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Philip Morin Freneau (1752 – 1832) was a notable American poet, nationalist, polemicist, sea captain and newspaper editor; well-known as the "Poet of the American Revolution". Freneau was born in New York City, the oldest of the five children of Huguenot wine merchant Pierre Fresneau and his Scottish wife. Philip was raised in Monmouth County, New Jersey where he studied under William Tennent, Jr.. He entered the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, as a sophomore in 1768 to study for the ministry.

Freneau's close friend at Princeton was James Madison, a relationship that would later contribute to his establishment as the editor of the National Gazette. As the Revolutionary War approached in 1775, Freneau wrote a number of anti-British pieces. However, by 1776, Freneau left America for the West Indies, where he would spend time writing about the beauty of nature. In 1778, Freneau returned to America, and rejoined the patriotic cause. Freneau eventually became a crew member on a revolutionary privateer, and was captured in this capacity. He was held on a British prison ship for about six weeks. This unpleasant experience, detailed in his work, "The British Prison Ship" would precipitate many more patriotic and anti-British writings throughout the revolution and after.

In 1790 Madison and Thomas Jefferson worked to get Freneau to move to Philadelphia in order to edit a partisan newspaper that would counter the Federalist newspaper The Gazette of the United States. Jefferson, then head of the State Department, offered Freneau a position in Philadelphia as a State Department translator. Freneau accepted this undemanding position, which allowed him enough free time to head up the Democratic-Republican newspaper Jefferson and Madison envisioned.

Freneau later retired to a more rural life and wrote a mix of political and nature works. The non-political works of Freneau are a combination of neoclassicism and romanticism. His poem "The House of Night" makes its mark as one of the first romantic poems written and published in America. The gothic elements and dark imagery are later seen in poetry by Edgar Allan Poe, who is well known for his gothic works of literature. Freneau's nature poem, "The Wild Honey Suckle" (1786), is considered an early seed to the later Transcendentalist movement taken up by William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Romantic primitivism is also anticipated by his poems "The Indian Burying Ground," and "Noble Savage."