Poetry Wars - Colin Wells Early American Studies

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precisely because Gage’s power, as measured by the success of his directives, was rapidly dwindling. In his subsequent proclamations, in fact, Gage acknowledged these limitations. One week after the martial law proclamation of June 12, Gage was forced to issue another, this one complaining that his previous order, demanding that the rebels surrender their weapons, had not been followed. Further demands would also be ignored, so that Gage’s final proclamations as governor read like self-parodies of official power—as, for instance, a proclamation in which Gage offers a reward for the names of those who have stolen the Public Seal of the Province from the Council Chamber. The sense in which this collective satiric resistance contributed to the weakening of British imperial power ensured that the fashion for penning versifications would continue even after Gage’s recall. In fact, when his replacement as commander in chief, General William Howe, issued his inaugural proclamation after arriving in Boston, he too was promptly parodied in verse, setting forth a pattern throughout the siege of Boston in which military resistance against Howe’s forces was accompanied by a steady flow of satiric verse.17

      Versifications like these would continue to appear for much the Revolutionary War, again, in response to decrees issued by British military officers—the most famous being William Livingston’s brilliant versification of a proclamation to the people of New York by General John Burgoyne in the months preceding the Battle of Saratoga. The lasting relevance of the versification would arise, first and foremost, from what I have called the linguistic or textual aspect of the Revolution—the struggle waged by rival documents laying claim to political authority. Amid a conflict that hinged, at least in part, on the question of which proclamations, declarations, or directives the public would follow, a poetry geared toward undermining attempts to embody power in language would prove a powerful weapon in its own right. Embedded as it was in this specific context, the versification’s moment of cultural ascendancy would last only as long as the conditions of the war required that commandments issued by pro-British governors and generals be publicly flouted. Yet I begin with the proliferation of the versification because its significance to the dynamics of discursive and literary warfare will prove surprisingly far-reaching—in particular because the form has been largely ignored by literary scholars. Yet, as we shall see, the defining assumption that gave rise to the versification vogue—that poetry or verse constitutes a unique weapon of political struggle because it keeps always in view its linguistic element—would remain relevant long after the Revolutionary War would give way to the party wars that would follow the establishment of the new federal government. This is the context in which poetry will be produced for the express purpose of exposing the contradictions, absurdities, and hidden motives underlying the various discourses invoked by political leaders and political poets alike.

       Literary Resistance and the Stamp Act Crisis

      If the anti-Gage versifications of 1774 and 1775 represented in one sense a collective, spontaneous response to one royal governor’s directives, in another sense they were the product of several distinct literary developments that had arisen at least from the time of the Stamp Act, and in some cases earlier. As noted above, versifications of official discourse had appeared in America as early as the 1740s; the act of posting a satiric poem in a public place for the purpose of competing for the public’s loyalty, moreover, had spawned a subgenre in its own right, the “pump verse,” or pasquinade, which had appeared in manuscript form amid earlier, local political controversies.18 The anti-Gage versification campaign, to be sure, differed from these precursor episodes in several respects: the number of poets involved, the cross-colonial dissemination of the parodies, and, perhaps most important, the intensity of the political and ideological atmosphere in which they appeared (which culminated, of course, in the outbreak of armed conflict). At the same time, this tension itself grew out of the struggle over coercion and resistance that had begun a decade earlier with the passage of the Stamp Act. This is a process by which the perception that the act amounted to an imperial assault on colonial liberty—an assault in particular on print culture as the protector of liberty—unleashed a series of public protests, which took numerous forms, including that of poetry.

      Perhaps the most dramatic example of how the Stamp Act crisis transformed American verse—another episode, significantly, that has gone largely unnoticed by scholars of the period—is the sudden politicization of colonial newsboys. By this I mean not the actual boys who, among their other duties as printer’s assistants, delivered newspapers in and around North American cities, but their literary counterparts, the fictional newsboys who addressed their customers in verse each New Year, either in the pages of the newspaper itself or in special broadsheets produced for the holiday. Reaching back at least to Aquila Rose’s New Year’s poems from the 1720s, newsboys’ verses—or carrier’s addresses, as they were also called—had by midcentury become an established genre of occasional verse, their popularity owed in large part to the two complementary functions they served. In practical terms, carrier’s addresses provided actual newsboys with the opportunity to wish their customers a happy holiday and to solicit a gratuity for their faithful service; but they also served a crucial ideological purpose, of promoting the benefits of print culture in general, usually by reminding readers of the events the newspaper had reported over the course of the year. In this earlier, traditional guise, such verses were optimistic in tone and traditional in political outlook, often toasting the king’s health or praising his mildness, and nearly always reinforcing the symbolic connections between Britain and its colonial outposts.19

      All of this would abruptly change in 1765—a fact that is most starkly illustrated when we compare carrier addresses printed just prior to the passage of the Stamp Act with those published immediately after. The Boston Evening-Post’s poem from December of 1764, for instance—The News-Boy’s Christmas and New Year’s Verses. Humbly Address’d to the Gentleman and Ladies to whom he carries the Boston Evening-Post—emphasizes holiday cheer and offers nothing by way of political commentary: “This Time of Joy to all Mankind, / Your News-Boy humbly hopes to find, / The Bounty of each generous mind.” By contrast, the broadside poem from the same newspaper from the following year registers even in its title the tense political climate that has arisen in the wake of the Stamp Act: Vox populi. Liberty, property and no stamps. The newsboy who carries the Boston Evening-Post, with the greatest submission begs leave to present the following lines to the gentlemen and ladies to whom he carries the news. Here the newsboy speaks not simply in character but through that character as the voice of the people, vowing to defend liberty and property against the unjust decrees of the British Parliament. And far from offering a good-natured toast to the king’s health, this newsboy speaks directly and confrontationally to the monarch, comparing the former era of mild governance and colonial liberty to the oppressive political climate brought on by the Stamp Act:

      Say Monarch! Why thy furrow’d brow

      Frowns from thy Chariot on us now?

      ...........................................................

      At thy approach, when GEORGE first reign’d,

      Fair Freedom wanton’d in thy Train;

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      But now she droops, deform’d with Fear;

      From her dim Eye-ball starts the Tear.

      Whence, too, that grisly Form that bears

      Bonds made for Innocents to wear?

      Will British steel in GEORGE’s Reign,

      Bend for to form a Subject’s Chain?20

      Broadside and newspaper poetry such as this, protesting the Stamp Act as the disastrous event of 1765 or celebrating its repeal as the triumphal moment of 1766, appeared throughout the colonies, moving outward from Boston, the early epicenter of the resistance, to New York, Philadelphia, and as far south as Charleston. This sudden and widespread transformation of the carrier’s address—from mouthpiece of the British Empire to vox populi—had both immediate and long-term implications for American poetry and politics. The longer history of this subgenre of political verse is registered throughout the following chapters as a consistent form for delivering annual triumphant or satiric verdicts on events

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