A collection of poems by Trumbull, Dwight, Barlow, Humphreys, Freneau, and others, edited by Elihu Hubbard Smith, which is regarded as the first general collection of American poetry. A second volume promised by the editor was never published. cf. Dexter, Biog. sketches of the graduates of Yale College, v. 4, p. 510; Sabin, Bibl. Amer.; M.E. Bailey, "A lesser Hartford wit, Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith", 1928, p. [61]-77.
"List of subscribers": [6] p. following p. 304.
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Elihu Hubbard Smith, editor, American Poems, Selected and Original, the first notable American poetry anthology; contains poems largely from the Hartford Wits group of Connecticut poets, including poems by friends of Smith such as John Trumbull, Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight and Lemuel Hopkins, as well as Philip Freneau, William Livingston, Sarah Wentworth Morton and Robert Treat Paine; Litchfield, Connecticut: Printed by Collier and Buel (1793)
Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771-1798) was born in Litchfield, Connecticut and graduated from Yale in 1786. Afterwards he studied literature at Timothy Dwight's Greenfield Academy, and medicine with Benjamin Rush. Smith practiced at Wethersfield (1791-93), where he was associated with the Connecticut Wits and edited American Poems, the first anthology of American poetry (1793). He later settled in New York, where he died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1798. Smith adapted Oliver Goldsmith's ballad Edwin and Angelina as a comic opera that was performed in New York.
