Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
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important element of the poetics of resistance, as seen in the allusions to Pope, Swift, Young, and Churchill, is the implicit conviction that poetic resistance had always been transatlantic in nature. From the time of Sir Robert Walpole to that of Bute and Grenville, poets had turned to satire to as a means of articulating political conflicts in moral terms, and they had done so, importantly, in full consciousness of belonging to a tradition of satiric opposition. This transatlantic (and later, transnational) political verse tradition will pervade the poetry wars of the Revolution, with Patriot and Loyalist poets alike invoking Milton, Pope, Butler, and others to expose the moral deficiencies of their political opponents, and poets representing the emerging proto-parties of the 1790s warring over which side comprised the true legacy of this literary-political tradition. Implicit in the act of allusion is a conception of poetic utterance as fundamentally intertextual—the notion that a poem’s meaning is not intrinsic to itself but depends in a fundamental way on its connections and resonances with other texts—and it is this aspect, I want to argue, that will constitute the crucial element of the poetics of resistance as it will develop after 1765. This is the notion of poetry as a form of discursive retaliation, evident in the tit-for-tat dynamic of the “Liberty Song” and “Female Patriot” exchanges, and culminating in the anti-Gage versifications as a strategy for contesting political legitimacy itself.
The power of a poem in retaliation will derive from its capacity to impose a new narrative onto public discourse itself as it is mediating history as it unfolds. This is why, as we shall see, poets during the Revolution will understand their respective acts of literary-political subversion not merely as commenting on political issues so much as shaping or altering political reality. The same assumption that cleared space for the versification vogue of 1774 will continue to embolden Patriot versifiers to recast the directives of British military leaders as mere linguistic performances, devoid of any power to control the actions of colonial subjects. They will also inspire Loyalist poets to try to nullify in verse the authority of the popular declarations issued by the “upstart” Congress. Such literary exchanges, moreover, will be seen to unfold chronologically, often in a dialectical relationship with the major events of the war as they are being reported in the same newspapers. Within this atmosphere, the narrative of the war itself—battles fought, territory gained or lost—will frequently merge with the various narratives generated by literary attacks and retaliations, such that a virtual triumph by a poet or balladeer will seem to prefigure, or even help to bring about, a corresponding actual triumph on the battlefield. Such blurring of literary and political reality will create space for the emergence of a fantasy about poetry’s ability to affect the outcome of a struggle not merely between opposing texts but even opposing armies.
Chapter 2
War and Literary War
The proliferation of verse parodies of Gage’s proclamations arose, as we have seen, from the audacious notion that, by blocking the legal or authoritative claims by a certain class of printed documents, poetry had the capacity to intervene in the domain of real power. This belief appeared to be borne out by the events surrounding Gage’s own tenure as governor, as the inability of his directives to keep order in Boston not only led to his dismissal but also opened space for counterclaims to political authority by the Congress. At the same time, from the summer of 1775 onward, this textual struggle was taking place alongside a full-fledged military struggle whose uncertain outcome had the potential to confound or contradict authorial intentions. Poets could control the metanarratives surrounding their satiric engagement with official proclamations or rival poems, but however much they desired to, they could not really control the outcome of the war.
Or could they? As recent studies by William B. Warner and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg illustrate, Americans of the Revolutionary era lived amid a dynamic media environment in which events and print mediations of events unfolded together in continuous dialogue with each other.1 Within this atmosphere, categories such as news as event and news as representation at times blurred into each other in such a way as to lend agency to the latter. As reports of news events appeared in the same newspapers as other texts—including, significantly, poetic responses to those events—over a succession of weeks, such mediations often coalesced into larger media narratives in which poems appeared to play more than an indirect role in their ultimate outcomes. As we shall see in the first episode analyzed in this chapter, the appearance of a strategically placed versification of a hostile proclamation by General Burgoyne could appear as a crucial step in his ultimate downfall at Saratoga. And this same assumption would inform other episodes of literary-political convergence as well: at the moment the Congress’s viability as a governing body was being tested, its members would petition John Trumbull to compose a poem to undermine British imperial claims, while the Loyalist poet, Jonathan Odell, would attempt to negate through satire that same Congress’s most momentous act, of declaring independence.
Yet if the existence of an independent American nation posed one kind of problem for Loyalists, it also raised a crucial question for those supporting of the so-called Patriot movement: namely, what sort of patria was implied by that label. Revolutionary American poets who expressed their total allegiance to an independent republic, as we saw in Chapter 1, had come of age in an era in which political resistance had always been framed in terms of a single empire. Issues surrounding a distinct American political identity had scarcely arisen. Even when the outbreak of war and the Declaration of Independence redefined the conflict as necessarily two-sided, Patriot poets were reluctant to give up the idea of literary resistance against a single, imperial entity. American war ballads focused less on celebrating the martial prowess of American soldiers than on exposing the failure of their British opponents to live up to their vaunted reputation, and Patriot verse as a whole was marked by a tendency to evade the issue of American identity. It is fitting, in this context, that the most renowned and reprinted poem of the Revolution was not some grand epic of national unity but a mock-epic treatment of the ideological dismantling of British America: John Trumbull’s M’Fingal. Yet perhaps for this very reason, Trumbull would be among the first to register that the very success of the Revolution meant asking a series of potentially troubling questions about what kind of nation had been created in its aftermath.
The Poetic Defeat of John Burgoyne
As the newly minted Continental Army was gearing up for its first major contest—transporting artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights to aid in the siege of Boston—the proclamation war that had begun during Thomas Gage’s governorship continued unabated. William Howe, who succeeded Gage in late 1775 as commander of His Majesty’s North American forces, issued a string of proclamations attempting to regulate the movement of Bostonians, at least one of which was versified by an anonymous wit. At the same time, the more important challenge to the governor’s authority that winter came from a rival proclamation by the General Court of Massachusetts-Bay, establishing a functioning provincial government, with an executive, a judiciary, and an active military force, whose “power” was declared to “reside … in the body of the people.” This dynamic would be replicated in colony after colony in 1776 and 1777, with remaining royal governors and newly established colonial authorities speaking past each other in proclamations, resolutions, and manifestos competing for the public’s assent, at least until the outcome of the war—the ultimate arbiter of political disputes—determined the actual limits of power. In the meantime, the Revolution would be fought to an important degree in print, as in the following representative exchange from June 1776, when the Loyalist governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, put out a proclamation calling for a meeting of the General Assembly, only to be answered by a “Resolution” of the Provincial Congress demanding that Franklin’s order to be ignored. That the Resolution was reprinted in newspapers in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia at the very moment the Congress was deliberating over declaring independence reinforces the sense that such exchanges amounted to more than mere performances of political resolve.2
It might be expected that this new atmosphere of contested legal authority would signal an end of the popularity