AT the very outset of any discussion of the beginnings of American literature we are met by the pertinent query, Is there really an American literature distinct from English? Such a question can be answered only by reminding ourselves what literature is. Here Dean Stanley’s definition is helpful:
“By literature I mean those great works … that rise above professional or commonplace uses, and take possession of the mind of a whole nation or a whole age.” 1
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With such a definition, for a test it would be absurd to deny that the work of Poe, of Emerson, of Hawthorne, of Lowell, of Whitman, and of other writers of the nineteenth century were contributions to belles-lettres that were distinctively American. Their work unquestionably was the record of the thoughts and feelings of men who are interpreters of American life and who mirror the prevalent tendencies of their time—work that, in Dean Stanley’s phrase, takes possession of the mind of a whole nation. If it be granted that there was, and is, an American, as distinct from an English literature, then its beginnings in the Colonial and Revolutionary periods are of interest and importance. 2
Literature of the Colonial Period (1607–1765)
American literature, in the strictest sense, as comprising only books that are still generally read, is only about one hundred and fifty years old. Including its period of preparation, however, it is more than three hundred years old. The Colonial period extends from 1607, the year of the founding of the Jamestown Colony, to 1765, the year of the Stamp Act, and the first stirring of political revolt. In its beginnings, therefore, it was contemporary with the great accomplishment of the Elizabethan age in England. When Jamestown was settled in 1607, Spenser had been dead only eight years, Shakespeare was doing his greatest work, Raleigh was writing in the Tower his ‘History of the World,’ and Bacon was beginning his ‘Novum Organum.’ The first books written here in America were contemporary with Shakespeare’s plays, the first books printed here were contemporary with Milton’s, and the first authors born here were contemporary with Dryden and Defoe. 3
Though the great books produced in England were read and admired on this side the water, they did not excite much emulation. Not in America were the great books written. Indeed few books of any kind were produced. The records of the voyages and first settlements, the diaries of the colonists, the sermons of the preachers, are all the Colonial period can show. The colonists were too busy making history to record it, too much occupied in turning a savage wilderness into a civilized country to find leisure for the cultivation of the muses. What little writing was done was in no sense American. Our early writers followed, albeit afar off, the British authors they knew both in theme and method. They looked at life through British spectacles, and failed to produce anything distinctively American. 4
The two centres of literary activity were, naturally, Virginia and Eastern Massachusetts. To the former belongs the credit of having made the first contribution to Colonial literature. The first American book was Captain John Smith’s ‘A True Relation of such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Colony.’ This book was printed in England in 1608, and was followed by the ‘General History of Virginia’ in 1624. The latter, which was both written and printed in England is an expanded narration of the same incidents recorded in the ‘True Relation.’ Neither the ‘True Relation’ nor its sequel have added anything to Smith’s reputation for veracity. Indeed he ranks with Defoe as one of the most picturesque and entertaining liars in all our literary annals. What he attempted, and succeeded admirably in doing, was to furnish a vivid and, therefore, interesting romance of life in Colonial Virginia. He wrote to satisfy the craving for excitement on the part of the gullible British public, ready to credit anything, even the preposterous Pocahontas story, provided it were localized in the land Michael Drayton (in his poem ‘Virginia’) had affirmed to be “Earth’s only paradise.”