Philip Freneau

Philip Freneau , 1752-1832, American poet and journalist, b. New York City, grad. Princeton, 1771. During the American Revolution he served as soldier and privateer. His experiences as a prisoner of war were recorded in his poem The British Prison Ship (1781). The first professional American journalist, he was a powerful propagandist and satirist for the American Revolution and for Jeffersonian democracy. Freneau edited various papers, including the partisan National Gazette (Philadelphia, 1791-93) for Jefferson. He was usually involved in editorial quarrels, and, influential though he was, none of his papers was profitable. His political and satirical poems have value mainly for historians, but his place as the earliest important American lyric poet is secured by such poems as "The Wild Honeysuckle," "The Indian Burying Ground," and "Eutaw Springs."

Bibliography: See his Poems (ed. by F. L. Pattee, 3 vol., 1902-7) and Last Poems (ed. by L. Leary, 1946); biography by L. Leary (1941, repr. 1964); studies by P. M. Marsh (1968 and 1970).

Freneau, Philip Morin (1752–1832), the ‘poet of the American Revolution’, and miscellaneous writer, editor, and journalist, was born in New York. In 1780 during the Revolutionary War he was captured by the British, an experience which prompted the bitter satire of his poem The British Prison-Ship (1781), one of his many attacks on the British. His first collection of verse, Poems (1786), was followed by various volumes of essays, poems, etc. His verse ranged from the satirical and patriotic to works such as ‘The Wild Honey Suckle’ (1786), a nature poem of delicacy and sensitivity which heralds Romanticism.