manuscripts and homemade books. His reputation as a local balladmonger (the “Down-East Homer,” as an early twentieth-century historian called him) probably derived from both his published and unpublished work.
Although he has been accorded a minor place in the history of a minor region, his career has usually provided literary criticism a means to mark the difficulties that stood in the way of any aspiring poet in the early national period: “His verse was indeed ‘unlernt,’ lamentably bad, worthless today, except that it indicates the isolation of mind and poverty of vision that was inevitable in those days of material and political struggle.”59 Where it has been noted at all, the archive left by a poet like Shaw is treated as a forlorn hope, and an amused condescension has been the standard critical approach to it. However, Shaw’s manuscripts speak to the conditions of early nineteenth-century poetic culture with a different sort of eloquence: Shaw is interesting precisely because he was not a mute, inglorious Milton but was instead all too profuse and prolix. If his poems forestall a critical analysis predicated on the conditions of literariness abstracted from print textuality, their seemingly self-evident worthlessness is also anticipated throughout his writings, which meditate obsessively on the conditions of their own mediation. The interplay between media in his archive, and between media and his archive, offers a compelling opportunity to imagine the social being of poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Shaw described the region where he grew up as “the wilderness, where there was no schools nor meeting untill I was 15 years old. Now my parents lernt me, as well as the rest of his Children to read, and I never went to school a moment in my life.”60 Shaw’s ambivalent relation to literacy and print literature—he could read and write, yet regularly characterized himself as “an old foole / That never once did go to school”—serves as an organizing principle for both his massive poetic output and the marginal position of his poems in relation to the literary culture of his time and after.61 The ways in which the borders of the poetic were policed at the turn of the century was a regular topic in his writings. When he was thirty-two, Shaw wrote a warrant for his own arrest:
Whereas Thomas Shaw, of Pearsontown in the County of Cumberland & Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Poet, did, on the twenty seventh Day of March, Anno Domini, one thousand, seven hundred & Eighty five, maliciously and of malice propense, commit a most horrid, barbarous and inhuman murder, on the Bodies of the Muses—Guardians of the liberal Arts, These are to command you by virtue of a power to me granted, from the high Court of Apollo, to apprehend the Body of the said Thomas, & him safely keep, so that he be had before the said Court aforesaid, on or before the twenty first Day of May next. Thereof fail not, ______Anno 1786 Mercury62
The delightful self-deprecation of this moment indicates a wry awareness of the conditions of writing in rural North America just after the close of the American Revolution. While the warrant would indict Thomas Shaw, Poet, for the temerity of writing and writing badly—his crime is both trespass and murder—writing the warrant reveals a self-conscious literariness that the warrant’s intention would deny. If the “Guardians of the liberal Arts” keep out those interlopers not vested with power “from the high Court of Apollo”—here the defendant seems to walk both sides of the line—the familiarity with legalese (“maliciously and of malice propense”) and classical mythology shows a knowledge of writing’s discursive power, making the “horrid, barbarous and inhuman murder, on the Bodies of the Muses” look a bit like an inside job. Shaw’s warrant therefore seems contradictory, because it indicates someone capable of judging his own work critically and of anticipating critical judgment. Though forbidden to enter “the high Court of Apollo,” he knows the way in.
This warrant both is and is not prescient regarding Shaw’s poetic career. All his life, he struggled for public recognition as a poet, but despite his continual efforts, only a handful of his poems were ever printed. While these were quite popular (a young Nathaniel Hawthorne was one enthusiastic reader), such publications did not win him deference as an author but instead engendered their own forms of punitive discipline.63 Yet the sheer size of his archive belies his frustrations getting into print. As he noted late in life on the flyleaf to one of his daybooks, “I Have been a writing 60 years and my books and papers lie very loose under my hands and are now very many.”64 Or, as he put it in “Thomas Shaws Wrtings. Colected from his Manuscripts &c. The interduction to what followes”:
Here in this volom you may see
My Songs both old and new to be
Sience Seventeen hundread Seventy five
I wrote them all I do beleve
I have colected them and here
Many of them here doth appear
Untill there pile here may be high
That have my thoughts in them to lie
In Sixty years I have wrote down
Many a thought out of my crown
And now to vew them my week mind
Hardly there meaning all may find
A thought has led me to begin
To write them all over agin
The good and preshous here to land
And all the bad fling from my hand.65
The poem introduces Shaw’s effort to collate and revise his work by collecting clean copies of his poems together in one book. Copying is never a neutral act: it was one of the central practices of contemporary pedagogy, so Shaw thus engages (or imitates) the work of the schooling he had been denied as a young man.66 But whereas a student of the early 1800s would copy texts primarily from a canon of approved Christian piety, Shaw copies his own (albeit often pious) poems. “To write them all over agin” is a self-canonizing process that enters in “the good and preshous” poems while flinging away “all the bad”: “good” and “bad” may be both moral and aesthetic terms here, and the act of distinguishing blends both kinds of judgment. Rewriting involves copying over his poems, which then rewrites the terms of his authorship by condensing the poetry into a single “volom”: Shaw reviews his sixty-year poetic career by invoking and remediating the materiality of that career, such that rewriting proliferates the poems while at the same time rendering their materiality invisible. Imagined first as scattered sheets, the poems “doth appear / Untill there pile here may be high,” but rewriting consolidates the pile into a book, making poems into spaces for “my thoughts … to lie.” Similarly, “a thought” occasions Shaw’s act of rewriting and the critical distinction that guards inclusion in the “volom.” Thoughts precede and succeed poems, which become no more than the vessels for “many a thought out of my crown.” Of course, the sheer labor of so much rewriting (the manuscript book is more than two hundred pages long) spectacularly contradicts this logic of effacement. But the manuscript’s handwritten-ness is itself obscured by a thematic of printing that organizes this project. The book’s title, “Thomas Shaws Wrtings. Colected from his Manuscripts,” separates “Writings” from “Manuscripts,” implying that the collection is something other than what it is—another manuscript. And, what is more, Shaw incorporates the structures of print into this book by supplying many of the organizational supports of the printed codex, including a table of contents, page numbers, and index meticulously written out. As poems reveal thoughts by disguising the labor of their own reproduction, the laboriously transcribed manuscript cloaks handwriting in the approximation of print.
Figure 4. Table of contents from one of Thomas Shaw’s manuscript poetry
