Excerpt from British Criticism of American Writings, 1783-1815: A Contribution to the Study of Anglo-American Literary Relationships No phenomenon in the literary history of America is more amusing than the eagerness with which writers of the young republic set about the creation of a national literature. It speaks well for the intellectual interests of these men that they felt deficiencies, and were anxious to remedy them; it hardly speaks for their good sense that they thought literature could be developed as rapidly, and by much the same energetic methods as ship-building or the woolen industry. It is particularly strange that they should have attempted direct imitation. Not only did they hasten to write epics because they deemed that without its epic no national literature could/ be complete, but in the name of independence and a new literature they copied individual authors. President Dwight, one of the most energetic promoters of American letters, and the proud author of the very first American epic, planned that the seven parts of his Greenfield Hill should be in frank imitation of the manners of seven distinguished English poets. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.