Making American Literature: Poetry With Footnotes

This lecture is drawn from Peter Miller’s 2015–16 RBS-UVA Fellowship project, which received the 2016 Betsy and Stuart Houston Prize. It was delivered at the annual RBS-UVA Fellowship Luncheon on Wednesday, 18 May 2016.

From Miller’s project description: My Rare Book School project was an experiment in literary oblivion. For the past year, I studied the production, dissemination, and disappearance of the long poem Ontwa, The Son of the Forest, written by an American soldier named Henry Whiting and published anonymously as a book in 1822. The essay I produced from my research did not seek a rehabilitation of Ontwa as much as a post-mortem. That is, I tried to explore questions of literary merit and canonicity through a via negativa of sorts, by examining a work of literature entirely forgotten today.

After stumbling upon Ontwa accidentally in Special Collections, I quickly realized that the poem, despite its short life, was far from ordinary. Most striking was the fact that the 85-page poem narrates not the actions of white explorers or settlers, but rather a conflict between Erie and Iroquois Indian tribes in the 1650s. Also significant was a series of prose “Illustrations” following the poem itself: pseudo-ethnographic observations about Indian culture and customs provided by Lewis Cass, then governor of Michigan Territory and later Secretary of State under James Buchanan. Ontwa would be included in the first collection of American poetry published in Europe (1828), and was an important but obscured precursor to Longfellow’s massively popular Song of Hiawatha (1855).

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