www.boke.com

Philip Freneau

1901

Philip Freneau

The Poet of the Revolution

A History of His Life and Times

By

Mary S. Austin

Edited by Helen Kearny Vreeland

Great-granddaughter of the Poet
DEDICATED

TO THE

PATRIOTIC SOCIETIES

OF

AMERICA

1986

THE NEWSPAPER VERSE
OF PHILIP FRENEAU

An Edition and Bibilographical Survey

By Judith R. Hiltner

 

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

I.
Contents of the edition

The majority of Freneau's known poems, which were col-
lected in five volumes published between 1786 and 1815, first
appeared in newspapers printed in the towns and cities where he
lived, worked, and traveled. [...]

The edition includes, in chronological order, the earliest
newspaper texts of Freneau's collected poems, as well as lists of
all subsequent newspaper variants, excluding variants appearing
in texts that were merely reprinted by newspaper editors from
one of Freneau's collections. [...]

[...] Among the several collected texts of Freneau's poems
many demonstrate variants in stanza form, proving that Freneau
habitually experimented with different layouts for his verses.
Although newspaper editors may have changed the layout in
reprinting a Freneau poem simply to fit the poem into their
columns, when a change in stanza form occurs in a text demon-
strating other substantive variants, we have grounds for assuming
authorial approval for the change in stanza form. [...]

In addition to the original newspaper texts and subsequent
newspaper variants of Freneau's poems, the main edition also
annotates useful or interesting editorial comments appearing
with the poems and information about the poems derived exclu-
sively from my study of the newspapers themselves. [...]

Several of Freneau's poems, for instance, were written in direct
response to articles, editorials, or poems printed in rival news-
papers. The substance of these "newspaper interchanges" is
annotated, providing the newspaper background of serveral of
Freneau's poems.

1967
excerpted from the book flap

Philip
Freneau
Poet & Journalist
By Philip M Marsh

In the past thirty years, scholars have
begun to re-examine the works and the life
of a man who is now, considered by many
to have been the first important American
poet and journalist -- Philip Freneau. He
has come to be called the poet of the
Revolution, our first national democratic
editor, and "the unwitting cause of the
original division of our voters into
two parties."

While Freneau was perhaps as much a poet
as a journalist, the author of this volume
has chosen to emphasize his journalistic
achievements -- "his neglected side."
The story of a "life and times," from
1752 to 1832, of colonial and in-
dependent America, and of one of
the liberal, democratic idealists
who helped to shape it. [...]

1967
excerpted from the book flap

Philip Freneau

Champion of Democracy

BY JACOB AXELRAD

A graduate of Princeton, he was the roomate
of James Madison and a classmate of Hugh
Henry Brackenridge and Aaron Burr. When the
colonies rebelled against England he supported
his newly born nation as a privateer, spending
some time in a British prison as a result. He also
served, more effectively, as "the poet of the Revo-
lution." Later he became the journalistic voice
of the democrats.

Ardently devoted to liberty, he believed him-
self to be a defender of the common man, for
whom he fought selflessly and often vitriolicly
throughout his life. In newspapers such as The
Freeman's Journal, The New York Daily Ad-
vertiser, The National Gazette, The Jersey
Chronicle, and The Time-Piece he published
articles, letters, and poems, instructing the citi-
zen of the new Republic about his rights, and
attacking those who, he believed, were infring-
ing on those rights. In the midst of the contro-
versy in which he was so often involved, he also
found time to write a small body of poetry
whose sensitivity and beauty mark him as the
poetic equal of his European contemporaries,
and, in fact, as a precursor of the new Romantic
movement. [...]

1941
excerpted from the PREFACE

That   
   rascal
Freneau

A STUDY
IN LITERARY FAILURE

By LEWIS LEARY

Philip Freneau failed in almost everything he attempted. It was
partly his own fault, and partly the fault of the restless spirit of his
time. Nurtured on books and poetry, he found himself at twenty
in a world torn by political and economic stress. There was no place
in this world for the life Freneau wanted to live; yet the ideals for
which blood was being shed and governments overthrown in the
late eighteenth century were just those toward which he strove.
Caught mercilessly between the necessity of remaining true to his
own highest aspiration and the equally compelling necessity of bend-
ing often to degrading means for its attainment, his life was a series
of alternationg compromises with and escapes from activity in revo-
lutionary America. He was not a political philosopher: he was a
poet, and too sensitive to personal hurt, too quick to turn in anger on
an opponent, to be taken seriously as a measure of the philosophical
content of his time. Through all his life Freneau was the young radi-
cal who never forgets his quarrel with a world which makes no room
for him. As such, he belongs to the twentieth century as well as to
the eighteenth, and represents a type of literary failure familiar in
almost any age.

But this does not mean that Freneau shall be forgotten. He re-
mains chronologically near the head of every anthology of Ameri-
can verse. "The Wild Honey Suckle" and "The Indian Burying
Ground" have become, at least in title, part of the equipment of
every man who pretends to knowledge of the pre-Romantic period
of English poetry. To students of Washington's administration and
to historians of American journalism he is known for his partisan
advocacy of Jeffersonian doctrines. His importance as a poet, a
journalist, and a political propagandist has been expertly chron-
icled. Only the details of his life story have remained unknown [...]

excerpted from The New York Times
April 27, 2003, Sunday

NEW JERSEY WEEKLY DESK

Ode to Joi(sey)

By ROBERT STRAUSS (NYT)
PERHAPS it's something in New Jersey's water. After all, water has always been a source of inspiration for poets -- whether in the ''The Odyssey'' or in the Bible.

It is as good an explanation as any. Otherwise, why would three of the last four Pulitzer Prize-winning poets come from New Jersey, including the most recent recipient, Paul Muldoon, an English professor at Princeton?

''Maybe we have an All-Star team growing here,'' C.K. Williams, a Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague of Mr. Muldoon at Princeton, said in a recent interview.

Besides Mr. Williams, the 2000 winner, and Mr. Muldoon -- who was awarded the Pulitzer earlier this month for his collection '''Moy Sand and Gravel'' -- there was Stephen Dunn, a professor at Richard Stockton University, who was granted the award in 2001.

Amazingly or coincidentally or both, the list does not end there. Yusef Komunyakaa, another Princeton professor, won the Pulitzer in 1994.

Not to forget Robert Pinsky, the country's poet laureate in 1997-98, who grew up in Long Branch and graduated from Rutgers. As if those were not credentials enough, his most recent book of poems was entitled ''Jersey Rain.''

''Maybe there is something in the water,'' Mr. Williams joked.

While there is no 21st-century New Jersey school of poetry as there were, say, Impressionist painters in 19th-century Paris or Elizabethan playwrights in 16th- and 17th-century England, surely there has been a passel of poets from the state.

Philip Freneau, a Monmouth County native and a roommate of James Madison's at Princeton, is widely considered the father of American poetry. [...]

excerpted from The New York Times
May 7, 2003, Wednesday

EDITORIAL DESK

Whose Side Is Bush On?

By Richard Norton Smith ( Op-Ed )
LAWRENCE, Kan. --

[...] Consider the 1790's, when a raw republic was convulsed by foreign turmoil and the president's cabinet was polarized around two secretaries. Then it was a pro-French secretary of state and the Anglophile secretary of the Treasury: the former a slave-owning aristocrat who lived on a mountaintop and proclaimed himself a friend to humanity; the other a self-made elitist with a Calvinist belief in original sin, and no shortage of personal experience to vindicate his faith. Like fire and frost, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were temperamental opposites whom not even George Washington could reconcile.

Practicing negative politics long before it had a name, each man enlisted journalistic proxies to take his case public. To edit The National Gazette, Jefferson drafted Philip Freneau, a minor poet whose verse held less appeal than his polemics. Ostensibly hired as a State Department clerk, Jefferson's mouthpiece converted his newspaper into a battering ram directed at the administration that employed him.

Not to be outdone, Hamilton served as midwife to The Gazette of the United States. Using a variety of pseudonyms, the government's chief fiscal officer savaged his cabinet rival, whose popular image as ''the great, modest, retiring philosopher'' masked ''the intriguing incendiary, the aspiring turbulent competitor.''

President Washington paid three dollars a year for the privilege of seeing himself vilified in Freneau's paper as a dupe of King George III and a captive of Hamilton. He may have been the first, but Washington is hardly the last American chief executive to be depicted as a bit player in the drama of his own presidency, shunted to the wings by more dynamic actors.

In truth, of course, he was anything but. Only a leader of Washington's self-assurance would have permitted Hamilton and Jefferson their street brawl. Desperate to buy time for the new nation to attain a position from which to defy Old World powers, Washington wanted above all to stay out of Europe's murderous quarrels. By humoring his fractious ministers, he not only got two opinions on every issue, he also delayed the formal onset of party warfare, keeping both men in his official family long after they wished to be free. The political general had not lost his touch. [...]