In his lifetime, which spanned the American Revolution and the first decades of the Early American Republic, Timothy Dwight was a commanding cultural figure, equally renowned as a poet, educator, clergyman and theologian. As a poet, Dwight was a founding member of the first literary “school” in America, the Connecticut Wits, which also included John Trumbull (1750-1831), Joel Barlow (1754-1812), David Humphreys (1752-1818), and others. Like the other Wits, Dwight was an especial admirer of the poets of the English Augustan period, and his own poems, which deal chiefly with the political, moral, and religious future of the new American nation, recall the particular Augustan sense of poetry as a means of political or ideological interventi

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First published 11 January 2005

Citation: Wells, Colin. "Timothy Dwight". The Literary Encyclopedia. 11 January 2005.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1369, accessed 9 February 2010.]