| Musae Americanae examines the Neo-Latin verse composed between 1625 and 1800 in the British colonies and the United States of America. In answering the fundamental questions concerning the composition of the verse, it suggests the place of the corpus within American literature and explains its critical neglect.;American Neo-Latin verse, despite its obscurity, illustrates many of the traits that critics suggest are generally indicative of early American literature: (1) the multiplicity of influences, (2) preponderance of public expression, (3) distinctly marginal character, and (4) understanding of nature as text.;Similar to their European antecedents, the primarily elegaic poems of the seventeenth century reveal their authors' ability to Christianize a classically pagan practice without undue violence to either legacy. Unlike the lapidary Old World anthologies, however, the American incarnations of Neo-Latin occasional verse were generally single-sheet elegies for departed leaders or intimate epigrams scribbled in margins or commonplace books.;With the advent of periodicals in the eighteenth century, many writers submitted topical verses, more diverse than previous. Through the poetic rivalries and English translations that colonial periodicals soon generated, these Neo-Latin poems present a microcosm of the periodicals themselves: a forum in which the public might share. Consequently, far from being mere coterie literature as some critics have suggested, American Neo-Latin verse reflects the essentially public, disparate, and fluid attributes of the early American character.;The disregard for American Neo-Latin verse derives, in part, from the retroactive invention of "American Literature" in the early nineteenth century, when writers and critics sought to forge a distinctly American literature to accompany its utterly original political experiment. Unhappy with what they deemed mannerist and European, critics such as William Cullen Bryant selectively championed texts that exemplified the values of the new era. American Neo-Latin, despite its firmly grounded academic infrastructure as well as its success in expressing the diverse and vital concerns of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, thus fell victim to the process of cultural self-definition of the early National period. |
