scribal practice approaches—or, supplements—conventions of the printing he could not reliably access. His journals regularly detail frustrations regarding a newspaper, the Maine Wesleyan Journal, which, although it often printed requests for submissions, apparently refused or ignored his contributions. Several of Shaw’s manuscript books have hand-sewn covers made from sheets of the local newspapers, one of which includes a poem. By folding his poems and other writings into newsprint sheets, Shaw places his work “in” the newspaper in a way that the newspaper’s editors would not. This minor effort to correct his exclusion from print publication is echoed within some of these books, where Shaw wrote out lengthy “letters to the Editor of the Maine Wesleyan Journal” on topics such as the playing of instrumental music in church (a favorite bugbear of his, on which the newspaper printed a short series of opinion pieces in 1834). On one occasion, the newspaper’s editor appears to have responded publicly to Shaw’s many submissions:
Figure 5. Index to one of Thomas Shaw’s manuscript poetry books. Collections of the Maine Historical Society.
Figure 6. Back cover of one of Thomas Shaw’s manuscript poetry books, sewn from a leaf of the Cumberland Gazette (July 1786). Note the poem in the left-hand column. Collections of the Maine Historical Society.
We wish to speak plainly on another subject without reference to any person or article. We have seen long pieces of composition called extempore poetry, said to have been written by a boy or girl, as the case might have been, not indeed for publication, but probably for the want of better employment; now we beg that our good friends will be sparing of such articles, as we feel incompetent to decide on their merits, and still more reluctant to fill up the Journal with articles which, however interesting they may appear at home, ought never to be sent abroad. To write poetry, requires something more than an ability to write lines of equal length, ending with a similar sound.67
There is no evidence that this statement was directed toward Shaw specifically. But regardless of who submitted the unpublishable poems, the editor’s critical standard speaks to the conflicts over mediation and canonization that partially structure Shaw’s poetics. What counts as “poetry” in antebellum Maine? Here, poetry and printedness have an intimate, if underarticulated relationship. Rhyme and meter do not by themselves make language into a poem; writing “poetry” requires at least the intention of print publication in order to be something more than mere “want of better employment” and thereby merit critical distinction (“we feel incompetent to decide on [the] merits” of the poems in question, which “might have been [written] not indeed for publication”). These are standards Shaw seems to have internalized within his own unpublished (if not unpublishable) poems:
Messieurs Printers if people would me hear
I would send you something that is very fare
Now your custemor a year I have been
And as for your press I dare not enter in
Prehaps sum people will call me a poet
But my lerning will not let me shoe it
Because to be a poet if I shout begin
It is your press I cannot enter in
And What if I should go on for to shoe
How fare a lernt man before can go
But if I should beet your lernt man agin
It is your press I cannot enter in …
If I had the lerning of sum lernt man
To put me in your press twould be your plan
But to lern now is to late to begin
Therefore it is your press I cannot enter in
For a man of no lerning to think to write
To fill your gazette does not you delight
So he had beter never think to begin
Because your press he cannot enter in
For a man that never did go to scool
To write for your press I think he is a fool
Now to write for you he beter not begin
For it your press he will not enter in
I do not want a lernt man to shoe to me
How a poeteckile stanze should formed be
But other lerning is to late to begin
For which your press I cannot enter in
For an unlarnt man to think to write for the
He beter not begin no no not he
For if he does people at him will grin
For your press he beter not enter in …
Now such a lernt man Sirs I can beat
Although he can spell and write very neat
Now to beat him I cannot now begin
Because your press I cannot enter in
Now such a lernt man I dare to defy
For to beet me a writing poetry
And if your press I could enter in
To bet such a one I would then begin.68
This manuscript poem poses a series of challenges structured by a set of associations between learning, poetry, and the press. Shaw emphasizes his own lack of learning to explain his exclusion from the press (“If I had the lerning of sum lernt man / To put me in your press twould be your plan … For a man of no lerning to think to write / To fill your gazette does not you delight”), but in deferring to the exclusivity of print, Shaw defies the link between poetry and printedness, as well as poetry and learning. Only the learned may get into print, but “I do not want a lernt man to shoe to me / How a poeteckile stanze should formed be.” Thus, although “sum people will call me a poet / But my lerning will not let me shoe it,” Shaw refuses to let the learned—those in print and those who control the press—entirely appropriate the claim to poetry: “Now such a lernt man I dare to defy / For to beet me a writing poetry.” To be a poet is to be in print—Shaw is excluded from the press, not his work. But Shaw’s failure to get into print becomes the occasion to write even more poems, thereby magnifying both his exclusion from poetry and his claim to the title of poet.
Despite the frustrations expressed in poems like “Messieurs Printers,” Shaw did sometimes get published, although this success not only required substantial efforts on his part but also provoked occasional reprisals from his audiences. Shaw’s most popular effort was “A Mournful Song, on the Death of the Wife and Child of Mr. NATHANIEL KNIGHTS” (1807), which was printed in at least three editions in Portland and reprinted in New York. In his diary, Shaw described “the solemn news” of the drowning, noting
