Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic (Early American Studies) - Hardcover

Wells, Colin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812249658 ISBN 13: 9780812249651

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017

Synopsis

During America's founding period, poets and balladeers engaged in a series of literary "wars" against political leaders, journalists, and each other, all in the name of determining the political course of the new nation. Political poems and songs appeared regularly in newspapers (and as pamphlets and broadsides), commenting on political issues and controversies and satirizing leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Drawing on hundreds of individual poems—including many that are frequently overlooked—Poetry Wars reconstructs the world of literary-political struggle as it unfolded between the Stamp Act crisis and the War of 1812.

Colin Wells argues that political verse from this period was a unique literary form that derived its cultural importance from its capacity to respond to, and contest the meaning of, other printed texts—from official documents and political speeches to newspaper articles and rival political poems. First arising during the Revolution as a strategy for subverting the authority of royal proclamations and congressional declarations, poetic warfare became a ubiquitous part of early national print culture. Poets representing the emerging Federalist and Republican parties sought to wrest control of political narratives unfolding in the press by engaging in literary battles.

Tracing the parallel histories of the first party system and the rise and eventual decline of political verse, Poetry Wars shows how poetic warfare lent urgency to policy debates and contributed to a dynamic in which partisans came to regard each other as threats to the republic's survival. Breathing new life into this episode of literary-political history, Wells offers detailed interpretations of scores of individual poems, references hundreds of others, and identifies numerous terms and tactics of the period's verse warfare.

About this title

About the Author

Colin Wells is Professor of English at St. Olaf College.

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Introduction

During the period of the American Revolution and the first decades of the early republic, dozens of poets—from the era's most celebrated writers to its most obscure amateur versifiers and balladeers—engaged in a series of literary wars against political leaders, newspaper editors and journalists, and each other, all in the name of determining the political course of the new nation. For those in our own time who are accustomed to thinking of poetry as an elevated form, antithetical to the vulgar world of political attack and counterattack, the idea of poetry as a weapon of political or ideological warfare may seem counterintuitive. Yet poems and songs on political affairs were a ubiquitous part of eighteenth-century political culture, appearing as broadsides and pamphlets and in the pages of newspapers, whose numbers grew exponentially during the period. Poems commemorated and satirized the most momentous and the most trivial of political controversies, from the debate over the Constitution to the outcome of a fistfight between rival members of Congress. From the time of the Stamp Act crisis to the end of the first party system, poems resisted the directives of King George's vice-regents in America; eulogized and demonized Washington and Adams, Hamilton and Jefferson; satirized the emerging political parties as dangerous factions that threatened the republic from within; and called for war or peace with Britain and France. My purpose in the following pages is to reconstruct this atmosphere of literary-political warfare as it unfolded against the backdrop of America's early national formation.

The poetry wars of the Revolution and early republic arose out of a unique intersection of poetic form and political discourse that developed in the print public sphere between 1765 and 1815. What I describe as poetic or literary warfare began in the years immediately prior to the Revolution as a strategy for highlighting one of the great political problems posed by the conflict: that of embodying power or authority in language or texts. Amid a struggle in which rival authoritative bodies issued directives to the people in the form of printed texts—proclamations by royal governors and military commanders or popular declarations by committees of correspondence, colonial assemblies, and the new Congress—poets sought to neutralize the ideological force of such authoritative documents by highlighting their linguistic or rhetorical elements. Spurred on by a sense that this strategy had been instrumental in aiding the Revolutionary War effort, poets of the early national period internalized a corresponding sense of political agency just as the earliest arguments were being advanced about the course the new government should follow. Such was the logic by which poetry became a powerful mode for giving voice to the 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 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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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 provocation of public demonstrations against the treaty by those whom the poem represents as "noisy demagogues." Nor is the poem's outward textual orientation limited even to these references, for as the word "Democratiad" indicates, the poem is also a mock epic, a genre made famous by such works as Alexander Pope's The Dunciad. Indeed, The Democratiad is one of a series of mock epics penned by Federalists during the period of the Jay Treaty controversy. Such extended allusions to Pope's mock-epic masterpiece provided Hopkins and other poets with a literary and historical framework for ridiculing the opponents of the treaty as the political "dunces" of their time.

Whatever the manifold referentialism of The Democratiad might tell us about the political circumstances of 1795, then, it tells us at least as much about the system of assumptions and practices that governed the poetry wars of the early American republic. As suggested by the label "poem in retaliation," Hopkins's is a poetics based not on an ideal of individual poems as self-contained, discrete works, or as the distinct artistic property of particular authors. (Indeed, as has long been noted, most poets of the early republican period published their works anonymously or pseudonymously, and a great deal of the poetry of the time was produced collaboratively.) Rather, Hopkins conceived his poem as a single move within a larger discursive chain, and understood its creation as an act of creative transformation—most immediately, of another printed text, but more broadly, of political discourse as a whole as it was evolving during the founding period.

Befitting the atmosphere of political conflict that pervaded the early republican period, the most common manifestation of this tendency toward literary referentialism is, as the title of my book suggests, the "poetry war," which formed around a dynamic of implicit or explicit attack and counterattack by poets vying for ideological victory. Yet this outward orientation from individual poem to broader discourse took other forms as well, including what was occasionally referred to at the time as a literary "vogue," or fashion, in which several poets responded to a common political event or text by penning variations on a particular form, with each individual poem contributing to the significance of the literary trend as a whole. Accordingly, the project of analyzing this poetry requires a combination of interpretive strategies: first and foremost, it calls for close reading of individual poems, taking each work seriously as poetry (as opposed to mere content or message) by giving sufficient attention to formal elements, such as genre, allusion, symbolism, and tone. Nor is this simply a matter of attending to literary details for their own sake, for as I also emphasize throughout, literary form was itself a frequent and powerful means of communicating ideological content. At the same time, a close reading methodology must be supplemented by drawing on aspects of what has recently been called "distant reading"—attending to matters of publication and republication history, often with the aid of research databases unavailable to earlier generations of literary scholars, so as to grasp the importance of those moments when multiple poets or editors were engaging collectively with a pol...

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0812249658
• ISBN 13: 9780812249651
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352