luckily as men may see—
By luck and chance My Parents they
Lernt me to Reade from day to day
Saying I should a Reader be
As people now may look & see85
These opening stanzas portray a social world stratified by uneven access to language and education, and they announce Shaw’s subject-hood in a gesture of performative literacy. The material process of writing (“pen & ink in hand”) produces the poem as a testament to Shaw’s creative management of the tools of education, which normally underwrite status (“men of lerning are made great / By Schooling, both for Church & State”) but in his case testify by contrast to his distance from the seats of cultural power. His home schooling retains its rough edges—he never did “lern to spell & write by Rule” but succeeded mostly through “luck and chance” and his parents’ initiative—yet he has prospered enough that an implied audience of future readers can open his book and find there the legacy of literacy in the shape of a poem.
For I began to write while young
In Poetree imployd my Tung
And Thoughts & hours by night & day
As if it was but sport & pley
On many thing I chose to write
Both on the day & on the night
As god ofton did leede my mind
On subjects as I was Inclind,
And on many a Funereal Song
I have studied & wrote along
And some of them I sent abroade
As if these things were ends of god86
His fluency with poems crosses different kinds of media (both writing and speaking) with such ease and abundance (“As if it was but sport & pley”) that it seems divinely inspired, although God simply leads his mind “on subjects as I was Inclind” already. This qualified divine sanction is an important component of the backward glance that he casts over his career. The popularity of the songs he has “sent abroade” makes it appear “as if these things were ends of god,” but ultimately their legacy is uncertain. What is certain, though, is that this poet’s lifelong project of writing poems touches on almost every aspect of his social world, from the organization of public life, to the structure of literate communication, and finally to the constitution of the subject, who can exist through the creation and consumption of poems, as the final stanza makes clear. The successful materialization of poetry in the community seems to underwrite the hand of God, but, as he acknowledges in a haunting conclusion:
Whether they be, I cannot tell
But god surely doth know full well
And so I cease—at this time draw
A line & end with—Thomas Shaw.87
* * *
The case studies of Plummer and Shaw lead to several preliminary conclusions about the work of poems in New England at the turn of the nineteenth century. First, “poetry” was an irregular category—not a genre but a mixed bag of genres arrayed in an unstable hierarchy. Because of that instability, the culture of poetry was only ever partly legible to its members, and which objects could count as poems—and which people as poets—was subject to considerable debate, because literariness was a shifting standard, although still forceful nonetheless. Second, literariness is mediated—it is subject to the scenes and conditions in and by which it is produced—but it also mediates broader social contests about public order and the legitimation of power. The sometimes scurrilous, sometimes scandalous ballads and doggerel verses I examine here played a particularly salient role in such contests. These poems were not only widely consumed, but more important, they were also widely produced, often by individuals with, at best, tangential access to cultural and economic capital. Third, much of the anxious force behind such poems derives from the dense relationship between their modes of circulation—the wayward, vagrant ways in which they moved, beyond established paths of communication—and the genres of scandal, gossip, rumor, slander, and news. While none of these communicative genres may seem particularly germane to modern senses of poetry (at least, not to good poetry), for nineteenth-century readers, the associations made a key contribution to the work of these texts. The readers of Plummer or Shaw did not value their poems—most of the copies that survive are badly mutilated—because they were not valuable, at least not in a literary sense. Instead, the social exchange value enticed their many readers (or customers, since they were balladmongers). “Ballads” like these thus condense the power of circulation as a social force. This force could be applied to scandal, news, and tragedy, or it could be mobilized in the service of politics. As the most controversial and also communal form of antebellum political association, antislavery and its poetics will be the subject of the next chapter.
CHAPTER 2
The Poetics of Reform
The Poetics of Reform
Chapter 1 concluded with the claim that in the early national period, certain genres of poetry condensed societal anxieties about circulation and public order. Particular kinds of poems were understood to have a constitutively social function, or, rather, particular kinds of poems were understood to be constitutive of sociality. That is, they engaged large audiences on diverse arrays of topics, but more important, they enabled certain concepts of community to become visible to members of the community. This relation was recursive, since people imagined such poems to participate in relations that the poems helped lay down. As we saw, these genres (most prominently the ballad) produced ambivalent feelings: they were and also were not literary, decorous, and decent, and while they were known to be popular and powerful ways of communicating, their powers were felt to be potentially and potently dangerous. Chapter 2 continues this line of thought by examining how one social reform project, abolition, drew upon the ambivalent charges ascribed to poems in the Jacksonian and antebellum eras. How did antislavery—the project most transformative in its vision and most incendiary in its practice—mobilize the energies encoded into common and widely read poetic genres? What sort of work did antislavery poems do? And what sorts of communities were formed or deformed by the circulation and exchange of antislavery verse?
I must begin by emphasizing that the work of abolition was borne on the wings of poetry, for—to put the point as strongly as possible—poems made reform possible as a social project. Anthologies by Marcus Wood and James Basker have demonstrated that antislavery poetry dates back at least one hundred years earlier than the organized movement itself.1 Thousands of authors wrote songs, hymns, laments, satires, ballads, and odes in the service of antislavery, to change hearts and minds, to recruit new members, and to build solidarity within local organizations and across the transnational movement. Abolitionist newspapers relied heavily on poems to provide front-page commentary or even to report news. Giftbooks of poetry, such as The North Star: The Poetry of Freedom by her Friends (discussed later), sold to raise money at abolitionist fairs, were exchanged as tokens among acquaintances, thus securing bonds of friendship in sympathy with the bondage of the slave. Making these books was one way to act politically; buying and giving them
