Poetry Wars. Colin Wells

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СКАЧАТЬ as we have seen, from the audacious notion that, by blocking the legal or authoritative claims by a certain class of printed documents, poetry had the capacity to intervene in the domain of real power. This belief appeared to be borne out by the events surrounding Gage’s own tenure as governor, as the inability of his directives to keep order in Boston not only led to his dismissal but also opened space for counterclaims to political authority by the Congress. At the same time, from the summer of 1775 onward, this textual struggle was taking place alongside a full-fledged military struggle whose uncertain outcome had the potential to confound or contradict authorial intentions. Poets could control the metanarratives surrounding their satiric engagement with official proclamations or rival poems, but however much they desired to, they could not really control the outcome of the war.

      Or could they? As recent studies by William B. Warner and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg illustrate, Americans of the Revolutionary era lived amid a dynamic media environment in which events and print mediations of events unfolded together in continuous dialogue with each other.¹ Within this atmosphere, categories such as news as event and news as representation at times blurred into each other in such a way as to lend agency to the latter. As reports of news events appeared in the same newspapers as other texts—including, significantly, poetic responses to those events—over a succession of weeks, such mediations often coalesced into larger media narratives in which poems appeared to play more than an indirect role in their ultimate outcomes. As we shall see in the first episode analyzed in this chapter, the appearance of a strategically placed versification of a hostile proclamation by General Burgoyne could appear as a crucial step in his ultimate downfall at Saratoga. And this same assumption would inform other episodes of literary-political convergence as well: at the moment the Congress’s viability as a governing body was being tested, its members would petition John Trumbull to compose a poem to undermine British imperial claims, while the Loyalist poet, Jonathan Odell, would attempt to negate through satire that same Congress’s most momentous act, of declaring independence.

      Yet if the existence of an independent American nation posed one kind of problem for Loyalists, it also raised a crucial question for those supporting of the so-called Patriot movement: namely, what sort of patria was implied by that label. Revolutionary American poets who expressed their total allegiance to an independent republic, as we saw in Chapter 1, had come of age in an era in which political resistance had always been framed in terms of a single empire. Issues surrounding a distinct American political identity had scarcely arisen. Even when the outbreak of war and the Declaration of Independence redefined the conflict as necessarily two-sided, Patriot poets were reluctant to give up the idea of literary resistance against a single, imperial entity. American war ballads focused less on celebrating the martial prowess of American soldiers than on exposing the failure of their British opponents to live up to their vaunted reputation, and Patriot verse as a whole was marked by a tendency to evade the issue of American identity. It is fitting, in this context, that the most renowned and reprinted poem of the Revolution was not some grand epic of national unity but a mock-epic treatment of the ideological dismantling of British America: John Trumbull’s M’Fingal. Yet perhaps for this very reason, Trumbull would be among the first to register that the very success of the Revolution meant asking a series of potentially troubling questions about what kind of nation had been created in its aftermath.

       The Poetic Defeat of John Burgoyne

      As the newly minted Continental Army was gearing up for its first major contest—transporting artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights to aid in the siege of Boston—the proclamation war that had begun during Thomas Gage’s governorship continued unabated. William Howe, who succeeded Gage in late 1775 as commander of His Majesty’s North American forces, issued a string of proclamations attempting to regulate the movement of Bostonians, at least one of which was versified by an anonymous wit. At the same time, the more important challenge to the governor’s authority that winter came from a rival proclamation by the General Court of Massachusetts-Bay, establishing a functioning provincial government, with an executive, a judiciary, and an active military force, whose “power” was declared to “reside … in the body of the people.” This dynamic would be replicated in colony after colony in 1776 and 1777, with remaining royal governors and newly established colonial authorities speaking past each other in proclamations, resolutions, and manifestos competing for the public’s assent, at least until the outcome of the war—the ultimate arbiter of political disputes—determined the actual limits of power. In the meantime, the Revolution would be fought to an important degree in print, as in the following representative exchange from June 1776, when the Loyalist governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, put out a proclamation calling for a meeting of the General Assembly, only to be answered by a “Resolution” of the Provincial Congress demanding that Franklin’s order to be ignored. That the Resolution was reprinted in newspapers in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia at the very moment the Congress was deliberating over declaring independence reinforces the sense that such exchanges amounted to more than mere performances of political resolve.²

      It might be expected that this new atmosphere of contested legal authority would signal an end of the popularity of the versification, which had always communicated simple resistance, as opposed to advancing a rival claim, to political power. And though the fashion for parodying official language in verse waned after 1776, it did not disappear entirely. In fact, the most famous example of the genre appeared in the summer of 1777, in response to an equally famous, or infamous, proclamation issued by General Burgoyne in the months prior to the Battle of Saratoga. The story of the battle and its importance for the outcome of the war is well known: Burgoyne had spent the previous winter lobbying Parliament to support his strategy to bring the war to a speedy end by gaining control of the Hudson from Canada to New York, which would effectively cut off New England, widely considered the epicenter of the rebellion, from the other colonies. A series of setbacks resulted in Burgyone’s army of Regulars, Hessians, and Iroquois allies finding themselves stalled near Saratoga, and after his request for reinforcements from New York went unheeded, “Gentleman Johnnie” was forced to surrender his entire force. When news of the American victory reached Paris a few months later, it served as a prime motivator for France’s decision to enter the war. Saratoga indeed proved a crucial turning point in the war, though not in the way Burgoyne had imagined it.³

      Beyond its military significance, the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga carried enormous symbolic weight, which was owed largely to the proclamation he issued as his army was pushing southward. Insisting that His Majesty’s forces were unstoppable, and threatening to destroy anyone who would hinder their progress, the proclamation was steeped in what critics derided as arrogance and false piety, such that when read retrospectively in light of his disastrous surrender, it appeared at best as a study in dramatic irony, and at worst as the sin that had invited divine retribution against him. Beginning with the genre’s obligatory list of titles, Burgoyne’s variation on the motif was at least as extravagant as that of his precursors: “By His EXCELLENCY JOHN BURGOYNE, Esquire, Lieutenant-General of his MAJESTY’s Forces in America, Colonel of the Queen’s Regiment of Light Dragoons, Governor of Fort-William, in North-Britain, one of the Representatives of the Commons of Great-Britain in Parliament, and commanding an Army and Fleet in an Expedition from Canada, &c. &c. &c.” The proclamation then goes on to describe Burgoyne’s mission less as a military operation than a humanitarian one: “The cause in which the British arms are thus exerted, applies to the most affecting interest of the human heart.” The aim was to defend the “suffering thousands” from the Revolutionary assemblies—what Burgoyne calls “the completest system of tyranny that ever GOD, in his displeasure, suffered for a time, to be exercised over a froward and stubborn generation.” He then goes on to say that as “the head of troops in the full powers of health, discipline, and valour, determined to strike where necessary, and anxious to spare where possible,” he demands the people’s full cooperation. More precisely, he announces: “I … invite and exhort all persons, in all places … to maintain such a conduct as may justify me in protecting their lands, habitations, and families.” To the “domestic, the industrious, СКАЧАТЬ