St. John Honeywood

St. John Honeywood (born February 7, 1763 in Leicester , Province of Massachusetts Bay ; died September 1, 1798 in Salem , New York ) was an American teacher, lawyer, poet, and painter.

life and work

Honeywood, the son of an English doctor who settled in Massachusetts, was orphaned at the age of twelve, but still enjoyed a good education and enrolled at Yale College , where he enjoyed the patronage of University President Ezra Stiles . After completing his studies, he first settled in Schenectady , New York, where he worked as a teacher. He began studying law in Albany in 1784 and eventually settled in Salem, New York, where he practiced as a lawyer until his untimely death.

Honeywood emerged as an amateur painter and poet. He wrote a few casual poems of political content in which he - like his contemporary Philip Freneau - glorified the young American nation and its statesmen. In 1797 he was one of the electors in the election of the second American President John Adams and on the occasion wrote a poem about Washington's renunciation of a third term ( On General Washington's Declining a Re-Election to the Presidency of the United States ). Stylistically it is a rather wooden imitation of the poetry of English neoclassicism , interspersed with numerous references to ancient mythology and the Bible. In other poems, such as The Selfish Man's Prayer on the Prospect of War , the semi-official solemnity gives way to gentle irony, while others are robustly domesticated and have country life in New York or New England Theme.

Honeywood's poems were mostly published in local newspapers, and only three years after his death did his collected works appear in a volume. In the nineteenth century some of his poems were occasionally anthologized for their moral or patriotic edification, and he enjoyed a reputation as an honorable, if at most second-rate, poet; William Cullen Bryant complained in the July 1818 edition of the North American Review in his Essay on American Poetry that Honeywood's poems were not being given due attention. In recent American literary histories, Honeywood's name appears in the footnotes at best.

Works

• Poems by St. John Honeywood, with Some Pieces in Prose . T. & J. Swords, New York 1801.