The Connecticut Wits, and Other Essays

The Connecticut Wits, and Other Essays

IN the days when Connecticut counted in the national councils; when it had men in the patriot armies, in Washingtons Cabinet, in the Senate of the United Statesmen like Israel Putnam, Roger Sherman, Oliver Wolcott, Oliver Ellsworth,in those same days there was a premature but interesting literary movement in our little commonwealth. A band of young graduates of Yale, some of them tutors in the college, or in residence for their Masters degree, formed themselves into a school for the cultivation of letters. I speak advisedly in calling them a school: they were a group of personal friends, united in sympathy by similar tastes and principles; and they had in common certain definite, coherent, and conscious aims. These were, first, to liberalize and modernize the rigidly scholastic curriculum of the college by the introduction of more elegant studies: the belles lettres, the literae humaniores. Such was the plea of John Trumbull in his Masters oration, An Essay on the Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts, delivered at Commencement, 1770; and in his satire, The Progress of Dulness, he had his hit at the dry and dead routine of college learning. Secondly, these young men resolved to supply the new republic with a body of poetry on a scale commensurate with the bigness of American scenery and the vast destinies of the nation: epics resonant as Niagara, and Pindaric odes lofty as our native mountains. And finally, when, at the close of the Revolutionary War, the members of the group found themselves reunited for a few years at Hartford, they set themselves to combat, with the weapon of satire, the influences towards lawlessness and separatism which were delaying the adoption of the Constitution. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 50915
Author: Beers, Henry A. (Henry Augustin)
Release Date: Jan 14, 2016
Format: eBook
Language: English