Edward William Johnston (aka Il Secretario): "American Letters," Part II

Edward William Johnston under the pen name IL SECRETARIO, "American Letters -- Their Character and Advancement." The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science. Volume I, Issue 6 (June 1845): pages 575-581. [Continued].

Overall, Johnston thinks that American poetry before his time was pretty bad, mostly ideas and styles copied from British writers. He dismisses a whole slew of work: "We need scarcely say that these have not the smallest pretension to originality. The most famous of their productions ([T]he Columbiad [by Joel Barlow, 1809])  is certainly one of the most execrable performances that mankind ever stopped their ears at." In this case, even the British inspirations were lousy, but also popular -- "ill taste is quite as perennial, and as native in England as in this country" (p. 578). He continues:

Next in order came a great body of writers of fugitive pieces, chiefly patriotic -- odes, especially, of all sorts and sizes, interspersed, occasionally, with a terrible epic -- all monuments (happily anything but eternal) of the absence, then, of anything like poetic taste among us. . . (Ditto.)

Then followed the Pierponts [John Pierpont, 1785-1866], the Spragues [Charles Sprague, 1791-1875], the Percivals [James Gates Percival, 1795-1856], and others of about twenty years since -- feeble and loose imitators of Pope, Dryden, Spenser, Cowley, Gray. Of them, it is enough to say that they wrote mostly neither from nature nor art; they drew from secondary sources, and worked with secondary skill . . . (Ditto.)

And next: "Shall we proceed to the 'American Poets,' as they are called, of our own day? Dare we?"

In the following segue, Johnston asserts that he must be careful so as not to overly draw the ire of "that vast and powerful literary interest, the blockheads." The discussion and criticism of his immediate contemporaries will be broad enough "such as will permit no chafed contemporary to bristle up and say that we meant him" (Ditto.).

[To be continued].

Map source: Map of the states and territories of the United States as it was from December 1845 to June 1846 by User: Golbez (Wikimedia Commons).