Timothy Dwight (May 14, 1752 – January 11, 1817) was an American academic and educator, a Congregationalist minister, theologian, and author. He was the eighth president of Yale College (1795-1817).[1]

While a tutor, he studied law, with the intention of adopting it as a profession; but in 1777, there being a great dearth of chaplains in the Continental army, he was licensed to preach, and soon afterward became chaplain in Parsons's brigade, of the Connecticut line.

While holding this office he wrote several stirring patriotic songs, one of which, "Columbia," became a genera.1 favorite. His father's sudden death in 1778 recalled him to the care of his widowed mother and her family, with whom he remained at Northampton, Massachusetts, five years, tilling the farm and preaching occasionally in the neighboring Churches.


Dwight graduated from Yale in 1769. For two years, he was rector of the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, Connecticut. He was a tutor at Yale College from 1771 to 1777. Licensed to preach in 1777, he was appointed by Congress chaplain in General Samuel Holden Parsons's Connecticut Continental Brigade. He served with distinction, inspiring the troops with his sermons and the stirring war songs he composed, the most famous of which is "Columbia".

On news of his father's death in the fall of 1778, he resigned his commission and returned to take charge of his family in Northampton. Besides managing the family's farms, he preached and taught, establishing a school for both sexes. During this period, he served two terms in the Massachusetts legislature.

His 1785 poem The Conquest of Canaan is considered to be the first American epic poem.

Dwight wrote an ambitious epic in eleven books, The Conquest of Canaan, finished in 1774 but not published until 1785, a somewhat ponderous and solemn satire, The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), directed against David Hume, Voltaire and others; Greenfield Hill (1794), the suggestion for which seems to have been derived from John Denham's Coopers Hill; and a number of minor poems and hymns, the best known of which is that beginning "I love thy kingdom, Lord".