Dwight, Timothy (1752–1817)

US poet and clergyman. His poem America (1772) was followed by The Conquest of Canaan (1785), the first American epic; The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), an anonymous satire in heroic couplets; and Greenfield Hill (1794), a poem in the 18th-century tradition. He was a prominent member of the literary group the Connecticut Wits, also known as the Hartford Wits.

He was president of Yale University 1795–1817. His grandson, Timothy Dwight (1828–1916), was also president of Yale, 1886–98.