A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

A Companion to American Poetry - Группа авторов


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an interpreter of history. Bradstreet embraces both her own ambition and her judgment more fully in the “Monarchies” than she does in either “The Prologue” or her elegies.

      “Or Round the Pictured Orb Instructive Trace”: Sarah Wentworth Morton’s Lady Harriet Ackland

      Morton makes frequent use of “prospects” in her long poems in passages that look both down on the landscape and into the future. This is, as Christopher N. Phillips explains, “a familiar gesture that could be used to make arguments about the meaning of landscape, the trajectory of the nation, or even the nature of knowledge” (2011, p. 17). Beacon Hill most obviously depends on this strategy, concluding, appropriately, with the United States figured as a beacon that shines out over the globe: “Till the full ray of equal Freedom shine,/And like the sun this genial globe entwine” (Morton 1797, p. 52). But it is a key feature in her representation of American exceptionalism in other long poems as well. The Virtues of Society stresses westward movement both through the revivification of classical exempla in America and the movement of its heroine, Lady Harriet Ackland, from England to upstate New York. This movement from east to west is then rendered through a number of North American prospects that are explicitly set against the picturesque qualities “Of peaceful Albion’s bliss-encircled isle” (Morton 1799, p. 9). Harriet’s decision to follow her husband to “the thunder of the plains” leads to a sea voyage in which the waves create delusions of English landscape that are then swept away with wind and wave, such that, “To the fond view the painted prospects die,/And flowers, and flocks, and trees, in blotted ruin lie” (Morton 1799, p. 11). In “Canadia,” Harriet finds instead a country of seasonal extremes that is nonetheless home to many peoples. Indeed, this portion of the poem depends both upon the oxymoron of a “brineless sea” and the warmth and glow of people who thrive in a location that is first represented as “sullen woods, that mock the solar ray,” but are then recharacterized as warm and bright because “there the varying, mingling colors join” (Morton 1799, p. 12):

      Yet on these shores a numerous race reside—

      Here the red warrior towers in painted pride—

      And there the blood of Gallia’s captured race

      Warms the brisk limbs, and tints the shaded face—

      Here white-brow’d Albion’s blooming offspring shine—

      And there the varying, mingling colors join;—

      Yet her own Lawrence rolls his fertile tide

      Through villas, smiling on his pastoral side

      (Morton 1799, p.12)

      This introduction to the frigid north then gives way to the Hudson River as the site of the Battle of Saratoga:

      The voice of death the shivering forest fills,

      And Hudson echoes from his hundred hills.—

      Hudson! The lord of many a fateful hour,

      With wild, impetuous, desolating power,

      To the loud battle joins his clamorous flood,

      And feeds his myriads with immortal blood.

      Morton uses this movement through successive prospects to teach Euro-centric readers to value both the sublime aspects of the North American wilds and the mixed community that emerges there.

      Phillips locates Morton’s “radical” rethinking of epic tradition in the prospects, proto-Romantic fragments, and intertexual connectedness working across her three long poems, all characteristics he identifies in other American epics of the period as well (2011, pp. 60–62). These characteristics help recenter the epic in local spaces and with respect to recent events while also drawing on and developing a greater use of fragments that “evokes and creates contexts if used deliberately” (Jung 2009, p. 16), in Morton’s case the reach and significance of the United States through episodes in its history. Just as importantly, Morton marks the difference between the unreliable histories of classical bards and her accounts of the present “Founded on Fact,” as the title page of The Virtues of Society proudly declares, by characterizing herself as a truth-telling “minstrel.” This is another engagement of folk traditions that, Phillips argues, modernizes epic while anticipating the authorial self-fashioning of Romantic poets (2011, p. 60). He continues, “The modern solution to the problem of rendering contemporary events epic, according to Morton, is to frame the telling of those events as more virtuous than the Iliad because they are more truthful” (Phillips 2011, p. 60).

      Morton’s insistence that she recounts “living efforts…Beyond the storied page of fabling fame” (1799, p. 5) recalls Bradstreet’s concern with lying Greeks; here too it signals a literary ambition that even a reader as astute as Phillips undervalues. While aligning Morton’s experiments with broad trends in the early American epic, Phillips hypothesizes that the intertextual experimentation of Morton and Phillis Wheatley suggests that “conceiving of the epic in pieces may be a particularly useful entry into the tradition for marginalized writers” (2011, p. 59). There may be some truth in this familiar consideration of the material conditions shaping a marginalized writer’s literary endeavors. It is a consideration invited by both Bradstreet and Morton themselves, as when Bradstreet adds to the end of her fourth monarchy, “No more I’le do sith I have suffer’d wrack,/Although my Monarchies their legs do lack” (Bradstreet 1678, p. 191), and Morton begs her readers to make allowances “from a consideration of my sex and situation” while hoping for “the partial eye of the patriot” (1790, p. viii). But too much emphasis on marginalization, particularly marginalization from formal education, may keep us from attending to the scholarly ambitions of these poems.


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