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      When I to you, prove always true,

      But you throw out your trash.⁸³

      This mournful address shows that attaining the name of “poet” was not all Shaw thought it would be. The crowd’s mockery is a bit hard to parse: hooting and shouting “you Poet” at Shaw might undermine his claim to the title by derisively (if implicitly) contrasting his “Rhyems” with an idealized sense of poetry as elevated language, or “you Poet” might itself just be a term of contempt, like “get a job!” Either way, the public performance of the Poet is the source of conflict (“Is not it shame, that some by name / Beset me in the street”). Such a performance is, of course, enacted through the making of verses: Shaw “throws out” his rhymes (which could variously mean that he produces, disseminates, or discards them) “as fast as I can say / A song by heart.” These acts of song making in the street prompt retaliatory verbal acts from his antagonists: “You that hant wit, do say poet / And at me you do hollow.” And this retaliation prompts from Shaw his recurring resentment about status and schooling:

      Ye Silly Fools, go to your schools

      Pay for your entrence in

      Your night-cap darn, an manners lern

      Before I come agin—⁸⁴

      In this case, though, it is the allegedly superior college boys who prove their ill breeding by harassing Shaw in the street; schooling and status are revealed as structures of power that merely enforce existing hierarchies rather than reflect inherent worth. Shaw is decried as “you Poet” not (or not only) because his poems are bad or his intentions impure, but because in issuing them publicly, he steps out of his place; literariness colludes with public decorum to push a poet like Shaw off the street, if not off the page. One final, poignant example encapsulates the conflicted place of poetry in the social world of the early nineteenth century, which Shaw’s example makes manifest.

      Then took my pen & ink in hand

      Here in this Book I did it land

      So any one may reade the same

      And so take it from whence it came

      Its Author never went to school

      To lern to spell & write by Rule

      As men of lerning are made great

      By Schooling, both for Church & State—

      But I a poore old Ignorent Man

      At first when I for self began

      Livd in the woods & what I have be

      Came luckily as men may see—

      By luck and chance My Parents they

      Lernt me to Reade from day to day

      Saying I should a Reader be

      As people now may look & see⁸⁵

      These opening stanzas portray a social world stratified by uneven access to language and education, and they announce Shaw’s subject-hood in a gesture of performative literacy. The material process of writing (“pen & ink in hand”) produces the poem as a testament to Shaw’s creative management of the tools of education, which normally underwrite status (“men of lerning are made great / By Schooling, both for Church & State”) but in his case testify by contrast to his distance from the seats of cultural power. His home schooling retains its rough edges—he never did “lern to spell & write by Rule” but succeeded mostly through “luck and chance” and his parents’ initiative—yet he has prospered enough that an implied audience of future readers can open his book and find there the legacy of literacy in the shape of a poem.

      For I began to write while young

      In Poetree imployd my Tung

      And Thoughts & hours by night & day

      As if it was but sport & pley

      On many thing I chose to write

      Both on the day & on the night

      As god ofton did leede my mind

      On subjects as I was Inclind,

      And on many a Funereal Song

      I have studied & wrote along

      And some of them I sent abroade

      As if these things were ends of god⁸⁶

      His fluency with poems crosses different kinds of media (both writing and speaking) with such ease and abundance (“As if it was but sport & pley”) that it seems divinely inspired, although God simply leads his mind “on subjects as I was Inclind” already. This qualified divine sanction is an important component of the backward glance that he casts over his career. The popularity of the songs he has “sent abroade” makes it appear “as if these things were ends of god,” but ultimately their legacy is uncertain. What is certain, though, is that this poet’s lifelong project of writing poems touches on almost every aspect of his social world, from the organization of public life, to the structure of literate communication, and finally to the constitution of the subject, who can exist through the creation and consumption of poems, as the final stanza makes clear. The successful materialization of poetry in the community seems to underwrite the hand of God, but, as he acknowledges in a haunting conclusion:

      Whether they be, I cannot tell

      But god surely doth know full well

      And so I cease—at this time draw

      A line & end with—Thomas Shaw.⁸⁷

      * * *

      The case studies of Plummer and Shaw lead to several preliminary conclusions about the work of poems in New England at the turn of the nineteenth century. First, “poetry” was an irregular category—not a genre but a mixed bag of genres arrayed in an unstable hierarchy. Because of that instability, the culture of poetry was only ever partly legible to its members, and which objects could count as poems—and which people as poets—was subject to considerable debate, because literariness was a shifting standard, although still forceful nonetheless. Second, literariness is mediated—it is subject to the scenes and conditions in and by which it is produced—but it also mediates broader social contests about public order and the legitimation of power. The sometimes scurrilous, sometimes scandalous ballads and doggerel verses I examine here played a particularly salient role in such contests. These poems were not only widely consumed, but more important, they were also widely produced, often by individuals with, at best, tangential access to cultural and economic capital. Third, much of the anxious force behind such poems derives from the dense relationship between their modes of circulation—the wayward, vagrant ways in which they moved, beyond established paths of communication—and the genres of scandal, gossip, rumor, slander, and news. While none of these communicative genres may seem particularly germane to modern senses of poetry (at least, not to good poetry), for nineteenth-century readers, the associations made a key contribution to the work of these texts. The readers of Plummer or Shaw did not value their poems—most of the copies that survive are badly mutilated—because they were not valuable, at least not in a literary sense. Instead, the social exchange value enticed their many readers (or customers, since they were balladmongers). “Ballads” like these thus condense the power of circulation as a social force. This force could be applied to scandal, news, and tragedy, or it could be mobilized in the service of politics. As the most controversial and also communal form of antebellum political association, antislavery and its poetics will be the subject of the next chapter.

      CHAPTER 2

      The Poetics of Reform

      The Poetics of Reform

      Chapter 1 concluded with the claim that in the early national

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