The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. Cohen
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 books. Collections of the Maine Historical Society.
Shaw’s 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