Poetry Wars - Colin Wells Early American Studies

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in his own right but as an instrument of Benjamin Franklin, who “caught at Payne; reliev’d his wretched plight, / And gave him notes, and sat him down to write.” The rest is history: Common Sense “like wildfire through the country ran, / And Folly bow’d the knee to [Franklin]’s plan. / Sense, reason, judgment were abash’d and fled; / And Congress reign’d triumphant in their stead.” Thus does “The Word of Congress” announce itself not simply as Odell’s satiric response to Congress’s acts of linguistic deception but also as addressing the larger connection between the outbreak of the rebellion and the power of print to alter public opinion, individual by individual, ultimately effecting political transformation on a massive scale.19

      In the poem’s conclusion, Odell renews his call for the muse of satire to put an end to this process by delivering a final, devastating blow to Congress and to the writers and editors who have lent legitimacy to its acts and utterances. Expressing the hope that some greater Genius will rise up to stop “the monster Congress” from raging, he vows to fight on as long as his abilities allow: “And when the feather’d weapon I prepare / Once more to lay the villain’s bosom bare; / Let inspiration from th’ethereal height / Shed on my soul her vivifying light.” As these lines suggest, Odell calls upon divine and literary inspiration to combat the modern, print-centered inspiration taking hold throughout the new United States. Recalling the image from the opening lines, of Satire’s devouring the Word of Congress, Odell permits himself a final fantasy that his “feather’d weapon” will be enough to symbolically destroy the language of his opponents: “Ask I too much—then grant me for a time / Some deleterious pow’rs of acrid rhyme: / Some ars’nic verse, to poison with the pen, / These rats, who nestle in the Lion’s den.”20

      The great irony surrounding Odell’s dream of satiric annihilation of the Word of Congress was that his own poem, no less than Common Sense or any other Patriot text, was part of precisely the same media environment that Odell decries in “The Word of Congress.” He imagines that a satiric voice—his own or that of some greater genius—will suddenly and universally awaken those souls who have erstwhile been converted by the Word of Congress and return them to their former sense and reason. Yet this dream was in direct contradiction to the very logic of discursive warfare within which Odell himself was participating: “The Word of Congress,” which appeared in print in September of 1779, was already part of an established string of literary and nonliterary textual exchanges, within which no single utterance was “consumed” or erased, only countered by another. A literary response like that which Odell has in mind might succeed in altering the meaning of the original, but only so long as it, too, remains unanswered by another opponent. His concluding fantasy of the symbolic silencing of folly by satire had already been rendered anachronistic, for in giving voice to this fantasy, he was sending his words into a print public sphere whose workings all but ensured that the debate would not end with his solemn pronouncements.

       The War in Song and Verse

      Even as versifiers and satirists continued to engage in the ongoing struggle over political legitimacy, after 1775, they did so against the backdrop of a war that had the potential to render such linguistic struggles largely irrelevant. Whether a vice-regent could compel the actions of the king’s subjects or Congress had the authority to issue directives in the name of the United States, the fate of both depended on success or failure on the battlefield. Befitting this importance, the military conflict inspired numerous songs and poems: odes commemorating battles and campaigns, elegies to fallen heroes, ballads composed and sung for and by the soldiers who were fighting. Poets and balladeers sought to direct the discursive narrative of the war by reframing battles as cosmic dramas or comic farces and by defining the opposition according to familiar tropes and archetypes. For the literary supporters of the Patriot cause, the Revolution was a story of common citizens defending their liberty against an admittedly more powerful enemy; for British and Loyalist writers, it was about defending English liberty against an unlawful insurgency made up of bumpkins and rabble-rousers. While these competing narratives sometimes reverberated past one another in songs praising the valor of a soldier or regiment, they often followed a pattern similar to that of pre-Revolutionary satiric exchanges, where ballads engaged directly or indirectly with opposing texts—most often, other ballads—in an ongoing attempt to wrest control of the meaning of the war in a dynamic that paralleled the back-and-forth engagement of a military struggle.

      After the colonial volunteers’ surprising successes in the first battles of 1775 and 1776, the crucial question was whether the insurgents could survive a lengthy campaign. Even after Congress took the step of commissioning George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army, it remained to be seen how they could contend against the experience and discipline of the British regulars. For British and Loyalist poets, the rebel prospects were comically unpromising. The members of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had acknowledged in their address to Washington that the volunteers were deficient in training, dress, and even cleanliness—and this sentiment was promptly versified by an anonymous poet in the London Public Advertiser: “We can’t indeed pretend to prattle / About their mighty Skill in Battle; / Nor can we say much in their Favour, / About the Sweetness of their Savour; / Being destitute of Cleanliness / Alike in Lodging and in Dress.”21

      Perhaps owing to this sense of inferiority, Patriot authors soon began a campaign of composing war ballads in the hope of boosting morale, and they did so, importantly, by tapping into one of the crucial ideological advantages that the British troops enjoyed: a long tradition of military ballads extolling their valor and celebrating their past victories. From at least the time of the English Civil War, songs like “The British Grenadiers” and “The 10th Regiment Song” had played a vital role in British campaigns, often sung by soldiers on the march and accompanied by fife and drum corps. By the middle of the eighteenth century, regiments came to be identified by their signature tunes, and versions of war ballads became popular folk standards in their own right, appearing regularly in newspapers and as broadsides. This tradition served as the foundation for American war songs that sought to counter the cultural and ideological force of British ballads by imitating, parodying, and transforming their words and music.

      The most immediate ballad strategy was simple imitation, as seen in the 1775 broadside “Americans to Arms,” which essentially takes the ballad “Britons to Arms” and substitutes “Americans” for “Britons,” as if to drown out doubts over the colonial forces’ readiness with a series of overconfident boasts. Other Patriot ballads, such Jonathan Sewall’s “A New Song, to the tune of the British grenadier,” addressed the perceived imbalance between the opposing forces in both their form and their content. Borrowing its tune from one of the most popular English war ballads, Sewall’s “New Song” inverts the bravado of the original into a counterboast declaring that Washington’s appointment as commander signals the end of the era of British military dominance that songs like “The British Grenadiers” exemplified: “VAIN BRITONS, boast no longer with proud Indignity, / By Land your conquering Legions, your matchless Strength at Sea; / Since We your braver SONS, insens’d, our Swords have girded on, / Huzza, Huzza, Huzza, Huzza, for WARD and WASHINGTON!”22

      Aspiring to an even higher level of satiric sophistication was “The King’s Own Regulars,” commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin, which appeared at a crucial moment in the spring of 1776 when the Congress was contemplating the question of declaring independence. Taking the ironic form of a ballad in praise of the Regulars and sung in the parodied voice of a soldier from that regiment, the song recounts the many occasions, from the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 to the Seven Years’ War, when the vaunted British regulars were forced to retreat:

      At Prestonpans we met with some Rebels one day,

      We marshall’d ourselves all in comely array;

      Our hearts were all stout, and bid our legs stay,

      But our feet were wrong-headed, and took us away.

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      To Ticonderoga we went in a passion,

      Swearing to be revenged on the whole French nation;

      But

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