The architects of the American literary canon have always struggled between aesthetics and the demands of historicity

Four years of college dozed awayIn sleep, in slothfulness and play…

Of course, the Wits also had positive things to say about the importance of education for both personal character and public good. Joel Barlow tried to found a national university based on combined research and instruction, a strange and radical idea at the time, and was an early proponent of the belief that education could bring about a real democracy of equals, writing “Banish the mysticism of inequality and you banish almost all the evil attendant on human nature.” This is another good starting point for debate amongst students.But it is the Wits’ attempt to create a national mythology, to try to define who we are as a people, that seems to hold the most promise in restoring their place in the canon. In this way they form a bridge from Benjamin Franklin to Walt Whitman, and beyond. From the Wits’ perspective, the job of the American author is to define who we are as a people – our character, values, culture, and flaws. And of course almost every American “classic” does just this, whether it is The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, or On the Road. Though the Wits’ poems and books may not have risen to the level of these later classics, they were the first literary movement to explore the cultural and philosophical results of the Revolution, which they saw, and we still see, as the most important event of their age.One reason John Trumbull’s M’Fingal stayed in the “canon” of American Literature longer than the poems of the Hartford Wits was probably due to his genius lay in bringing the entire Revolution down to human size, and setting the argument at a typical New England town-meeting, something every one of his readers could relate to. In the town meeting argument, he also gives the Tory Squire M’Fingal as much voice as the patriot Honorius, allowing for warnings about “mob rule” with lines like this:

Yet with republics to dismay us,

You’ve call’d up Anarchy from chaos,