The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. CohenЧитать онлайн книгу.
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 in an incidental rhyme how Mrs. Knight “To god only she could then cry, When that she knew that she must die.” He then wrote out the text of his poem, copying from the broadside he had printed shortly after the accident occurred. According to his journal, he had composed the poem on February 23, 1807, the day after the tragedy.
This after noon I composed the above Mournfull song on the death of the Wife, and child of Nathaniel Night of Windham, and read it after meeting, and a Coppy was requested and I returned home late at night a praising god for his good ness to me. Thursday 26 we had a meeting at the Widdow Stuarts, and Brother Lumbard preached from those words, And I heard a voice saying unto me, arise, for blessed are the dead that die in the lord, &c. and Miss ford, and Brother Sar. Shaw, and Brother Aims exorted, and we had a powerfull meeting indeed, now this night two copies was requested of me, and Brother Lumbard had one for to read to parent of the child that was drowned Wife not found.69
Shaw drew inspiration from both the tragedy itself (which was a major news story, remembered for decades afterward) and the exhortations of the Methodist meeting, which took the tragedy as one of its texts. Shaw read his verses aloud at meetings and then transcribed them on the request of fellow members. Knowledge of the poem spread in the first days, and Shaw wrote out additional copies, one of which was intended for Nathaniel Knight himself. The song began circulating orally and in manuscript through the close circle of the Methodist meeting (which convened in private homes, rather than a church), and while interested readers initially turned to Shaw himself, Brother Lumbard’s example indicates that readers soon began reciting it in settings where Shaw was not present. As news of the accident spread, Shaw realized the song’s potential popularity:
The above mournfull song was wrote the next day after the awfall sean happened, and it the first edition was was [sic] printed the fourth day of March, 10 days after the sean in 1807. Now I had 1444 pamphlets printed and there was such rapped sail for them, that another man took my workes without my leave within five days and printed at five hundred coppies for sail. And then I had a second edition printed the 18th of march; now I had three thousand copies printed at this time, and there is rappid sail for them, both east, and west.70
If we take this account at its word, it offers an unusually specific record of the production of a broadside poem at the beginning of the nineteenth century.71 The poem appears in forty quatrain stanzas, divided in two columns and headed with a brief account of the tragedy and a woodcut of two coffins; the broadside looks crude even by the standard of its day. The price listed on the sheet was 6½ cents per copy, or 62½ cents per dozen. The bundle pricing indicates that Shaw or the printer anticipated a market for secondary circulation; in a port city like Portland, sailors or passengers on outbound ships might have carried copies very far indeed (this is the likeliest way that the song reached New York, where it was printed in a different broadside format later that year). Shaw claims that he sold “30 dollars worth” (about 460 copies, going by the face value of the broadside) in the three days after the first edition of the song was printed.72 Later, he “let Josiah Jarmon have 21 one duzon of the watch night songs for four dollars,” and he sold copies after various Methodist meetings in the area south of Portland.73 Shaw was intimately involved with each stage of a process that took the “Mournful Song” from manuscript to recitation to printed broadside to recitation once again and back into scribal transcription.74 The song’s mournful timeliness occasioned a “rappid sail,” which in turn prompted a dispute over ownership: the song quickly slipped beyond Shaw’s control, and in a supplemental stanza inserted at the bottom of the second edition of the broadside, he complained, “Take notice good people of Portland fair town, / I think I’m impos’d on by Printer MC KOWN: / He’s taken my verses and printed the same, / Which I think you’ll agree is much to his shame.”75 This address to readers indicates the complex ways in which familiarity and anonymity were encoded in print. Shaw seeks to shame the printer for taking “my verses and [printing] the same,” by proclaiming himself as the verses’ rightful owner and mobilizing readers’ assent to this claim. But this appeal, and the attendant identification of the verses with Shaw, depends on the same diffuse, anonymous transmission that enables McKown to co-opt them in