Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
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the tendency of the British occupiers to project this caricature onto Americans as a whole.33
The competing versions of “Yankee Doodle” make plain the respective strategies of war ballads in general with regard to questions of American identity. Whereas British or Loyalist songs, as we have seen, sought to degrade colonial American identity as socially and culturally inferior, Patriot ballads emphasized the discrepancies between actual and perceived identity. While “The King’s Own Regulars” and “The Battle of the Kegs” worked to undermine the perception of British invincibility, the Patriot variations of “Yankee Doodle” deflected anti-American caricatures through a process of simultaneously performing and exposing such distortions as a figment of the imperial gaze. More broadly, the relentless focus on dismantling British identity, as opposed to representing American identity in positive terms, stands as a significant, and perhaps surprising, characteristic of American war songs. On one level, this tendency lends support to Leonard Tennenhouse’s contention that American literature produced throughout this period is characterized by an unacknowledged acceptance of cultural Englishness. Within this reading—as in the trend we saw in Chapter 1, in which American poets understood themselves as belonging to a transatlantic tradition of combating moral and political corruption with satire—American identity stands as the variation on British identity denoted by its successful avoidance of corruption.34 At the same time, the complex counter-burlesque in “The Yankey’s Return to Camp” and other “Yankee Doodle” songs carried important implications for conceptualizing British cultural identity as well: as the song implies, colonial American identity cannot be reduced to the low-born stereotype imposed by the British gaze, but the gaze itself—defined by a tendency to treat common people with disdain—is an accurate representation of a crucial aspect of Britishness. And as we shall see, the act of exposing in poetry a condescending gaze toward the people will outlive the Revolution and extend beyond the critique of cultural Britishness alone. Amid the verse wars that will develop after independence, this strategy will prove particularly powerful against a class of Americans whose politics will come to be described by a different term: aristocratic.
Voicing the Revolutionary Debate: The Evolution of M’Fingal
The most famous example of the belief in poetry’s capacity to intervene in the outcome of the Revolution is perhaps the oft-repeated account of the origins of John Trumbull’s mock epic M’Fingal, especially the poem’s role in lifting the Patriots’ morale at an especially dark period in the war. According to the story, kept alive by Trumbull’s friends long after the Revolution and frequently cited when toasting the poet’s importance to the cause of independence, Trumbull had completed his anti-Gage versification in the summer of 1775 when he was entreated by several members of Congress to compose a more substantial satire, which they hoped would “dispel the melancholy that overspread the patriot cause … [and] ‘set the people laughing.’” Trumbull immediately began work on a mock epic that centered on the exploits of a fictional Loyalist; completing it in less than two months, the poet sent the manuscript to his congressional friends in Philadelphia, who saw to its publication in early 1776 under the title M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem. Canto First, or the Town Meeting.35
This account of M’Fingal’s contribution to the war effort goes a long way toward explaining the poem’s unmatched popularity, at least as measured by the more than two dozen editions and reprints of the poem that appeared in the decades following the Revolution. Such popularity, in turn, helps account for Trumbull’s lasting literary fame: well into his later years, he would be feted with “M’Fingal” dinners held in his honor, and his erstwhile friend and literary collaborator, Joel Barlow, would highlight M’Fingal’s “deathless strain” in his 1807 epic, The Columbiad.36 In addition to being the Revolution’s most famous poem, M’Fingal was also its most substantial. Announcing in the 1776 edition that this was the first canto of a longer mock epic, Trumbull made good on this promise, such that the revised, four-canto edition of M’Fingal, published in 1782, exceeded three thousand lines, longer than any other wartime poem. In revising the work, Trumbull divided the original edition, which recounts a town-meeting debate between the fictional Tory, Squire M’Fingal, and his Patriot opponent, “Honorius,” into two separate cantos (“The Town-Meeting, A.M.,” and “The Town-Meeting, P.M.”); he then added two additional episodes, “The Liberty Pole,” which relates a run-in between M’Fingal and an unruly Patriot mob that detains and tars and feathers him, and “The Vision,” in which the now-imprisoned M’Fingal is visited by the ghost of a fellow Tory, who, in a scene reminiscent of the prophetic visions in classical epics, reveals to M’Fingal the future course of the Revolution.
The latter cantos of M’Fingal are marked by stark differences in tone and in the targets of Trumbull’s satire, which has led most modern readers to focus on how the revisions to the poem affected its meaning. The critical consensus is that M’Fingal’s evolution reflects Trumbull’s own evolving perspective on the Revolution between 1775, when he was an enthusiastic member of the resistance, to the end of the war, when he was beginning to feel a measure of anxiety over the movement of some revolutionaries toward what he saw as unbridled populism and mob rule. Yet while this aspect of the poem’s evolution has been a common topic of scholarly interest, what has rarely been noted is that the 1782 enlargement was not the first instance of revision or literary transformation to characterize the evolution of M’Fingal. In fact, the original single-canto edition of 1776 was itself already a kind of revision, for when Trumbull was putting the first version together in the fall of 1775, he drew directly on his anti-Gage versification from earlier that summer, in all incorporating some fifty lines of verse from A New Proclamation! into M’Fingal. The evolution of M’Fingal, then, began at an earlier moment than is usually acknowledged, and our understanding of the relationship between the poem’s evolution and meaning must accordingly begin with the act of transforming the poem from a versification into a mock epic.37
The passages Trumbull adapted from A New Proclamation! into M’Fingal focus on two specific complaints raised by the parodied voice of General Gage: the failure of the British forces to make short work of the rebellion at Lexington and Bunker Hill, and the failure of the British propaganda machine, encompassing the Loyalist press and the clergy, to quash its spirit. Thus, for instance, in his speech to the town meeting, Squire M’Fingal parrots Gage’s own lament that Tory printers like James Rivington and Richard Draper and writers like Samuel Leonard (author of the “Massachusettensis” essays) have failed to convince the rebel faction of the futility of their cause. Insofar as the satiric strategy of the versification form was to use the parodied figure’s own language as a weapon to expose his character, it made sense for Trumbull to put the same strained arguments into the mouth of his Tory apologist, M’Fingal. In doing so, Trumbull ensured that the new poem retained a similar preoccupation with the language of politics and its vulnerability to manipulation. At the same time, by placing such complaints inside a mock-epic rendering of a town-meeting debate—with M’Fingal pitted against a speaker, Honorius, who calls for a unified resistance to the Crown—Trumbull transformed his own mode of poetic intervention, from enacting resistance through versification to representing the back-and-forth dynamic of the debate from a detached, third-person perspective.
Equally important to the early evolution of M’Fingal was the decision to represent the Revolutionary debate in the form of a mock epic, which fundamentally altered the power dynamic between the poet and his subject. Versification, as we have seen, constituted a resistance to authority by an audience implicitly represented in the original document as powerless; mock epic, by contrast, implied a satiric diminishment of its subject. The shift from parody to mock epic thus signified an important moment in the development of Revolutionary War verse more generally, for as is suggested by the poem’s subtitle, “A Modern Epic Poem,” it recast American Loyalists on the whole as paltry heroes of a dwindled age and empire. This is undoubtedly why Trumbull chose to model the new poem, stylistically and thematically, on Samuel Butler’s Restoration-era burlesque Hudibras, which recounted the exploits of a similarly diminished hero in an earlier military conflict, the English Civil War. Indeed, the opening of M’Fingal