he began the military career that he would intermittently pursue for the next twenty-five years by enlisting as a gentleman volunteer with the 41st. Regiment of the British Army, then engaged in war with the United States.
No experience or event had a greater impact on Richardson’s life and career than the War of 1812, and throughout his life he would recall shaking hands with Tecumseh before the beginning of the Battle of Moraviantown in 1813.15 In that same battle, Richardson was captured by American soldiers and, after a year as a prisoner of war in Kentucky, returned to Canada in October, 1814. In the following summer he sailed to Europe to join the forces opposing Napoleon. Upon arrival, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant, although the Battle of Waterloo had been fought while he was crossing the Atlantic. After a brief interval as a half-pay officer, Richardson was assigned to the Queen’s Regiment and posted to the West Indies where he spent the next two years; in 1818 he returned to England as a half-pay lieutenant. Relatively little is known of the next decade of his life, but during this period he began his career as a writer.
| LoC Classification |
PR9199.2.R53T43 1992 |
| Dewey |
811/.3 |
| Nationality |
Canada |
| Cover Price |
$8.00 |
| No. of Pages |
186 |
| Height x Width |
9.1
inch |
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In his "Preface" to the first edition of Tecumseh; or The Warrior of the West (1828), Richardson stressed that the poem was "the production of a Soldier—of one who aspires not to the high pinnacle of poetical fame,
"probably the first book of verse by a Western Ontario author," and the "first literary account of the naval battle at Put-in-Bay and the subsequent defeat of the British at the Moravian village"7 during the War of 1812. Klinck then identifies the literary and cultural contexts within which the poem has been placed:
In the midst of the poet’s long Byronic comments on war, hope, terror, idyllic Indian life, revenge, natural beauty and melancholy, Tecumseh is sustained as the central figure, a noble savage and a Byronic hero—eloquent, passionate, strong, patient, misunderstood, solitary, and torn by fierce agonies of the soul.
