Poetry Wars. Colin Wells

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СКАЧАТЬ rebellion, he issues a menacing threat: “I have but to give stretch to the Indian forces under my direction, and they amount to thousands, to overtake the hardened enemies of Great-Britain; … I trust I shall stand acquitted in the eyes of God and men, in denouncing and executing the vengeance of the state against the willful outcast.—The messengers of justice and of wrath await them in the field, and devastation, famine, and every concomitant horror, that a reluctant but indispensable prosecution of military duty must occasion, will bar the way to their return.”⁴

      From the moment of its appearance in print, Burgoyne’s proclamation inspired numerous reactions, ranging from brief dismissals of his tone—“Burgoyne has issued out another pompous something (I don’t know what to call it) which may get to your hands before this”—to detailed analyses of his rhetoric: “Some men are pedantic, … others are foppish…. But Burgoyne’s turn, or artificial character, is that of a mountebank, in which every thing must be wonderful. In his proclamation, which has already been in most of the papers, he has handed himself out under as many titles as a High German doctor.” Others used Burgoyne’s threat to employ the “Indian forces” at his disposal to implicate him in the murder of Miss Jane McCrea, which occurred under Burgoyne’s ostensible protection a month after he issued the proclamation, and which was already becoming grist for anti-British and anti–Native American propaganda: “The following is Burgoyne’s pompous proclamation, under which many of the credulous have lost their scalps.” Given such responses to its rhetoric, it seems inevitable that the proclamation would be parodied in verse, and indeed it was, this time by none other than a sitting governor, William Livingston of New Jersey.⁵

      Originally entitled simply “Proclamation,” and attributed to “A New-Jersey Man,” the poem would live on in cultural memory to become one of only two verse parodies included in Frank Moore’s influential 1856 anthology, Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution. This may be due in part to the momentousness of the battle itself, which inspired numerous similar poems and songs with such titles as “The Fate of John Burgoyne” and “The Lamentations of General Burgoyne.” Yet it may also be owed to the comic brilliance of Livingston’s act of invalidating the ideological force of the original proclamation. This is nowhere more evident than in the opening lines, which capitalize on Burgoyne’s ceremonial inventory of titles to create a hilariously ridiculous character who is far from the calm, confident “gentleman” persona Burgoyne sought to project. Instead, the young general comes off as a boy so impatient for honors that he can scarcely restrain himself from blurting out all his achievements and ambitions:

      By John Burgoyne, and Burgoyne John, Esquire,

      And grac’d with titles still more higher,

      For I’m Lieutenant-General too,

      Of George’s troops both red and blue,

      On this extensive Continent;

      And of Queen Charlotte’s regiment

      Of eight dragoons the Colonel;

      And Governor eke of Castle Will;

      And furthermore, when I am there,

      In House of Commons there appear

      (Hoping e’er [sic] long to be a Peer)

      Being member of that virtuous band

      Who always vote at North’s command;

      Directing too the fleets and troops

      From Canada as thick as hops;

      And all my titles to display,

      I’ll end with thrice etcaetera.

      This passage executes its strategy of satiric diminishment of the original document through multiple poetic techniques: the breakneck pace of the tetrameter lines, the repetition of additives, such as “and,” “too,” and “eke,” and the triplet rhyme (there/appear/peer), which dramatizes a speaker who is utterly incapable of controlling himself as he frantically rehearses his pedigree. Such emphasis on exaggeration introduces, in turn, the charge of Burgoyne’s dishonesty, which will be further developed in later passages, such as when Burgoyne insists that his mission is one of benevolence, to save the people of New York from the “tyranny” of the rebellion: “But now inspir’d with patriot love / I come th’ oppression to remove; / To free you from the heavy clogg / Of every tyrant-demagogue.”⁶

      Having established Burgoyne as capable of deceiving even himself of his true motives, Livingston abruptly shifts the tone from comic to deadly serious, as the promise of magnanimity gives way to boasts about the strength of his army and his willingness to use every available means to destroy those who would defy him. Retaining only the manic pace of the earlier part of the poem, Livingston turns to address the darker image of Burgoyne then circulating, as the cold-blooded general who is all too willing, as Burgoyne puts it in the original, to “give stretch to the Indian forces under [his] direction” (see Figure 4):

      With the most christian spirit fir’d

      And by true soldiership inspir’d,

      ......................................................

      I will let loose the dogs of Hell,

      Ten thousand Indians, who shall yell,

      And foam and tear, and grin and roar,

      And drench their maukesins in gore;

      To these I’ll give full scope and play

      From Ticonderoge to Florida;

      .................................................

      If after all these lovely warnings,

      My wishes and my bowels yearnings,

      You shall remain as deaf as adder,

      Or grow with hostile rage the madder,

      I swear by George and by St. Paul

      I will exterminate you all.

      By the end of the poem, Burgoyne is more than ridiculous: he is a profoundly hateful character who delights in his capacity to terrorize readers by exploiting their fears of Indian “savagery,” and who identifies personally with such brutality, as indicated by his final, cold-blooded threat to exterminate an entire population should it attempt to oppose him. If, as one historian puts it, the original proclamation was sufficiently ill-conceived in tone and message as to breed “a passion to stop him,” Livingston’s versification reinforced that passion, such that the two documents, which were frequently reprinted in succession, would combine to shape the popular narrative of the campaign that would take hold after Burgoyne’s defeat.⁷ At the same time, the fullness of this narrative becomes even more recognizable when the works are read not as a simple satiric tit for tat but as part of a larger chronological unfolding of interrelated texts, beginning in the weeks preceding the battle and concluding with the dispatches from the battle lines as they were being reported.

      The first important intersection of poetry and news involved Livingston’s initial publication of the parody in Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet at the end of August СКАЧАТЬ