Thomas Campbell, _Gertrude of Wyoming: or, The Pennsylvania Cottage_

HAZLITT DEVOTED HALF of a chapter in The Spirit of the Age to the poet Thomas Campbell, whom I had never even heard of, much less read, and praised him so highly ("beauty linked to beauty, like kindred flame to flame [...], the voluptuous fancy that raises and adorns the fairy fabric of thought") that I decided I had to investigate.

Campbell is mainly famous for two long poems, The Pleasures of Hope (mainly abstract-philosophical) and Gertrude of Wyoming (narrative). Hazlitt seemed more taken with the latter ("The Pleasures oF Hope alone would not have called forth these remarks from us; but there are passages in the Gertrude of Wyoming of so rare and ripe a beauty, that they challenge, as they exceed all praise'), so that's the one I chose to read. Besides, how can you say no to a poem titled "Gertrude of Wyoming"?

Published in 1809 (Campbell was 32), Gertrude is a narrative poem in three parts, with a total of 92 Spenserian stanzas. It is set in the American colonies--not in the Rockies, though, but in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania.  In Part I, Gertrude's widowed father adopts a boy who was orphaned by the French and Indian wars; Gertrude is nine at the time. The boy grows up and leave, but returns about fifteen years later, in Part II, and marries Gertrude. Part Iii is set a little later yet, at the time of the Revolution, and...well, it gets tragic here. You can get an idea from the Wikipedia page on the Battle of Wyoming (also known as the "Wyoming Massacre.")

Campbell had never been to North America so far as I can tell, but his father has business dealings in Virginia (which collapsed, with great financial loss, at the time of the Revolution) and two of his brothers emigrated here. It is obvious from Campbell's notes to the poem that he had read everything he could find on the native peoples of the region. The poem walks that James Fenimore Cooper line--the native peoples the English settlers encounter are at times nature's nobility, profound and eloquent, at other times brutal and bloody. This is all seventeen years before JFC published Last of the Mohicans, though--seems like it could well have been an influence.

I did not end up sharing Hazlitt's enthusiasm for. the poem, but I enjoyed reading something he enjoyed so much. And the next time I teach Faerie Queene, I can announce, "This stanza was later used for many other narrative poems--Gertrude of Wyoming, for instance."

The other half of the chapter in which Hazlitt takes up Campbell is given to George Crabbe--not famous, but a lot more famous than Campbell--and I was struck that the lengthy passage Hazlitt quotes to illustrate Crabbe's strengths is about Peter Grimes, the fisherman whose life as recounted by Crabbe became the basis for Benjamin Britten's opera.