Philip Freneau

Philip Freneau (born Jan. 2, 1752, New York, N.Y. [U.S.]—died Dec. 18, 1832, Monmouth county, N.J., U.S.) was an American poet, essayist, and editor, known as the “poet of the American Revolution.”

After graduating from Princeton University in 1771, Freneau taught school and studied for the ministry until the outbreak of the American Revolution, when he began to write vitriolic satire against the British and Tories. Not until his return from two years in the Caribbean islands, where he produced two of his most ambitious poems, “The Beauties of Santa Cruz” and “The House of Night,” did he become an active participant in the war, joining the New Jersey militia in 1778 and sailing through the British blockade as a privateer to the West Indies. Captured and imprisoned by the British in 1780, Freneau wrote in verse bitterly, on his release, The British Prison-Ship (1781).

During the next several years he contributed to the Freeman’s Journal in Philadelphia. Freneau became a sea captain until 1790, when he again entered partisan journalism, ultimately as editor from 1791 to 1793 of the strongly Republican National Gazette in Philadelphia. Freneau alternated quiet periods at sea with periods of active newspaper work, until he retired early in the 19th century to his farm in Monmouth county.

Well schooled in the classics and in the Neoclassical English poetry of the period, Freneau strove for a fresh idiom that would be unmistakably American, but, except in a few poems, he failed to achieve it.