the poems that regularly appeared alongside and within the prose, thus intensifying the hybrid effect. And it’s paul lewis Boston College