What are some characteristics of Revolutionary poetry?

Oddly enough, one of the more prominent Revolutionary
poets was Phyllis Wheatley(1753-1784), an emancipated African slave whose owners taught
her to read and write. She captured both the spirit of the Revolution and the sins of
America in her poetry that imitates the popular style of poetry of her time:  She uses a
Latinate vocabulary, inversions, and elevated diction. For instance, in this stanza from
her poem to the earl of Dartmouth, a new appointee as secretary of state in charge of
the American Colonies, Wheatley hopes that Dartmouth will be open to the colonists'
grievances:

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Should you, my lord, while you peruse my
song,

Wonder from whence my love of Freedom
sprung,

Whence flow these wishes for the common
good,

By feeling hearts alone best
understood,

I, young in life, by seeming cruel
fate

Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy
seat:

...Such, such my case.  And can I then but
pray

Others may never feel tyrannic
sway?

Much of the
Revolutionary poetry used rhetoric to amplify the cause and spirit of the Revolution. 
However, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did not live during the Revolutionary period, wrote
about the Revolution in a different tone as he sought to define the intention and
significance of the Founding Fathers' actions.  In such poems as "A Nation's Strength,"
he asks and answers the question "What  makes a nation's pillars high/And its
foundations strong?"

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It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go
down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on
abiding rock.

Not gold but only men can make
A
people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand
fast and suffer long.

In his
poem "Concord Hymn," Emerson extols the bravery of the soldiers of the
Revolution,

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Spirit, that made those heroes
dare

To die, and leave their children
free,

Bid Time and Nature gently
spare

The shaft we raise to them and
thee."

Some of the poetry
written about the Revolution created an American mythology.  Critics feel that Walt
Whitman did more to interpret the meaning of the Revolution than any poet as he
projected the Revolutionary spirit into "a vision of citizenship" in his "I Hear America
Singing":

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Washington spoke; Friends of America look over
the
  Altantic sea;
A bended bow is lifted in heaven, & a
heavy iron chain
Descends link by link from Albion's cliffs across the sea to
bind
Brothers & sons of America, till our faces pale and
yellow;
Heads deprest, voices weak, eyes downcast, hands
work-bruis'd,
Feet bleeding on the sultry sands, and the furrows of the
whip
Descend to generations that in future times
forget.—