Poetry Wars. Colin Wells

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 from the outbreak of the Revolution to the end of War of 1812. In the more immediate context of the Stamp Act, however, the politicization of the carrier’s address had the specific effect of reinforcing an ideology in which political liberty was inexorably linked to print culture. As explicated in particular by Michael Warner, this is an ideology in which the workings of the print public sphere were identified so fully with freedom of speech, and freedom of speech with the protection of all other liberties, that the Stamp Act’s tax on printed documents was immediately and broadly understood as an assault on freedom itself: “Print had become so central to the routines of colonial life and had come so completely to be seen within the same concepts with which the political itself was thought, that the most literate classes could successfully claim that the entire realm of the public was at stake.” Against this backdrop, many colonial printers, for whom the tax also constituted a direct economic hardship, rebranded their papers as organs of anti–Stamp Act propaganda, transforming the carrier’s address into a mode of political protest.²¹

      There is limited evidence as to who, exactly, these early newsboy poets were. Later examples of the genre, in which the author’s identity is known (as in the case of Philip Freneau and several members of the Connecticut Wits, who frequently penned carrier’s addresses in the 1790s and 1800s) suggest that the newsboys were usually either editors or close associates of editors, and it is reasonable to assume that this was also likely the case in 1765. In at least one known example, however, the newsboy poet appears to have been an actual newspaper carrier, and named as such in the title of the verse, New Year’s Ode, for the Year 1766, Being actually dictated, by Lawrence Swinney, Carrier of News, Enemy to Stamps, a Friend to the Constitution, and an Englishman every Inch. In this poem, the carrier laments the effects of the Stamp Act on his own, already strained, economic condition—“I’m in Debt to the Doctors, / And never a Farthing to Pay. / … / … / And but little Hay for my little Horse, / And if Famine should stamp him to Death, / More than half my Fortune is gone!”—before ending on a decidedly political note: “What Shall I say for the Boys of New-York? / Happy New Years to the Sons of LIBERTY.”²² Such examples as this, while relatively rare, lent credibility to the fiction of the newsboy as the representative of a public that felt powerless in the face of imperial authority but was willing, nonetheless, to voice its collective protest.

      This is the context in which carrier’s addresses in particular, and anti–Stamp Act verse more generally, emerge as one of the many forms of politicized social ritual that characterized the period of the imperial crisis. As cultural historians of the period have shown, Stamp Act protests were highly stylized rituals for acting out symbolic narratives about the heroes, victims, and villains of the tax. The stories communicated through such rituals might be tragic or mock tragic, as in the “funeral” parades for Liberty performed in city streets, or they might center on divine or human retribution, as in the various effigy dramas in which stampmen were figuratively beaten or hanged. Similarly, poems protesting the Stamp Act constituted symbolic performances in their own right, within which fictional representatives of the vox populi roused audiences to unified resistance or addressed the king or Parliament on the people’s behalf. Like staged rituals, poems of protest could be turned into public events by being read aloud; as printed documents, however, they were not subject to limitations of time and place. A poem could be delivered by post to a neighboring town or colony, where it could be recited before an audience or reprinted, in turn, by the local newspaper editor, creating a virtually unlimited number of “revivals” of the original dramatic performance.²³

      As in staged protests, the Stamp Act appeared in most poems from the time as a grand symbolic or cosmic struggle, whether between liberty and tyranny or between moral innocence and malevolence. Many Stamp Act poems lent an especially threatening tone to the general mood of defiance in the colonies, as in the opening lines of the 1766 New Year’s broadside from the Boston Gazette: “May LIBERTY and FREEDOM! O blest Sound! / Survive the Stab, and heal the deep’ned Wound; / May Tyrants tremble! And may villains fear! / And spotless JUSTICE, crown the happy Year.” At the same time, it was not the case that the implicit narrative projected by most Stamp Act verses tended inexorably toward rebellion or revolution. Even poems like this one, which hints strongly at some form of violent retribution, concludes with a humble petition that the king will hear the pleas of the people and redress their grievances: “May GEORGE the Great, with open’d Ears and Eyes, / Observe our Injuries, and hear our Cries; / Redress the Grievance; and vouchsafe to give / Joy to us FREEMEN, who like BRITONS live.”²⁴

      Stamp Act poetry as a whole reflected this uneasy tension between expressions of moral outrage, tending toward a logic of rebellion, and an equally powerful desire for reconciliation with the Crown. This latter wish, in fact, is the common denominator in nearly all Stamp Act poems, including several that engaged in a distinct fantasy that by appealing directly СКАЧАТЬ