Philip Freneau (1752—1832)

1. Philip Freneau (1752—1832) • The Poet of the American Revolution • The Father of American poetry • Pioneer of the New Romanticism Movement (Dict. Of Amer. Bio.)

2. His Major Themes • death • Nature • Transition • the human in nature • All of these themes become important in 19th century writing.

3. Freneau as Leader of 18th Century Naturalism自然论 • Fresh interest in nature. • The belief that nature is a revelation of God. • Humanitarian sympathy for the humble and oppressed. • The faith that people are naturally good. • That they lived idyllic and benevolent lives in a primitive past before the advent of civilization. • his radical doctrine that the golden age will dawn again when social institutions are modified, since they are responsible for existing evil.

4. His Major Achievements • Poems anticipating Romanticism: • The Wild Honey-Suckle (1786), The Indian Burying Ground (1787), To a Caty-Did (1815) , and The Beauties of Santa Cuz • Political Poems: • To the Memory of Brave Americans (1781), On Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man • A Deist Poem: • On the Universality of and Other Attributes of the God of Nature

5. Indian Burying Ground

6. Some poetic terms • Theme: An implicit or recurrent idea. • Stanza: One of the divisions of a poem, composed of two or more lines usually characterized by a common pattern of meter, rhyme, and number of lines. • 诗节：诗中由两行或更多行构成的一节，通常以有相同音步、节奏和行数为特征 • Meter: The measured arrangement of words in poetry, as by accentual rhythm, syllabic quantity, or the number of syllables in a line. • 韵律：诗歌中字词的有格律的排列，如重音的韵律，音节的数量或一行内音节的总数