Poetry Wars. Colin Wells

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СКАЧАТЬ primary audience is a sort of organized political body, a female counterpart to the Sons of Liberty. The poem as a whole likewise functions as a call to action, arising from a stated deficiency of determination among those in power—men who “from Party, or Fear of a Frown” have been kept “quietly down, / Supinely asleep—and depriv’d of their Sight.” If these “degenerate” sons refuse to guard the rights and freedom of colonial Americans, the speaker exclaims, “Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise.”⁴³

      The paradox surrounding this act of voicing female patriotism is that, as the speaker also acknowledges, when it comes to deciding how to respond to the Townshend duties, “we’ve no Voice but a Negative here”—for the political agency of women arises only from their power to “forbear” from consuming “Taxables” like tea, glass, and paint. Yet it is precisely the marginalization of the female patriots from power that allows them—as we also saw in the case of the humble newsboys—to lay claim to more accurately representing the people at large. By emphasizing women’s power of forbearance, moreover, the speaker is also able to assert the traditionally “masculine” ideal of republican virtue, that of sacrificing one’s personal self-interest for the public good and eschewing what was frequently described in protest pamphlets as an “effeminate” desire for luxury. As Griffits’s speaker argues, by living according to these republican values, even within the confines of the domestic sphere, female patriots possess a powerful retort to certain male counterparts who, either out of weakness or self-interest, seek to silence women’s protests: “Thus acting—we point out their Duty to Men; / And should the Bound-Pensioners tell us to hush, / We can throw back the Satire, by bidding them blush.”⁴⁴

      No doubt inspired by Griffits’s poem, the iconic figure of the female patriot—whose fidelity to the resistance movement was measured by her willingness to deny herself such luxuries as tea and fine linen—would become a subject of frequent poetic musings throughout the period of the Townshend Acts crisis. Appearing several months after Griffits’s “Female Patriots” was the similarly entitled anonymous broadside The Female Patriot, No. 1—which, in contrast to Griffits’s address to the Daughters of Liberty, is addressed “To the Tea-Drinking Ladies of New York.” In place of Griffits’s call for female solidarity as a corrective to male wavering, moreover, this poem directs its satire toward women, presenting them as obstacles to their husbands’ efforts to honor the boycott: thus, in response to her husband’s refusal to participate in the importation of tea, the shrewish wife depicted in the poem beats him with her broomstick, exclaiming, “Go, dirty CLOD-POLE! get me some Shushong, / This Evening I’ve invited MADAM STRONG.”⁴⁵

      However misogynistic in its satire, The Female Patriot, No. 1, raised questions about women’s involvement in the boycott that would be taken up as a crucial motif in political verse written by women during the crisis. Griffits herself would in 1775 pen a fictional poetic exchange pitting “Fidelia,” who calls on women to join her in boycotting East India Company tea, against “Europa,” a clearly satirized figure who curses the “hideous wild uproar” brought on by Congress’s nonimportation pact and declares, “Tea I must have, or I shall dye.” In the same vein, Mercy Otis Warren would publish several poems on the tea boycott, including a satire against women who complain about having to give up what they call “necessities” but what the poem’s voice of moral conscience derides as “useless vanities of life.”⁴⁶ As in the implied back-and-forth exchange between the conflicting “Female Patriot” poems, these poems and groups of poems followed a binary structure in which a satirized voice—one who complains about the inconvenience of political action—is opposed by that of a self-proclaimed patriot. By consistently favoring the latter argument, such poems allowed complaints about the boycott to be aired but then circumscribed within a moral framework that served to police illicit consumption of taxable goods at a moment when the political leverage of the resistance depended largely on the success of the boycotts.

      In all of these examples, poetry and song gave voice to the resistance to the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts, and it did so according to what I have described as a poetics of resistance—a set of literary practices and conventions that arose in response to the circumstances of the crises themselves. The first of these—seen in the newsboy verses and then in the “Liberty Song” and “The Female Patriot”—is the consistent act of connecting the poetic voice to the voice of the people. This would continue as a mainstay of poetic warfare in the ensuing decades, with poems and songs giving voice to these and other symbolic manifestations of the vox populi. In positive or concrete form, the voice of the people would be represented by a variety of symbolic figures speaking back to various institutions of authority, from the humble soldier asking for a fairer system of compensation for Revolutionary War veterans in the 1790s to the “honest tar” of 1807 who rails against the embargo as an impractical policy dreamed up by elite politicians. At the same time, as seen in the versification vogue, the voice of the people could also be expressed in a purely negative or critical mode, as the invisible agent that draws on the transformative power of parody to register the public’s rejection of a governmental directive.

      Another important element of the poetics of resistance, as seen in the allusions to Pope, Swift, Young, and Churchill, is the implicit conviction that poetic resistance had always been transatlantic in nature. From the time of Sir Robert Walpole to that of Bute and Grenville, poets had turned to satire to as a means of articulating political conflicts in moral terms, and they had done so, importantly, in full consciousness of belonging to a tradition of satiric opposition. This transatlantic (and later, transnational) political verse tradition will pervade the poetry wars of the Revolution, with Patriot and Loyalist poets alike invoking Milton, Pope, Butler, and others to expose the moral deficiencies of their political opponents, and poets representing the emerging proto-parties of the 1790s warring over which side comprised the true legacy of this literary-political tradition. Implicit in the act of allusion is a conception of poetic utterance as fundamentally intertextual—the notion that a poem’s meaning is not intrinsic to itself but depends in a fundamental way on its connections and resonances with other texts—and it is this aspect, I want to argue, that will constitute the crucial element of the poetics of resistance as it will develop after 1765. This is the notion of poetry as a form of discursive retaliation, evident in the tit-for-tat dynamic of the “Liberty Song” and “Female Patriot” exchanges, and culminating in the anti-Gage versifications as a strategy for contesting political legitimacy itself.

      The power of a poem in retaliation will derive from its capacity to impose a new narrative onto public discourse itself as it is mediating history as it unfolds. This is why, as we shall see, poets during the Revolution will understand their respective acts of literary-political subversion not merely as commenting on political issues so much as shaping or altering political reality. The same assumption that cleared space for the versification vogue of 1774 will continue to embolden Patriot versifiers to recast the directives of British military leaders as mere linguistic performances, devoid of any power to control the actions of colonial subjects. They will also inspire Loyalist poets to try to nullify in verse the authority of the popular declarations issued by the “upstart” Congress. Such literary exchanges, moreover, will be seen to unfold chronologically, often in a dialectical relationship with the major events of the war as they are being reported in the same newspapers. Within this atmosphere, the narrative of the war itself—battles fought, territory gained or lost—will frequently merge with the various narratives generated by literary attacks and retaliations, such that a virtual triumph by a poet or balladeer will seem to prefigure, or even help to bring about, a corresponding actual triumph on the battlefield. Such blurring of literary and political reality will create space for the emergence of a fantasy about poetry’s ability to affect the outcome of a struggle not merely between opposing texts but even opposing armies.

      Chapter 2

       War and Literary War

      The СКАЧАТЬ