Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
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him and his subjects. Such men, Churchill warned, are nothing more than “Arch, subtle Hypocrites,” who, “with arts to honest men unknown, / Breed doubts between the People and the Throne.” The same verdict is delivered by Church in the more severe form of direct accusation: “Behold your crimes, and tremblingly await / The grumbling thunder of your country’s hate; / Accursed as ye are! how durst ye bring / An injur’d people to distrust their K[ing]?”30
Corresponding to this struggle pitting the king and his subjects against a narrow coterie of conniving ministers was a perceived literary conflict between the forces of satire and those of “panegyric,” with the latter representing writers who would pander to corrupt leaders even in a time of crisis. This, too, was a well-established Augustan motif, as seen, for instance, in Edward Young’s rhetorical question from Love of Fame, the Universal Passion: “When flatter’d crimes of a licentious age / Reproach our silence, and demand our rage,” he asks, “Shall panegyric reign, and Censure cease?” Church has this same symbolic opposition in mind when he contrasts the recent past—a time when the muse “Instructed, rul’d, corrected”—with the present “degenerate” age in which the muse “stuns me with the clamour of her praise: / Is there a villain eminent in State, / Without one gleam of merit?—She’ll create; / Is there a scoundrel, has that scoundrel gold? / There the full tide of panegyrick’s roll’d.” The danger of panegyric is that it is meant to please, which, in times of moral or political corruption, requires readers to accept an inverted reality. To assume such a perspective at the present moment, Church witheringly puts it, requires that one believe not only that “The STAMP, and LAND-TAX are as blessings meant” but also “That where we are not, we most surely are, / That wrong is right, black white, and foul is fair; / That M[a]nsf[ie]ld’s honest, and that Pitt’s a knave, / That Pratt’s a villain, and that Wilkes’s a slave.”31
Within this shared sense of satiric struggle, importantly, the outcome of the Stamp Act crisis remained precariously open-ended. One possible outcome was the one imagined in poems emphasizing reconciliation, with the king awakening to the realization that he has been misled and recommitting himself to acting on behalf of the people. The other was that this latest round of satiric warfare would, as in earlier decades, fail to stem the tide of political corruption and oppression, leading the crisis to fester to the point of outright rebellion. Indeed, this prospect is strongly hinted at in Oppression: A Poem in a passage that explains, somewhat threateningly, the origin of past political revolutions:
Ever ye’ll find, when nations have rebell’d,
Thro’ fell Oppression they have been compell’d.
When civil discord, shakes the props of state,
And wild distraction howls with deadly hate;
When from the Royal head the crown is torn,
And on the front of some usurper born;
When frightful horror glares in ev’ry street,
And friends with friends in dreadful battle meet;
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Know then the cause! Oppression lawless reign’d,
And ev’ry right with liberty was chain’d;
Revenge at last, a horrid war prepar’d,
And high and low her deadly fury shar’d,
Till righteous rage had pull’d the monster down,
And made the subject, happy as the crown.32
Notwithstanding its transatlantic publication and self-conscious identification with the British satiric tradition, this is as close as any poem would come in 1765 to imagining something like the American Revolution. Nor should this surprise us, for embedded in its narrative of corruption and satire is the same moral logic of independence that would lead colonial pamphleteers to argue that the only hope for the preservation of public virtue would be for the colonies to cut themselves off from the corrupt British Empire before it reached a point of inevitable collapse.33 Despite their formal differences, both major strains of anti–Stamp Act verse—the carrier’s address and the high-Augustan satire of the times—appealed to this logic through a shared set of assumptions about the role of poetry as an agent in history. Whether by giving voice to a public that was coming into consciousness of itself as a political agent or by laying bare the degree to which political reality had diverged from a self-evident standard of truth or virtue, political poetry in 1765 presented itself as a means of awakening society and its leaders to otherwise unseen historical consequences.
While such strains functioned in a complementary manner in the context of the Stamp Act crisis, this would not remain the case during the Revolution. Amid the struggle between competing authoritative texts demanding implicit assent from the public—royal proclamations on one side and declarations by the Congress on the other—the two forms would come into conflict. Poets representing the so-called Patriot movement would draw more often on the populist strain of political verse to counter the commands of British generals, while Loyalist poets would be more likely to respond to acts of Congress in the impersonal voice of high Augustanism in the name of restoring order to a world turned upside down. Yet both types of response would arise from a shared sense of poetry as a unique mode of political intervention, which originated, in turn, from poetry’s capacity to highlight, reinterpret, and circumscribe the language of politics.
Tit for Tat: Songs and Poems on the Townshend Duties
If the repeal of the Stamp Act was met with poems of celebration and thanksgiving in the North American colonies, in Britain, not surprisingly, the literary response was decidedly more skeptical. Though some London newspapers published poetry expressing sympathy for the colonial protesters, and even reprinted a few anti–Stamp Act songs in their pages, most British poets responded to the resistance as a dishonest attempt by colonial subjects to avoid contributing to their own protection. In the wake of the act’s repeal, moreover, British balladeers cast the episode as a case of provincials having engineered a bargain for themselves more favorable than that of their British countrymen. Thus, in a song whose title describes the repeal as a zero-sum game—“America Triumphant; or Old England’s Downfall”—the singer introduces a motif that will reappear in countless British and Tory poems, that the leaders of the resistance are fundamentally dishonest: “The Americans no burthens bear, / But, laughing in their sleeves, / Most wittily have shewn us, / They’re still a land of thieves.”34
After the Stamp Act crisis gave way to the controversy over the Townshend duties, American Whigs were increasingly vulnerable to such attacks as this because, unlike the Stamp Act’s tax on printed materials, which could be framed as an assault on the protections of liberty, the new taxes on glass, tea, and other imports did not easily lend themselves to such an interpretation. Yet even in the absence of this connection, there was sufficient momentum for representing what was on its face an economic issue as a political and ideological one. In the first place, the Commissioners of Customs Act called for the appointment of new salaried officers who answered not to the people of the colonies but to Parliament, what the author of Oppression had called the “pension’d servile herd.” This raised questions, in turn, of whence, precisely, Parliament derived its authority to tax and whether such duties violated the constitution’s protection against depriving subjects of liberty or property without their consent—what would before long be rendered in shorthand as “taxation without representation.” The latter argument was put forth by John Dickinson in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which interpreted the new duties as an infringement of constitutional rights but did so somewhat delicately, rejecting the passionate rhetoric of the Stamp Act protests in favor of advocating what he called “constitutional methods of seeking Redress” (such as nonimportation agreements). Yet even as the Letters opted not to speak to the general sense of resentment over the Townshend Acts, Dickinson himself soon offset this gesture of rhetorical restraint by penning his other celebrated work from the period, “The Liberty Song.”35
The circumstances behind the song’s composition are