Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
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of newspapers and pamphlets and broadsides through the end of the eighteenth century, creating what Jürgen Habermas has called a “world of a critically debating reading public,” at once distinct from the private realm of individuals and the inner workings of the state, within which opinions on affairs of state could be freely exchanged. Originating in the polite social environments of European coffeehouses and salons, the public sphere took particular hold in colonial America in the virtual spaces of print media, providing unprecedented opportunities for political debate among the participants of an emerging writing public. Such a public included, not surprisingly, writers of poetry, who implicitly came to conceive their works as performances before a reading public that was itself coming into consciousness of its own political power.11
Of course, the actual world of print public discourse in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America was a far cry from the idealized public sphere originally imagined by Habermas. In such idealized form, this was a public sphere of polite, rational discourse, accessible to a wide variety of participants who, by virtue of the convention of anonymous submission, could assume their ideas would be judged free from the limitations of status imposed in other modes of interaction. Yet notwithstanding the convention of anonymous authorship, which in theory offered a level of discursive equality, in practice the public sphere in eighteenth-century America, as numerous scholars have since noted, excluded participation by gender, race, and social and economic status.12 Such forms of exclusion, it must be acknowledged at the outset, were largely true as well for the world of poetic exchanges on political or public matters. Works by women, African Americans, and Native Americans appear infrequently in this sphere of political-poetical exchange, and although it is impossible to identify the many anonymous poets who participated in poetic exchanges or poetic warfare, those whose names we know tend to have come from two main groups: the educated, professional classes that also produced most of the political leaders of the new republic, and those associated with the specific trade of print or newspaper publication.
In an era in which virtually no one made a living from writing, much less from writing poetry, the practice of penning political verse emanated mainly from the social circles of educated professionals. The most famous and prolific political poets in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America were first and foremost lawyers, clergymen, physicians, and merchants. Such men usually began their writing careers amid the social environment of colonial colleges, where groups of students regularly engaged in competitions of wit. The ability to entertain friends and relations with their literary performances signified their erudition and elite status, and this, in turn, likely contributed to a shared sense of authority over, and responsibility to weigh in on, matters of state. Beyond this group, a significant number of political poets appear to have emerged from the ranks of printers and newspaper editors. For these figures, penning topical verse (or inviting literary-minded friends to submit works) amounted to a means of providing entertaining content for their readers’ consumption. From their first appearance in James Franklin’s New England Courant in the early 1720s, poems grew to become a common feature of newspaper culture and an integral part of the discursive life of colonial America. Newspaper poems treated a variety of subjects, from religion and morality to love and domestic happiness; as the eighteenth century wore on, newspaper poems increasingly touched on topics of local or imperial import. It is against this broad cultural backdrop that, in the wake of the crises surrounding the Stamp and Townshend Acts, political verse would emerge as a powerful and permanent weapon in the collective arsenals of partisan editors.13
Still, it would be inaccurate to describe the poetic public sphere as it arose prior to the Revolution and reached its height in the 1790s as purely a bourgeois or elite space. Indeed, a considerable number of political poems from the period were composed by authors who identified themselves explicitly as mechanics, recent immigrants, women, and soldiers, and many anonymous poems communicated through their style that they had been penned by novice poets with little formal education. Such inclusion of nonelite voices, though not representative of the majority of political poets, nonetheless proved crucial to the symbolic and ideological significance of the poetic public sphere. For it appeared to ground in reality a widespread assumption underlying political poetry as a whole—namely, that poetic warfare was waged necessarily on behalf of the public. As we shall see throughout, countless poems and literary exchanges involved laying claim to the mantle of the vox populi, usually in opposition to some putatively illegitimate authority. The claim originated as part of a literary-political awakening that occurred during the Stamp Act crisis, when printers would compose (or employ their literary friends to compose) broadside verses decrying the act in the symbolic persona of the “newsboy” or newspaper carrier who—by virtue of his age and social status—served as a synecdoche for the popular resistance.14 Not only would the carrier’s address itself become a popular genre of political expression well into the nineteenth century, the broader claim to represent the voice of the people would live on as an enduring motif in American political poetry, with subsequent works giving voice to other humble personae—the “female patriot,” the Revolutionary soldier, the unemployed sailor of the embargo era—who claimed to represent the will and interests of the common people in protest against some imposition of state power.
At the same time, as illustrated by the fiery tone of many newsboy poems, the poetic public sphere was defined by another form of exclusion—not of particular persons but of particular statements or discursive utterances, which were circumscribed within poetic performances as fraudulent, illegitimate, or morally suspect. It should be noted at the outset that the majority of poems examined in this book are satirical in nature, appearing as parodies, burlesques, mock epics or Juvenalian high satires, and their primary outward orientation is necessarily negative or critical toward the texts, discourses, and ideas to which they respond. Any analysis of the larger body of political poems from the period, then, reveals a version of the print public sphere that stands in stark contrast to the idealized discursive space defined by politeness, reason, and deliberation. Rather, as indicated by my titular phrase “poetry wars,” it is a sphere characterized by rhetorical conflict and even, at times, rhetorical violence, within which the purpose of a given poem or move is to isolate the ideological “work” of a rival text and nullify its power.15
Finally, to understand the process by which poets imagined they could influence history by shaping political discourse, it is necessary to consider the context of eighteenth-century print as one in which political acts and mediations of acts often merged into each other in the chronological unfolding of “the news.”16 Events such as the passage of the Stamp Act, the surrender of Cornwallis, and the ratification of the Jay Treaty reached the reading public via sequentially published newspapers and broadsides that also included poems, songs, and other creative forms. Within this media landscape, a strategically placed poem could appear as a crucial part of a developing news narrative, creating the sense—real or imagined—of the poem as a causal agent in the process. In the chapters that follow, I recount numerous instances of apparent poetic intervention, from simple tit-for-tat poetic exchanges competing to circumscribe events within larger narratives to complex dialectical fusions of poetry and news as they appeared alongside one another in chronological succession. Within this media context, I argue, poets came to conceive their works as forms of actual, rather than merely virtual, intervention.
Poetic Warfare and Political Formation
The dynamic of literary warfare that governed the writing of political verse during the Revolution continued after the war itself gave way to the rhetorical struggles between rival factions over the nature and policies of the newly formed federal government. In a political context in which determining national policy depended on prevailing in a public debate—whether to ratify the Constitution, how best to fund the Revolutionary War debt, whether to incite or defuse rising conflicts with Britain and France over international trade—poets revived the strategy of engaging directly with texts and discourses they perceived as threatening to the nation’s still-precarious survival. Indeed, one of the major claims of this book is that poets implicitly recognized in such debates a crucial similarity to the earlier wartime struggle over political legitimacy—in particular, the fact that these debates also hinged on issues of language. For insofar as claiming leadership or enacting policy depended on words, discourses, and the meanings ascribed to them—aristocrat,