Poetry Wars. Colin Wells

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СКАЧАТЬ COLONIES a savage Ex—se pay,

      To feed the creatures of a motly [sic] day:

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      When all these ills, thousands yet untold,

      Destroy our liberty, and rob our gold,

      Should not then SATIRE bite with all its rage,

      And just resentment glow through ev’ry page?

      The most obvious allusion in this passage is to John Brown’s Essay on Satire (1744), a work purporting to teach poets not only the art of effective satire but also, and more important, when in the course of a society’s moral or political decline it becomes necessary to speak back in the acerbic tones of satire. Indeed, the passage from Oppression quotes Brown directly on this question: “When fell corruption, dark and deep, like fate, / Saps the foundation of a sinking state; / … / … / Then warmer numbers glow through satire’s page, / And all her smiles are darken’d into rage.” Implicit in Oppression’s tribute to Brown (as well as in Brown’s tribute in his poem to Pope), is a reminder of the literary warfare simultaneously waged in many of the satiric masterpieces of the 1720s—The Dunciad, Gulliver’s Travels, The Beggar’s Opera—against the Parliamentary dishonesty, bribery, and fraud associated with the government of First Minister Sir Robert Walpole. Embedded in the very name given to this literary period—the Augustan Age—stood the anxious possibility that, if left to itself, political corruption would spread through all segments of society, leading, as in ancient Rome, to the decline and fall of a once virtuous and prosperous society. The purpose of the poem, accordingly, is to intervene in this process of moral or political decline before it reaches the point of no return. Within this narrative, the satirist addresses the reader not (as in the carrier’s address) as a representative voice of the people but as its moral guardian.²⁸

      The opening lines of Benjamin Church’s The Times identifies the same transatlantic literary opposition to Bute and Grenville, this time by alluding to the poetry of Charles Churchill, Wilkes’s collaborator who had, in the years immediately prior to the Stamp Act, produced a string of social and political satires (including a poem also entitled The Times). Church opens his own version of The Times with a eulogy to the recently deceased Churchill and a humble comparison of his own “rough” verse to that of his English precursor: “’Tis not great Churchill’s ghost who claims your ear, / For even ghosts of wit are strangers here; / That patriot-soul to other climes remov’d, / Well-pleas’d enjoys that liberty he lov’d.”²⁹ Yet despite this gesture of contrast, the point here and throughout the poem is that Church and Churchill belong to a common satiric alliance, and their poems, appearing at nearly the same moment on opposite sides of the Atlantic, stand as twin defenses of liberty against those who would usurp it for their narrow ends.

      This is why both The Times and Oppression: A Poem make the point of emphasizing the ideological union between those who denied Wilkes the freedom to criticize his government and those who advocated excise, whether in Britain or America. Thus Church, writing in America, takes aim not only at Bute and his associates at the center of imperial power but also at men like Jared Ingersoll, a notorious Boston stampman accused of enriching himself at the expense of his countrymen. Similarly, the anonymous “American” author of Oppression, writing from London, devotes a significant part of his poem to attacking one John Huske, a New Hampshire native who returned to England to become a member of Parliament. Huske was commonly accused of being one of the architects of the Stamp Act and in fact was hanged in effigy on the Liberty Tree alongside Lord Grenville on the day the act took effect. This shared sense of literary alliance explains why both The Times and Oppression: A Poem echo the charge first made by Churchill in The Farewell—that this collection of ambitious placemen and corrupt ministers, besides restraining the people’s liberty, also undermined the king’s authority by driving a wedge between him and his subjects. Such men, Churchill warned, are nothing more than “Arch, subtle Hypocrites,” who, “with arts to honest men unknown, / Breed doubts between the People and the Throne.” The same verdict is delivered by Church in the more severe form of direct accusation: “Behold your crimes, and tremblingly await / The grumbling thunder of your country’s hate; / Accursed as ye are! how durst ye bring / An injur’d people to distrust their K[ing]?”³⁰

      Corresponding to this struggle pitting the king and his subjects against a narrow coterie of conniving ministers was a perceived literary conflict between the forces of satire and those of “panegyric,” with the latter representing writers who would pander to corrupt leaders even in a time of crisis. This, too, was a well-established Augustan motif, as seen, for instance, in Edward Young’s rhetorical question from Love of Fame, the Universal Passion: “When flatter’d crimes of a licentious age / Reproach our silence, and demand our rage,” he asks, “Shall panegyric reign, and Censure cease?” Church has this same symbolic opposition in mind when he contrasts the recent past—a time when the muse “Instructed, rul’d, corrected”—with the present “degenerate” age in which the muse “stuns me with the clamour of her praise: / Is there a villain eminent in State, / Without one gleam of merit?—She’ll create; / Is there a scoundrel, has that scoundrel gold? / There the full tide of panegyrick’s roll’d.” The danger of panegyric is that it is meant to please, which, in times of moral or political corruption, requires readers to accept an inverted reality. To assume such a perspective at the present moment, Church witheringly puts it, requires that one believe not only that “The STAMP, and LAND-TAX are as blessings meant” but also “That where we are not, we most surely are, / That wrong is right, black white, and foul is fair; / That M[a]nsf[ie]ld’s honest, and that Pitt’s a knave, / That Pratt’s a villain, and that Wilkes’s a slave.”³¹

      Within this shared sense of satiric struggle, importantly, the outcome of the Stamp Act crisis remained precariously open-ended. One possible outcome was the one imagined in poems emphasizing reconciliation, with the king awakening to the realization that he has been misled and recommitting himself to acting on behalf of the people. The other was that this latest round of satiric warfare would, as in earlier decades, fail to stem the tide of political corruption and oppression, leading the crisis to fester to the point of outright rebellion. Indeed, this prospect is strongly hinted at in Oppression: A Poem in a passage that explains, somewhat threateningly, the origin of past political revolutions:

      Ever ye’ll find, when nations have rebell’d,

      Thro’ fell Oppression they have been compell’d.

      When civil discord, shakes the props of state,

      And wild distraction howls with deadly hate;

      When from the Royal head the crown is torn,

      And on the front of some usurper born;

      When frightful horror glares in ev’ry street,

      And friends with friends in dreadful battle meet;

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      Know then the cause! Oppression lawless reign’d,

      And ev’ry right with liberty was chain’d;

      Revenge at last, a horrid war prepar’d,

      And high and low her deadly fury shar’d,

      Till righteous rage had pull’d the monster down,

      And made the subject, happy as the crown.³²

      Notwithstanding СКАЧАТЬ