Poetry Wars. Colin Wells

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Figure 4. Cover page of Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, Aug. 26, 1777. New Jersey governor William Livingston recognized the rhetorical power of issuing proclamations and subverting, through versification, proclamations issued by rival British leaders. At the top of the page is Livingston’s parody of Burgoyne’s proclamation to the people of New York; at the bottom is Livingston’s own proclamation prohibiting the granting of passports from Patriot-controlled New Jersey to British-occupied New York. American Antiquarian Society.

      At the same time, the notion that Livingston’s versification could be understood as an agent in the war effort becomes clearer when both works are read in the context of their republication in one newspaper in particular, the New-York Journal, and the General Advertiser, which, largely by accident, found itself in the position of being the first to report the news of the battle and of Burgoyne’s surrender. Though the paper’s editor, John Holt, had spent more than a decade publishing his avowedly Whig paper in New York City, in the wake of the British occupation he fled northward, eventually reviving the Journal in the summer of 1777 in the village of Kingston, New York—nearer to Saratoga than any other Patriot newspaper, and thus fortuitously situated to report on the status of Burgoyne’s advance. Before long, Holt’s dispatches, bearing the dateline “Kingston,” were providing the earliest word on the unfolding action. Such dispatches, in turn, both informed and were informed by the Journal’s concurrent reprinting of Burgoyne’s proclamation and Livingston’s versification.⁹

      Holt reprinted Burgoyne’s original proclamation on September 1, in the same issue that reported news of the first major setbacks in Burgoyne’s plans, the defeat of Lt. Col. Barry St. Leger at Fort Stanwix and the loss of more than nine hundred men at the Battle of Bennington. Holt reported that there was reason to believe that “the enemy lost a greater number of men than the public have yet been informed,” such that the local people have begun to “recover their spirits, and many are moving back into their former habitations.” The juxtaposition between the two pieces provided the first hint of tension between Burgoyne’s overconfident pronouncements and the reality on the ground. One week later, the paper led with Livingston’s versification on page 1, which, when read in the light of the previous issue’s increasing optimism that Burgoyne’s advance might be impeded by attrition, served at once to diminish anxiety over Burgoyne’s military advantage and to reinforce, through the characterization of Burgoyne, the moral imperative of defeating him. In the issues that followed, Holt updated his dispatches, reporting that Burgoyne was hemmed in near Stillwater and short of supplies, and then finally, in the issue of October 13, he printed a “letter from the Northward,” which predicted what had once seemed impossible: “In a few days, I think Burgoyne will be entirely surrounded.” Four days later, Burgoyne’s soldiers surrendered.¹⁰

      In this interplay between verse and prose, literature and news, all in the fluid context of an ongoing military campaign, one glimpses the degree to which a poem could seem to transcend the “merely” literary to emerge as an agent in the historical process. Within the narrative logic of the print public sphere—in which events reported as news appeared alongside other texts in a system of mediation that unfolded temporally—such a timely publication as Livingston’s could appear as one of a series of events leading inexorably toward the specific outcome of Burgoyne’s defeat. In the aftermath of the surrender, the act of unmasking Burgoyne’s claim to military dominance could be read as narrative foreshadowing in a story of cosmic retribution against British arrogance. As a poem that lent moral and ideological weight to this narrative, moreover, Livingston’s versification also helped to transform the surrender itself into something much larger in its implications—an event not simply about Burgoyne, or even imperial Britain as a whole, but about human pride and the capacity for evil. This is how the story would be remembered in the poems and ballads published after the fact, as evidenced in such works as Grateful Reflections On the Divine Goodness vouchsaf’d to the American Arms in their remarkable successes in the Northern Department, after the giving up of our Fortresses at Ticonderoga. By the end of the war, Burgoyne’s name would be turned into a verb meaning “to be defeated at the moment of apparent triumph,” as in the title of a 1781 ballad on the Battle of Yorktown, “Cornwallis Burgoyned.”¹¹

      Such narrative logic as this, in which poetry appeared not simply as a mode of commentary but as an agent in the historical process itself, would in turn account for another common motif in Revolutionary verse: namely, the tendency of poets to indulge in fantasies about the potential effects of the publication of their poems. As we shall find in Chapter 3, this will most often involve poems purporting to expose some sinister conspiracy against the public good, whether in the guise of a rebel or Tory cabal or, in the aftermath of independence, a faction seeking to advance an agenda that contradicts the will of the people. In the meantime, the same faith in the power of poetry to intervene in the struggle between competing texts—proclamations issued by royal governors, on the one hand, and counterproclamations by state assemblies or by Congress, on the other—would continue unabated, ultimately extending beyond the specific fashion for penning versifications. For if the form’s negation of authoritative language opened space for rival claims to authority by ascendant colonial officials (with the most famous example being the Declaration of Independence), Loyalist poets seeking to invalidate such claims would need a counterstrategy of their own. That strategy, importantly, would involve reviving a different subgenre of eighteenth-century verse, one that communicated a negation of the rebel’s claims as well as a symbolic reaffirmation of the old order.

       Satirizing the “Word” of Congress

      As a literary form that enacted symbolic resistance by an anonymous public against the professed power of a governor or military commander, the versification proved wholly suitable for conveying the rebel or insurgent position, both before and during the war. Yet if one purpose of the versification form was to help open the way for popular declarations issued by town meetings and state assemblies, it seemed likely that British or Loyalist poets would recognize a similar capacity in the versification’s ability to invalidate the claims of such directives.

      And indeed, a few British and Loyalist versifiers joined the fray, including the anonymous poet who, in 1774, first defined the penchant for verse parody as a literary “vogue.” At the moment Gage was waging his first discursive war against the Massachusetts “Solemn League and Covenant,” similar leagues, assemblies, and committees of correspondence were forming in neighboring colonies, and in the late summer of 1774, these disparate bodies appointed delegates to what they styled a “Grand Continental Congress.” Among the Congress’s first official acts was drafting the Articles of Association, which announced a collective protest СКАЧАТЬ