Philip Morin Freneau

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Freneau, Philip Morin

 

Born Jan. 2, 1752, in New York City; died Dec. 19, 1832, in Middletown Point, N. J. American poet and publicist.

Freneau graduated from Princeton University. His first collection, Poems, was published in 1786. A veteran of the American Revolution (1775–83), Freneau expressed in this collection a growing disenchantment with the results of the revolution. A classicistic writer, he became the first American preromantic poet. His political lyric poems “The House of Night” (1779) and “The British Prison-Ship” (1781) marked the beginning of 19th-century American democratic poetry.

WORKS

The Poems, vols. 1–3. Princeton, N. J., 1902–07.
The Prose. New Brunswick, N. J., 1955.
In Russian translation:
“Sovet sochiniteliam.” In Estetika amerikanskogo romantizma. Moscow, 1977.

REFERENCES

Istoriia amerikanskoi literatury, vol. 1. Moscow-Leningrad, 1947.
Nikoliukin, A. N. Amerikanskii romantizm i sovremennost’. Moscow, 1968.
Marsh, P. M. Philip Freneau, Poet and Journalist. Minneapolis, 1967.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.