The Migration of the Muses: Translation and the Origins of American Poetry

The Migration of the MusesTranslation and the Origins of American Poetry Joanne van der Woude (bio) In a 1626 poem to George Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company and resident of Jamestown colony, Michael Drayton envisions the American future of poetry: And (worthy GEORGE) by industry and use, Let’s see what lines Virginia will produce; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intice the Muses thither to repair, Intreat them gently, trayne them to that ayre, For they from hence may thither hap to fly. (3: 207–08, lines 37–45) Praising Sandys’s translation of the first five books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1621), Drayton imagines the Muses may follow Sandys to Virginia, where, once trained and entreated, they will supply the artistic inspiration that is lacking in England. The image of the migration of the Muses was popular: two years later, it would be repeated by George Wither in Robert Hayman’s Quodlibets, Lately Come Over from . . . Newfound-land: Despaire not therefore, you that love the Muses If any Tyrant you, or yours abuses: For these will follow you, and make you mirth Ev’n at the furthest Angles of the Earth. (A4r) These poems suggest that the Muses are geographically flexible and willingly make their way to the New World, where they redeem and civilize its “uninhabited wastes.”1 This article takes the idea of the migration of the Muses (semi)seriously and considers the use of classical machinery in verse on Virginia, Newfoundland, and the New World holdings of the Netherlands, which was [End Page 499] the other major Protestant player in early modern imperialism. It argues that antiquity served as the primary literary paradigm for understanding and rendering American territories and peoples. Classicism constitutes a crucial, and largely overlooked, strategy of colonial representation, particularly in poetry. The migration of the Muses is a particularly apt image as many of these texts predate Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse (1650) and the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican nun and poet who is known in the Spanish world as the tenth Muse. These well-known and often-taught “muses” form part of the larger body of devotional texts that is traditionally taken as the starting point for American literary history. This article puts forth a different kind of canon: one that thoughtfully addresses the linguistic and cultural multiplicity of settler colonialisms, while building on the comparative perspectives pioneered by Ralph Bauer (Cultural Geography) and Anna Brickhouse. Given that poetry appears to be more frequently inspired by Hellenic and Roman materials than by religious fervor in the early Atlantic world, one wonders how such classical sources change when applied to the colonial context. Does the modernity of settlement and intercultural encounter, for instance, demand new modes of representation even from old texts? I argue that uncertainty, variability, and a search for verifiable truth in the colonial contact zone prompted a consistent turn to and reworking of classical sources in an attempt to systematically confer value upon New World experience.2 New World poetry was not an entirely novel phenomenon in the early seventeenth century. Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s voyages to America were celebrated in verse by Thomas Churchyard and Stephen Parmenius in 1578 and 1582; George Chapman’s 1596 epic on Guiana repeated Raleigh’s image of the area as a virgin land; and Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1599) included nonfictional narrative verse on travels for trade and exploration. Meanwhile, in Dutch, major poets including Joost van den Vondel and Caspar Barlaeus, as well as colonial administrators such as Pieter Stuyvesant, took to writing classically inspired verse on America. Many of these poems were acutely engaged in economies of print and colonial investment. Although Mary Fuller has argued that colonial poetry “seeks to promise and even enact a kind of conceptual domestication or cultivation” (47), lots of promotional verse actually featured rude, unlearned speakers, seemingly in keeping with Drayton’s idea that the cast-out figure of Poesie “must wander in the wildernesse” (3: 208, 56). The repeated use of purportedly [End Page 500] lay speakers—even Indians—points to an aesthetic of plainness and accessibility in these poems that exists in tension with their poetic...

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