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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Della cruscanism has been primarily associated in literary history with a rash of bad taste which broke out in English poetry between 1787 and 1791 and for which Robert Merry was held responsible. It took its name from the pseudonym “Della Crusca” which Merry used in a poetical correspondence carried on in the World between 1787 and 1789 with Mrs. Hannah Cowley, who signed herself “Anna Matilda,” and other ladies. It was a compound of amorous superlatives, dithyrambic apostrophes, pretentious ornament overflowing in flowery epithets, and a heady romanticism completely lacking the comparatively disciplined artistry which Byron and Shelley were later to achieve in Romantic poetry dealing with similar themes. This flood of bombastic sentiment was stemmed in England by William Gifford, whose satirical onslaughts in the Baviad (1791) and the Maeviad (1795) have left Merry branded as a mere poetaster ever since.
1 Though later Merry was to outgrow this immature romanticism of the lunatic fringe especially in his political writings in England, the change has never been recognized by literary historians. For a study of his later writing in England and its departure from the Della Cruscan stereotype, see M. Ray Adams, “Robert Merry, Political Romanticist,” Studies in Romanticism, ix (Autumn 1962), 23–37.
2 Poets and Poetry of America, 16th edition, p. 81n.
3 The Farmer's Museum (Walpole, New Hampshire), 2 September 1799.
4 “Robert Merry—a pre-Byronic Hero,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, xxvii (December 1942), 95.
5 The First Century of American Literature, 1770–1870 (New York, 1935) pp. 107–115. Only two of the longer general histories of American literature as much as mention it, even though it was the predominant influence in shaping popular poetry for a decade. See the Cambridge History, i, 178–179, and Charles Angoff, Literary History of the American People (New York, 1931), ii, 214–215.
6 Since, as shown below, the floridity and flamboyance of the poetry of the young American republic are traceable only in part to the influence of Merry's Della Cruscan verse and in part to the undisciplined ebullience of a young nation, I have practically limited myself to the poetry unmistakably inspired by the correspondence in the World.
7 The poem was reprinted in the Massachusetts Magazine for December 1790, in the New York Magazine for March 1791, and in American Poems, edited by Elihu H. Smith in 1793.
8 Gazelle of the United States of Philadelphia for 6 October 1790.
9 The quotations here given from the Philenia-Alfred series are taken from the numbers of the Columbian Centinel for 12 March, 16 April, and 28 May, respectively. “Alfred” also is thought by some to have been Paine, who, incidentally, was then enamored of the French Revolution. But Ruth C. Clough in her biography of Paine does not think so. See Emily Pendleton and Milton Ellis, Philenia: The Life and Works of Sarah Wentworth Morton, Univ. of Maine Studies, No. 20 (1931), p. 49. Paine had at least four pseudonyms.
10 The quotations from the Ella-Birtha series are taken from the Gazette of the United States for 23 March, 2 and 16 April, 14 May, 4 June, 3 August, and 2 July, respectively. “Ella” is Dr. Elihu H. Smith, a Hartford Wit, who joined Barlow against the Federalist bias of the group. “Birtha” has not been satisfactorily identified. The evidence supplied by Smith's biographer that the writer was Joseph Bringhurst, friend of Smith and C. B. Brown, is not tenable, since it completely disregards the tone of the poems and since, as seen above, “Ella” uses the feminine pronoun with reference to “Birtha.” See Marcia Edgerton Bailey, A Lesser Hartford Wit, Univ. of Maine Studies, No. 11 (1928), p. 44. Mrs. Annie Russell Marble conjectures, with no supporting evidence whatever, that the Ella-Birtha correspondence was carried on between Freneau and his wife, Eleanor Forman, during their courtship. See her Heralds of American Literature (Chicago, 1907), p. 44n. Miss Bailey writes of an Ella-Callista interchange in the New York Magazine during 1791 (p. 102). I have been unable to find such a correspondence. There is a poem entitled “Friendship” by “Ella” in the number for January 1792, in which, bereft of friends, he is rescued by “Callista,” who “stood confessed / In feelings lost, tumultously sweet,” and there is one entitled “To Ella” by “Callista” in the number for May 1793. During 1794 the magazine was loaded with pseudonymous poems, amorous and elegiac, in the Della Cruscan vein.
11 Massachusetts Magazine for April 1793.
12 Massachusetts Mercury for February 1793. A better description of what Della Cruscan poetry was not could hardly be found.
13 Works in Prose and Verse of the Late Robert Treat Paine (Boston, 1812), pp. 98–100, 187.
14 Massachusetts Magazine for June 1793.
15 Preface to The Echo (New York, 1807), pp. iii, iv.
16 Echo, No. ii.
17 Quoted in Emily Pendleton and Milton Ellis, op. cit., p. 67.
18 Pattee (pp. 112–115) comments in some detail upon Tyler's attacks but beyond them he does not follow the decline and fall of Della Cruscanism in America.
19 In Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature (New York, 1856), i, 417.
20 This and the above passage are quoted in larger part by Pattee.
21 Farmer's Museum, 2 January 1798.
22 See Milton Ellis, Joseph Dennie and His Circle (Austin, Texas, 1915), p. 190.
23 Spirit of the Farmer's Museum, p. 251.
24 Quoted by permission of the Harvard University Library from the unpublished letter of 18 June 1797 in its possession.
25 See the Time Piece for the following dates: 17, 21, 24 April; 3, 8, 10, 22, 29 May; 8, 18, 22, 25 September; 2, 6, 9 October 1797.
26 For a full discussion of this series with generous quotations, see Thelma Louise Kellogg, Life and Works of John Davis, Univ. of Maine Studies, No. 1 (1924), pp. 37–44.
27 See p. 181.
28 The Spirit of American Journals, edited by George Bourne (Baltimore, 1806), pp. 169–170.
29 16th edition, p. 449. The third and fourth lines seem to refer primarily to Merry's political satires against the Pitt government written just before leaving England. See M. Ray Adams, “Robert Merry, Political Romanticist,” op. cit., pp. 33–36. The affinities between Della Cruscanism and political liberalism in America as seen above, are fairly constant.
30 Pp. 115, 111.
31 See Tucker's chapter, “The Beginnings of Verse,” in the Cambridge History of American Literature, i, 178, and Pattee, p. 108. Neither writer, however, gives the matter more than passing notice, Tucker mistakenly assuming that Merry started the Della Cruscan craze in Florence instead of in England.
32 This fact suggests an affinity between the callow youth-fulness of American poetry at the time and the overblown sentiment that was soon to mark the Della Cruscan school in England.
33 Bulletin of Bibliography, xviii (April 1945), 131.
34 The first of these was originally published in the Newport (Rhode Island) Mercury on 8 May 1785 and the other seven in the Charleston Columbian Herald between 8 August 1785 and 22 May 1786. These poems were generously reprinted along with others of Ladd in the American Museum of Philadelphia between February 1787 and April 1788.
35 Charleston Columbian Herald, 30 September 1785.
36 Quoted in part by Pattee (p. 112). The phrase “the Boston style” was lifted by Pattee from Timothy Dwight, who in 1796 fixed it in literary history as indicating “a florid, pompous manner of writing.” But Dwight used it with special reference to American oratory, not, as Pattee makes it appear, to American Della Cruscan poetry. See his Travels in New York and New England (New Haven, 1821–22), i, 510. See also in this connection H. Lloyd Flewelling, “Literary Cricitism in American Magazines, 1783–1820” (1931), pp. 45–50, an unpublished Univ. of Michigan dissertation.
37 Pp. lxxv, lxxxii.
38 In a letter of 3 October to Thomas Poole he wrote from Hamburg of the gardens of English merchants along the Elbe: “The style is in imitation of the English garden, imitated as Della Crusca might imitate Virgil.” Early Letters of William Wordsworth, edited by Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), i, 200. This passage was called to my attention by Professor C. L. Shaver of Oberlin College.
39 See “A Newly Discovered Play of Robert Merry Written in America,” Manuscripts, xiii (Fall, 1961), 23–24, and “Robert Merry, Political Romanticist,” op. cit., pp. 35–36.
40 See his “The Original Della Cruscans and the Florence Miscellany,” Huntington Library Quarterly, xix (May 1956), 277–280, 288–290, 293–300.
41 For instance, Reese Davis James, writing of Merry after he had come to America, refers to him simply as “the one-time playboy and poet ‘Della Crusca’,” with no recognition whatever of his maturer character and work. Cradle of Culture: The Philadelphia Stage, 1800–1810 (Philadelphia, 1957), p. 57.
42 Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia, 1855), p. 64.
