Robert Bolling (1738-1775)

Sources

Poet

Significance. Bolling was the most eminent Southern poet before the Revolution, and his writing and his life demonstrate some of the profound problems of cultural identity faced by even the wealthiest members of the colonial gentry. Like other sons of the Virginia gentry such as the playwright Robert Munford and the Patriot writer Robert Bland, he attended a prestigious school at Wake-field in England (1751–1755), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of the classics. Bolling’s life and the role that literature played in it were typical of Virginia gentlemen of the colonial era, who cultivated hobbies of writing history, poetry, and belles lettres both as proof of their cultivation and refinement and as a central occasion for friendship and sociability with their peers. Writing for Bolling was not a vocation but an amusing and improving diversion from his main duties as one of Virginia’s major landholders, and the minor political roles he assumed after inheriting plantations upon his father’s death in 1757. His poems were published in English journals and newspapers throughout the 1760s and celebrated by patriots as evidence that culture in America could be homegrown and not just imported.

Commentary. Bolling’s earlier poetry imitated the Italian lyrics of Torquato Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto, Gabriello Chiabrera, and Pietro Metastasio. Among the British elite these poets represented a fashionable ideal of metropolitan taste, and they provided Bolling with a model of lyrical conventions and a perspective of aristocratic refinement from which to depict and lament colonial backwardness. “The Exile,” for example, offers a comic account of the alienation that a colonial sophisticate experiences in comparing his primitive Virginia home to the true charms of English society. By the second half of the 1760s Bolling increasingly used the pages of the Virginia Gazette to comment in satirical verse on the political fortunes of his colony. His frustration with the colonial government and his outrage at the infringements on individual rights produced some of the most original verse of the colonial era. Bolling’s poems about the Chiswell scandal of 1766, in which Loyalist and rebel factions first became apparent among the Virginia elite, nearly got him indicted for treason against the Crown. Two other poems, “Civil Dudgeon” and “A Canzonet,” dealt with the Norfolk smallpox inoculation, which Bolling interpreted as a rehearsal of Whig and Tory conflicts that would erupt with the Revolution.

Marriage. Although Bolling became well known to his contemporaries through the poems he published in newspapers in England as well as in the colonies, he is probably better remembered now for private poetry, which then had few readers outside his closest friends but today demonstrates the profound conflicts colonial gentlemen felt as they sought to transcend their provincial origins. Virginia gentlemen such as Bolling sought to identify with the cosmopolitan habits of the English gentry, but the wealth needed for the consumption and genteel display lay beyond the grasp of all but the largest landowners and political powers, such as the Byrds. For young Virginia gentry such as Thomas Jefferson and Bolling the main avenue for social and economic mobility was marriage. Bolling’s courtship of Anne Miller promised to unite him not only with wealth but also with an English aristocratic family of high standing; his rejection by her father, and the frequent failure of these court-ships in general, made such ambitious colonial men aware of their cultural inadequacy in an especially humiliating way. Although Bolling did have later success in marrying a wealthy woman (who died a year later), the path toward the modest success he achieved as Virginia’s foremost poet and a leading squire before his death in 1775 was difficult. His case in particular reveals a gap between the myth of a Virginia gentry class celebrated in the public writings by Bolling, Jefferson, and William Byrd II and the private realities of colonial resentments and self-hatred that lay behind it.

Hatred of Women. In “Neanthe” Bolling wrote a mock epic about about the courtship of a lustful, fat daughter of a newly rich gentlemen by two friends who are after her estate. One suitor kills the other; the survivor is hanged; and the woman, “Neanthe,” hangs herself. Perhaps the most vicious satire in American literature, Bolling’s poem shows young gentry reducing themselves to the most grotesque behavior out of their crude drives for sex and money. Like his collection of poems, writings, and often obscene drawings in “Hilarodia,” “Neanthe” seethes with hatred of women. The disgusting object of this courtship has been interpreted as a symbol for the ideal of British, metropolitan gentility. Young gentlemen chased this ideal through rituals of courtship that were a sham disguise for the degrading pursuit of primitive desires. Bolling’s writings suggest in particular how the seemingly unattainable standards of cosmopolitan culture inspired among ambitious colonial men a deeply felt but rarely expressed cynicism about their provincial status and desperation about their seeming inability to ever transcend it.

Sources

Emory Elliot, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 31, American Colonial Writers, 1735–1781 (Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark/Detroit: Gale Research, 1984);

J. A. Leo Lemay, Robert Bolling Woos Anne Miller (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990);

Kenneth Lockridge, “Colonial Self-Fashioning: Paradoxes and Pathologies in the Construction of Genteel Identity in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, edited by Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Frederika Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).