If we define poetry as the heart of man expressed in beauti-
ful language, we shall not say that we have no national poetry.
True, America has produced no Shakespeare and no Milton,
but we have an inheritance in all English literature; and
many poets in America have followed in the footsteps of
their literary British forefathers.
Puritan life was severe. It was warfare, and manual
labor of a most exhausting type, and loneliness, and devo-
tion to a strict sense of duty. It was a life in which pleasure
was given the least place and duty the greatest. Our Puri-
tan ancestors thought music and poetry dangerous, if not
actually sinful, because they made men think of this world
rather than of heaven. When Anne Bradstreet wrote our
first known American poems, she was expressing English
thought; "The tenth muse" was not animated by the life
around her, but was living in a dream of the land she had left
behind; her poems are faint echoes of the poetry of Eng-
land. After time had identified her with life in the new
world, she wrote "Contemplations," in which_her English
nightingales are changed to crickets and her English gilli-
flowers to American blackberry vines. The truly represent-
ative poetry of colonial times is Michael Wigglesworth's
"Day of Doom." This is the real heart of the Puritan, his