Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
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nascent political parties in the 1790s and after.
On the way to advancing this argument, the more modest aim of this book is to recover for contemporary readers a substantial body of American political poetry that has gone largely unexamined in any systematic fashion. For though the literature of the Revolutionary era has been the subject of several broad studies over the years, most date back to the early twentieth century, with the most recent appearing more than a generation ago. And while several book-length treatments have appeared in recent decades to fill the once-yawning gap in our understanding of British-American poetry from the early eighteenth century, the equally prolific period of poetic output after the Revolution has been approached more narrowly, in studies of individual authors or small circles of literary collaborators. Poetry Wars seeks to tie many of these disparate threads together with my own research into the hundreds of political poems that have gone all but ignored by modern readers, in order to tell what I believe is one of the major literary stories of the era: that of the direct engagement by poets in the formative political struggles of the new American nation.1
The four decades following the outbreak of the Revolution represent a high-water mark in the history of American political poetry. This is perhaps not surprising when we recall that the poets most celebrated during this period—John Trumbull, Philip Freneau, Timothy Dwight—as well as many of the period’s most anthologized poems—Phillis Wheatley’s “Liberty and Peace,” Joel Barlow’s The Conspiracy of Kings—engaged explicitly with politics or affairs of state. Yet these names and titles make up only a fraction of the hundreds of poems published and the scores of poets who penned them. To propose a collective study of political poetry thus involves bringing many largely forgotten works into conversation with those poems that have drawn the most scholarly attention. Thus, for instance, Trumbull’s M’Fingal is analyzed in these pages, befitting its enormous popularity in the half-century following its publication in 1776; yet equally prominent is his forgotten verse parody, A New Proclamation!, which appeared a year earlier amid General Thomas Gage’s declaration of martial law in Massachusetts. Freneau, similarly, figures prominently in this book, but not the oft-anthologized, proto-Romantic Freneau of “The House of Night” and “The Indian Burial Ground” so much as the furiously partisan author of A Voyage to Boston and “The Republican Genius of Europe.” More important still, I examine these works alongside the considerably larger number of poems and songs by authors whose names are known only by brief entries in indexes of American biography, or, more often, who remain unknown to this day.
Poems in Retaliation
In bringing together this extensive body of poems, I argue for a conception of political poetry not merely as a subset of early American poetry that happens to be characterized by its political content but as a genre or cultural form in its own right, with its own origin, history, and implicit aesthetics. In this sense, I hope to do for political verse what other scholars have done for the early American theater, for instance, or for parades or patriotic celebrations—that is, to examine the significance of this cultural form within the broader formation of American national identity. Given the sheer number of poems that engaged explicitly with politics, one might wonder why the form has remained largely ignored by scholars of early American literature even as many other once-obscure forms—sentimental novels, diaries, travelogues, belles lettres—have enjoyed unprecedented scholarly interest in recent decades. Part of the reason may stem from frustrations involved with reading poems that are so highly topical—often requiring, even as a condition of first-level comprehension, a familiarity with names and references that, while wholly recognizable in their own time, are obscure to modern readers. Yet beyond this is the fact that American political verse from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has never fully shaken off the verdict, delivered by its earliest generation of scholarly readers, that it is simply unworthy of serious attention as literature. Even the term commonly used to describe it—“verse,” as opposed to “poetry”—suggests an occasional or forgettable, rather than enduring, form of expression, not quite deserving the designation of poetry. Nor was such verse considered by early critics as worthy of the designation “American,” as the tendency of eighteenth-century American poets to model their works on those of British precursors suggested an unforgivable failure, as one critic described it, to declare their “literary independence” from Britain.2
Such pronouncements have been corrected in recent decades by readers who have rightly pointed out that these older critiques were grounded in aesthetic assumptions that the poets of the early republic simply didn’t share. To infuse one’s poetry with allusions to well-known literary touchstones by Dryden, Pope, or Swift, now appears less as gratuitous imitation than as a conscious act of invoking a tradition whose symbolic resonances were themselves politically and ideologically charged. Beyond this, the tendency to dismiss political or topical verse is now more likely to be understood in the context of the development described in recent years as the “lyricization of poetry,” which evolved during the century following the period covered in this book. Culminating in the triumph of the New Criticism in the 1930s and 1940s—roughly the same moment that the first literary histories of the United States were being written—this was a process by which poetry as a whole came to be defined and measured according to standards associated with lyric poetry. From Cleanth Brooks’s insistence on a work as a self-contained entity whose meaning necessarily transcends history to the now-famous New Critical pronouncement that interpretation must never extend beyond the poem itself, this model left little room for appreciating a body of poems whose meaning depended on the manifold contexts that surrounded their subject matter, origin, and dissemination.3
Still, it is one thing to point out misplaced aesthetic judgments and another to immerse oneself sufficiently in the literary assumptions governing a body of verse to understand it, as it were, on its own terms. Such an act begins by recognizing the signature feature of political poetry from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—namely, its tendency to orient its meaning outward from the individual poem to other literary or discursive utterances circulating at the same moment. What has been disparaged as derivative or imitative, I argue, is actually a central element of the conscious referentialism of this poetry. Indeed, in dozens of cases described below, the meaning of one poem arises chiefly from its capacity to evoke and transform other linguistic forms, through allusion or parody or some other strategy of “speaking back” to one or more targeted texts circulating in public.
To illustrate the pervasiveness of this quality, let us consider a single poem by Lemuel Hopkins, which appeared in Philadelphia in 1795 under the title The Democratiad: A Poem, in Retaliation, for the “Philadelphia Jockey Club.” By a Gentleman of Connecticut (Figure 1). As the title states rather explicitly, the publication of this poem is announced as an act of “retaliation” against another poem that had appeared earlier that year, The Philadelphia Jockey Club: Or, Mercantile Influence Weighed. Consisting of Select Characters Taken from the Club of Addressers, by Timothy Tickler. This latter title, in turn, reveals a poem made up of several satiric portraits of Philadelphia merchants whose support for the Jay Treaty was condemned by opponents as a case of placing economic self-interest above the public good. The Democratiad, in this context, stands as a counter-satire against local civic leaders who were at the time protesting the treaty as a capitulation to Britain and an affront to America’s “true” ally, France.4
Nor is the full scope of the poem’s referential quality limited to this circumstance alone, for as the subtitle also points out, The Democratiad was not originally written for a Philadelphia audience at all but was penned by “a Gentleman of Connecticut.” In fact, it had first appeared earlier that year in the Connecticut Courant as an installment of “The Echo” series, in which Hopkins (along with several collaborators) had for several years been satirizing the emergent opposition to Washington’s administration by composing verse parodies of their letters, speeches, and newspaper articles. The Democratiad, in fact, began its life as a parody of a letter by a Virginia senator who had leaked the content of the Jay Treaty to the opposition press. The strategy of the poem as “echo” was thus to recast the senator’s self-described gesture on behalf of governmental transparency into something more sordid, a deliberate