Question

In at least 150 words, write an essay in which you explain how Philip Freneau explores American identity in the poem

The Indian Burying Ground. Use evidence from the poem to support your response.

Answer 1

Philip Freneau's poem The Indian Burying Ground encompasses many American literary techniques that explore American identity. When America was still in the process of gaining its freedom from Great Britain, American's like Philip, wrote poems and works of literature. These early authors explored themes of goth and drama, and Freneau incorporates these themes inside his poem. Philip includes suspense and psychological drama in his poem, which was also a part of the American identity. In many instances, American literature has had a theme of independence or freedom, just like how Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle includes the idea of independence for America. In his poem, Philip says, "The posture, that we give the dead, Points out the soul's eternal sleep. Not so the ancients of these lands -- The Indian, when from life releas'd Again is seated with his friends, And shares gain the joyous feast." In this stanza, Philip includes a sense of suspense as he describes the Native American burial ceremony. This drama that he creates is an aspect of the American identity. He also refers to himself at the beginning of the poem, "In spite of all the learn'd have said; I still my old opinion keep..." Many American works of literature include this aspect of using first-person words.

(I know it is not a lot compared to the other guy, but here you go!)

Answer 2

easy here

Step-by-step explanation:

“The Indian Burying Ground” is a short lyric poem of forty lines celebrating the spirits of Native Americans haunting their sequestered graves in the North American wilderness. It is an early American example of the Romantic movement in Western literature. Although its elegiac subject matter harks back to the eighteenth century British school of “graveyard” poetry, Philip Freneau adds a Romantic twist to the sepulchral theme of human mortality. This writer displays a Gothic fascination with supernatural phenomena and moonlit scenes of fancy, a primitivistic attention to unspoiled natives and pristine nature, a nostalgia for a legendary past, and an interest in the spellbinding powers of the imagination (or “fancy”) as superior to the reason of the European Enlightenment. In lyric form and fanciful poetic theme, Freneau bears close comparison to William Collins in eighteenth century England.The poem opens with a primitivistic speaker in the guise of a common man challenging civilized burial customs, which betray what a culture thinks of the state of death. When civilized culture demands burying a corpse in a prone position, death is seen as an eternal sleep for the soul.

If readers consider not the European past but the antiquity of the New World, however, they contemplate America’s primordial race of Indians, whose sitting posture in their graves suggests that their souls actively continue the simple pursuits of their former mortal lives, as depicted on their pottery and as indicated by their weapons. For example, an Indian arrowhead, or “head of stone,” symbolizes the opposite of a European headstone—namely, the enduring vitality of the dead person’s spirit, unlike the cold, engraved memorial for a dead white man