KENTUCKY IN
AMERICAN LETTERS
OTHER WORKS BY MR. TOWNSEND
Richard Hickman Menefee. 1907
Kentuckians in History and Literature. 1907
The Life of James Francis Leonard. 1909
Kentucky: Mother of Governors. 1910
Lore of the Meadowland. 1911
KENTUCKY IN
AMERICAN LETTERS
1784-1912
BY
JOHN WILSON TOWNSEND
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
JAMES LANE ALLEN
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
THE TORCH PRESS
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA
NINETEEN THIRTEEN
Of this edition one thousand sets have been printed, of whichthis is number
241
Copyright 1913
By The Torch Press
Published September 1913
To My Mother
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Townsend's fellow countrymen must feel themselvesto be put under a beautiful obligation to him by his workentitled Kentucky in American Letters. He has thusfenced off for the lovers of New World literature a wellwatered bluegrass pasture of prose and verse, whichthey may enter and range through according to their appetitesfor its peculiar green provender and their thirstfor the limestone spring. This strip of pasture is a hundredyears long; its breadth may not be politely questioned!
For the backward-looking and for the forward-lookingstudents of American literature, not its merely browsingreaders, he has wrought a service of larger and morelasting account. Whether his patiently done and richlycrowned work be the first of its class and kind, there isslight need to consider here: fitly enough it might be apioneer, a path-blazer, as coming from the land of pioneers,path-blazers.
But whether or not other works of like character be alreadyin the field of national observation, it is inevitablethat many others soon will be. There must in time and inthe natural course of events come about a complete marshallingof the American commonwealths, especially ofthe older American commonwealths, attended each by itswomen and men of letters; with the final result that theentire pageant of our literary creativeness as a people[Pg viii]will thus be exhibited and reviewed within those barriersand divisions, which from the beginning have constitutedthe peculiar genius of our civilization.
When this has been done, when the States have severallymade their profoundly significant showing, when theevidence up to some century mark or half-century markis all presented, then for the first time we, as a readingand thoughtful self-studying people, may for the firsttime be advanced to the position of beginning to understandwhat as a whole our cis-Atlantic branch of Englishliterature really is.
Thus Mr. Townsend's work and the work of his fellow-craftsmenare all stations on the long road but the rightroad. They are aids to the marshalling of the Americancommonwealths at a great meeting-point of the higher influencesof our nation.
Now, already American literature has long been a subjectin regard to which a library of books has been written.The authors of by far the most of t