Untimely Verse: Distressed Publishing and Exemplary Circulation In

Home , Rufus Wilmot Griswold

Untimely Verse: Distressed Publishing and Exemplary Circulation in

Antebellum America

A dissertation submitted by

D. Leif Eckstrom

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

English

Tufts University

May 20, 2018

Adviser: Virginia Jackson

Untimely Verse treats Phillis Wheatley, Rufus Griswold, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman as major authors, but it takes a narrower interest in recovering how their work circulated, as material texts and as a developing set of ideas about American poetry and authorship within antebellum periodical and book formats. Thematically, the dissertation is organized around issues of print temporality and the project of reading the contemporary practice of American verse as an at once historical and yet- still-emergent category of poetry. It traces how Wheatley, Poe, and

Whitman developed and reflected a growing interest in exemplary and untimely circulation in antebellum America, while the labors of the indefatigable anthology czar, Rufus Griswold, came to embody the all-too- timely values of an American poetry written and published for its day, eventuating in the twentieth-century notion of an obsolete poetry synonymous with a graveyard of forgettable and largely forgotten poets.

For Eleanore

iii

Acknowledgements

Thanking the friends, family, and colleagues who supported this work is a pleasure long anticipated. My first thanks goes to Virginia Jackson who read every word of this project, and in most instances read these words and ideas many times over. Her work on the lyricization of poetry, as well as the histories, theories, and lineages of reading (c19 and c20) poetry that she has developed and fostered, inspired the lines of inquiry that I wanted to pursue in Untimely Verse. I’m equally grateful for her generosity of spirit, which set the highest standard for being a gracious and generative scholar. She introduced me to so many wonderful colleagues, books, and conferences, as a matter of course, and no less significantly, she made sure

I had an outstanding meal or two each semester. Thank you, Jennie.

Radiclani Clytus was an early and crucial interlocutor on this project. I’m grateful for his friendship and for his help in realizing the greater interests of the Wheatley chapter, particularly with respect to

William J. Wilson and his inimitable “Picture Gallery” of 1859. Meredith

McGill and her work on the culture of reprinting, as well as the circulation, formats, and media of nineteenth-century poetry and literary history, fundamentally shaped the interests of each chapter. In addition to inspiring a sharper accounting of the figures and claims of Untimely

Verse, she was an enthusiastic and supportive presence at conferences. I’m very grateful for Joseph Litvak’s contribution to this project and for his

iv mentorship throughout my first years at Tufts. Nathan Wolff graciously served as a reader on this project without really knowing me. His thoughtful comments and suggestions were very much appreciated.

The first section of my Whitman chapter was published in Whitman among the Bohemians (Iowa University Press, 2014). I’m grateful to the editors, Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley, for their contributions to this essay; I also thank the Iowa University Press for permission to reprint this essay as part of my extended dissertation chapter on Whitman.

Another generous and collegial English department helped give

Untimely Verse its start. The English department at Loyola University of

Chicago provided a wonderful introduction to graduate study and nineteenth-century studies, in particular. Jack Kerkering’s seminar on nineteenth-century American poetry was a revelation for me, and his teaching and mentorship were equally inspiring. Jack and Chris Castiglia fostered an Americanist reading group that made a compelling case for thinking that everything interesting actually happened in the nineteenth century. I’m happy to say that I haven’t been disabused of this notion.

Finally, Bill Jolliff set a model for teaching, writing, and thinking that I’d be pleased to live up to every once in a while. He also introduced me to one of the most beautifully distressed objects of the twentieth century—Bill

Monroe’s invention of the Bluegrass genre.

Jacob Crane, Erin Kappeler, and Greg Beckett were the readers I depended upon when sifting through the roughest bits of writing and thinking about this project. They always improved my work and brought a v joy to the process that I will cherish and carry forward to future projects.

I’m grateful for these friendships and many others that developed through and alongside the work of writing this dissertation. Britt Rusert, Rachael

Nichols, Doug Guerra, Barbara Orton, Luke Mueller, and the Medford

School Writing Group—Caroline Gelmi, Mareike Stanitzke, Jackie O’Dell,

Laurel Hankins, Seth Studer, Nicole Flynn, and Nino Testa—all contributed to this project and the joy I found in it.

My family also made this work possible in countless ways. Thank you, Katie Jean, Mary Jean and Keith, Dan and Marg, Ginger, Julie and

Rich, Aaron, Tristan, Tom and Helen, Justine and Matt, Starr and Zach,

Catherine, Sangini, Froilan, Elizabeth and Rory, Josh, Nora, Sara, and, of course, my three dearest ones, who have filled my life with wonder and delight: Eames, Lucinda, and Eleanore. Eleanore, this is for you. We did this together.

vi Table of Contents

Introduction: Untimeliness at Mid-Century: The Distressed Tradition of

Printing and Reading American Verse

1-40

Chapter 1: Phillis Wheatley’s Antebellum Itineraries and the After-Lives of

Occasional Verse

41-129

Chapter 2: Colonial Minstrels, American Poets: Rufus Wilmot Griswold,

Edgar Allan Poe, and the Distressed Tradition of American Verse

130-176

Chapter 3: Whitman, the Saturday Press, and the Distressed Print History

of the Whitman Poem

177-259

Bibliography

260-266

vii Untimely Verse: Distressed Publishing and Exemplary

Circulation in Antebellum America

Introduction: Untimeliness at Mid-Century: The Distressed Tradition of

Printing and Reading American Verse

I. Amidst the American Renaissance: Augustine Duganne’s Poetical Works

In 1855 Philadelphia, a book of roughly contemporary verse was published with a curiously “antique” design. The book, as an appreciative

North American Review essay described it, had achieved an “antique style of singular beauty”: “even the ink has the intense and burnished jetty hue of the best English books a century old, while the paper of the entire work bears a slightly yellow tint, as of decorous age. As a mere specimen of art, the edition by its elegance attests [to] the taste and liberality of the publishers, while its costliness bears witness to their practiced sense of the intrinsic worth of its contents.”1 As I argue at greater length throughout

Untimely Verse, the attention to and celebration of the design of this book,

The Poetical Works of Augustine Duganne, mark a crucial turn in the history of valorizing American poetry. The anonymous review reveals a

1 See Anonymous, “[Review] Article IX: The Poets and Poetry of America (1855) and The Poetical Works of Augustine Duganne (1855),” North American Review, January 1856, 236-48. 1 readership deeply invested in an idealization of the American literary past, and yet, decidedly unfazed by a superficial and commercial relation to U.S. literature’s actual past. But why would this reading and printing culture— in the midst of the American Renaissance, the very moment that twentieth-century critics would later consider the first great flourishing of literary development—insist that their idealized version of American poetry lay in the past?

In designing and printing this book, Duganne, his publishers, and printers conspired not to dupe readers into thinking that they held an authentic, eighteenth-century book in their hands, but instead to produce the frisson of a pointed literary anachronism, to establish an untimely relation between those contemporary readers and the book, its verse, and author. How exactly Duganne and his contemporaries came to think of this curiously anachronistic mix of material, authorial, and readerly effects as simultaneously commercial, literary, and historical values is the larger story that I recover in Untimely Verse. Indeed, the mid-century printing of

Duganne’s book makes visible—in provocatively material and immaterial ways—the peculiarly mid-nineteenth-century understanding of American literary history as an always-already malleable and commercial abstraction, an antique that could be ready-made and, as was especially the case with Duganne’s Poetical Works, project the weight, distinction, and value of history from the tinted color of its paper and the “burnished jetty hue” of its ink.

When we look closer at the page images of Duganne’s book (Figures 2 1-3, reproduced below), we see some of the ornamental print elements highlighted by the anonymous reviewer, but we also see in the front- matter of this book Duganne’s explicit engagement with what Meredith

Martin has termed the “ballad-theory of civilization.”2

2 Meredith Martin, “‘Imperfectly Civilized’: Ballads, Nations, and Histories of Form,” ELH 82.2 (Summer 2015): 346. 3

Figure 1: Title Page to The Poetical Works of Augustine Duganne (1855)

The inset verse on Duganne’s title page comes from the second stanza of his poem “The Poet and the People,” which reads in ballad meter:

Songs are a nation’s pulses, which discover

If the great body be as nature will’d;

Songs are the spasms of soul,

4 Telling us when men suffer:

Dead is the nation’s heart whose songs are still’d.

Duganne’s first stanza of this poem invokes the precedent of classical

Greece in his version of the “ballad-theory of civilization”; in particular, he references Plato’s thinking that poetry could shape a culture, as well as its laws:

Spoke well the Grecian, when he said that poems

Were the high laws that sway’d a nation’s mind—

Voices that live on echoes—

Brief and prophetic proems,

Opening the great heart-book of human kind!

Within the “ballad-theory of civilization,” epitomized and popularized in

Martin’s account by Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome

(written in India and published in London, 1842), ballads were—“crucially and ideally” in Martin’s phrasing—“comparable across national boundaries and borders. Ballads were at once imagined to be the authentic record of a nation’s earliest poets as well as evidence of early songs that appeared at the beginning of every culture. Now collections of fragments, authentic ballads had to be in some way corrupted or faded so that their re-creation could accommodate the nostalgic projection onto the past of a purer form of connected society, via poetry….”3 Ballad discourse—and historiography as a mode of ballad-thinking and ballad-reading—emerged in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, but its influence, as

3 Ibid., 348. 5 Martin and Michael Cohen have recently shown, spread across nineteenth- century Britain and America.4 Duganne’s “The Poet and the People” as well as the printed effects of his Poetical Works are clear manifestations of ballad discourse’s influence on mid-century imaginings of the historicity of

American verse. That historicity was also, clearly, an aestheticized and commercialized production. The printed surface of Duganne’s Poetical

Works projected itself both forward and backward in time: displaying the antiqued image of American mid-century verse dressed in British eighteenth-century refinement, the book also gestured toward a future moment of literary distinction and historical valorization for Duganne, his poetry, and his contemporary readers.

4 Michael Cohen’s work on balladization demonstrates that nineteenth- century reading practices assumed particular characteristics about the historically representative nature of poems. As Cohen writes, “Ballad reading made certain assumptions about the objects it encountered: among them, that the poems indexed particular times, places, and cultures; that they both narrated and constituted popular social history; and that they created in readers a sense of identification with the collective spirit embodied in the poem.” Martin aligns Cohen’s development of balladization with Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins’ related arguments about the process of lyricization. As Martin writes, “Both processes— balladization and lyricization—highlight the heterogeneity of poetic forms and the mutable, unstable genres that reading practices consolidate.” Susan Manning makes a similar argument about the homogenizing project of “English” balladry in the eighteenth century: “Eliding under the designation ‘English’ the heterogeneous provenance of his collection (many contributions arrived from Scottish correspondents), Percy [and his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)] contributed to the synthesis of a ‘national history’ from the literary remains of regional enmities.” See Michael Cohen, “Whittier, Ballad Reading, and the Culture of Nineteenth- Century Poetry,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 64 (2008): 5; Martin, Meredith Martin, “‘Imperfectly Civilized,’” 351; and Susan Manning, “Antiquarianism, Balladry and the Rehabilitation of Romance,” in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 53. 6 The reviewer’s statement, quoted above, that the printing of

Duganne’s Works “attests [to] the taste and liberality of the publishers, while its costliness bears witness to their practiced sense of the intrinsic worth of its contents” aptly registers the conflation of literary and commercial values that Untimely Verse finds to be paradigmatic of

American literary and print cultures at midcentury. Indeed, if we follow the reviewer’s phrasing and grant that literary, historical, and aesthetic values, or “intrinsic worth,” were, in this moment, difficult to distinguish from economic and material understandings of “costliness,” value, and

“worth,” then we might also notice the curious temporal tic that attended mid-century observations of the future-historical value of American literature and poetry. Viewed in this way, the potentially circular aspects of the reviewer’s reasoning—that the literary, historical, and aesthetic values of “elegance,” “taste,” and “liberality” are at once the product of the publishers’ material investments and the confirmation that those investments merely replicated or stood as a temporary collateral for what was already intrinsically evident and valuable within Duganne’s volume— likewise inscribe the complicated temporal perspective at the heart of perceiving the value of these printed works as they shifted across material and aesthetic registers in this moment. To put a finer point on this, we might say that the popular belief in mid-century publishing and criticism was that one had to spend capital to transcend capital.

The front-matter of Duganne’s Poetical Works foregrounds another reproduction of eighteenth-century literary culture (See Figures 2 and 3 7 below). His “A Word, From a Friend, To the Author” (pp. iii-vii) reproduces a personal letter from James Lesley, Jr., which asks in over- wrought, typeset prose for “a full Collection of [Duganne’s] scattered

Songs which, marked by real Saxon Breadth and Sturdiness, prove that there lives at least one native Bard, who quaffs ‘the Well of English undefiled’”; Duganne provides a similarly floral reply to Lesley in his “A

Word From the Author, To His Friend” (pp. viii-x). Lesley helped secure the London publication of Duganne’s Poetical Works, and thus this public display of their polite letters aims to show the embedded economy of friendship—favors paid, received, and returned in kind—that helped bring

Duganne’s book to print. Duganne’s printed letters, stage-dressed in the anachronistic typesetting of the eighteenth century, were read by one

London reviewer as taking this “affectation” too far, however.5 Leon

Jackson has shown that embedded literary economies persisted through the antebellum period, but the simultaneous printing of The Poetical

Works of Augustine Duganne in Philadelphia and London, when most

London reviewers remarked in their reviews of Duganne’s Poetical Works that they have never heard of Duganne, marks this volume as being simultaneously representative of the increasingly disembedded,

5 “Belles Lettres,” [a review essay on contemporary poetry, including Robert Browning’s Men and Women (1855), Duganne’s Poetical Works, and Longfellow’s Hiawatha (1855)] The Westminster Review (London), 1 January 1856, 296. The reviewer further characterizes the commercial aspects of Duganne’s Poetical Works as “a sort of poetical flowered calico of which we feel sure that manufacturer can produce any quantity to order” (296). 8 commercial markets of transatlantic book production.6

Figure 2: “A Word, From a Friend, To the Author,” iii.

6 Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 9

Figure 3: “A Word From the Author to His Friend,” viii.

In another context, Susan Stewart has explored what she calls

“distressed genres” of writing, which take shape as an “imitation of older [, folkloric] forms,” including the eighteenth-century revival of the epic,

10 fable, proverb, fairy tale, ballad and parody forms.7 Untimely Verse extends Stewart’s notion of distressed genres to the distressed printing and reading contexts that constituted the historical understanding of

American poetry at midcentury. Discussing Stewart’s notion of distressed genres in her own work on British balladeering and minstrelsy, Maureen

McLane notes that these “literary modes [were] vexed and in some cases created by the emergent problematic of authenticity, originality, and modernity in [the] era of industrial print capital”; furthermore, these modes were “distressed by their historiographic self-consciousness, to which they owed their complex status as revived.”8 The central chapter of

Untimely Verse reconsiders the significance of Rufus Griswold’s 1842 anthology, The Poets and Poetry of America in light of this anthology’s

“historiographic self-consciousness” that, in turn, enabled a distressed reading of American verse.

Griswold produced an historical introduction for his volume of contemporary verse that was obviously historiographic in its intent, but the popularity of Griswold’s anthology also made it the anthology of record for the contemporary poems and poets collected therein. The notion that

American verse in 1842 merited an historical introduction was preposterous to some. A well-circulated British review of American poetry suggested that Griswold’s project of historical recovery would be better

7 Susan Stewart, “Notes on Distressed Genres,” in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 67-68. 8 Maureen N. McLane, “The Figure Minstrelsy Makes: Poetry and Historicity,” Critical Inquiry 29.3 (Spring 2003), 431-32 and 432, note 5. 11 construed as an historical production. As this reviewer writes of Griswold’s anthology: “The plan is something similar to the collections of English poetry by [Robert] Southey, [Thomas] Campbell, and others. All the poetasters who could be scrambled together are crammed into the volume, which is very large, double-columned, and contains nearly five hundred pages. There is an ‘historical introduction,’ (!) and a biographical notice prefixed to each name, and the specimens are, of course, the best that could be selected.”9 Poe famously attacked Griswold and his anthology on the grounds that Griswold’s representation of the contemporary field of

American poetry was inauthentic and that Griswold was unoriginal in his criticism. Poe was most concerned with the historiographic implications of the contemporary field of American poetry, rather than the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century verse Griswold recovered in his historical introduction. Nevertheless, in Poe’s criticism we see that both Griswold’s

“historical” and contemporary material were vexed or “distressed” by the

“historiographic self-consciousness” constituted by the anthology form itself, and by, in Poe’s opinion, Griswold’s undue success in the popular circulation of his book.

As I hope the vignette of Duganne’s Poetical Works and its relation to distressed productions of American verse has begun to suggest,

9 “Poets and Poetry of America,” Foreign Quarterly Review (London) reprinted over two installments in The New World: A Weekly Family Journal of Popular Literature, Science, Art and News, 27 January, 1844, pp. 97-101, and 3 February 1844, pp. 129-134. Poe believed that the opinions he shared with Charles Dickens about contemporary American poetry, while Dickens was touring the U.S. in 1842, were re-presented in this anonymously printed review. 12 Untimely Verse is interested in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century encounters with historical distance as mediated through poems in various printed formats. Untimely Verse is equally interested in the manufacture of historical distance through poems printed and read in this period. In the chapters that follow, Phillis Wheatley, William J. Wilson, Rufus Wilmot

Griswold, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman serve as primary figures, but in addition to tracing the temporal inflections of their printed, authorial personas, Untimely Verse aims to recover how their work circulated, both in terms of the materiality of their texts and in relation to emergent ideas about the history and value of American poetry within antebellum periodical and book markets. My first chapter argues that the extended, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century circulation of Phillis

Wheatley’s occasional verse amplified the untimeliness of Wheatley’s initial appearances in print as a young, black and enslaved female writing from Boston in the 1760s and 70s. From John Wheatley’s testament in

1773 to the startling rapidity with which Wheatley mastered the English language in “sixteen Months Time” at the age of eight or nine, to his further relation of her precocious achievements in neoclassical verse and transatlantic print practices, to Wheatley’s wider recognition within transatlantic abolitionist print networks as an anticipatory figure for black

“potential,” Wheatley’s significance was consistently described in temporal terms.10 At once a figure for the timely and necessary end to slavery as well

10 John Wheatley’s 14 November, 1772, letter to Wheatley’s London publisher is characteristic of this trend of measuring Wheatley’s 13 as the untimely apparition of a future tradition of black writing yet to be realized in antebellum America, Wheatley’s circulation history neatly intersects with current critical interests in the category of the untimely.

This includes critical and historical attention to notions of earliness, belatedness, obsolescence, and anachronism, especially as they relate to the ephemeral and periodical media, genres, and formats that underscored for antebellum readers the complex effects of reading verse in and across time.11 Indeed, as I argue in this first chapter, the pointed anachronism of

achievements in temporal terms; the letter was printed as front-matter in Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (A. Bell: London, 1773) and doubled as a founding document of Wheatley’s scant biographical data throughout the nineteenth century: “[B]etween Seven and Eight Years of Age[,] [w]ithout any Assistance from School Education, and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time from her Arrival [in the Year 1761], attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her. As to her Writing, her own Curiosity led her to it; and this she learnt in so short a Time, that in the Year 1765, she wrote a Letter to the Rev. Mr. Occom, the Indian Minister, while in England.” See the facsimile copy of this edition in The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 11 Within queer temporality studies, the category of the untimely collects a range of experiences and phenomena either left behind, disavowed, or made invisible by modern classifications of sexuality and being. My interest in untimeliness is indebted to this work, but my project attempts to demonstrate that the experience and perception of the untimely was a broader cultural phenomenon in the antebellum period and was, in fact, a crucial aspect of how the historicity of American poetry came to be circulated, read, and understood at mid-century. For more on queer theorizations of temporality in the nineteenth century, see Peter Coviello’s Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), and Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007). For a broader survey of queer theorizations of time, see E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen’s edited 14 reading Wheatley’s revolution-era occasional verse across numerous

collection of essays, Queer Times, Queer Becomings (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011); their introduction helpfully aligns Nietzche’s late-nineteenth-century exhortations of untimeliness as a mode of living anti-historically in Untimely Meditations (1873-76) with twenty- first-century understandings of queer becoming that stand opposed to the “reproductive futurism” of heteronormative time (6, quoting a term developed by Lee Edelman in No Future). Of course, the temporal turn in recent criticism extends beyond the field of queer studies; earlier, postcolonial critiques of the idea of a national, homogenous time have been foundational to the rethinking of temporality and periodization within American and Nineteenth-Century studies. Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) and Lloyd Pratt’s Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) are representative of this trend. For another wide-reaching survey of the field, see Dana Luciano and Ivy Wilson’s co-edited collection of essays, Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2014). Finally, and closer still to the course charted by Untimely Verse, the field of historical poetics has shown that the historically contingent practices of reading, writing, publishing, and circulating poetry demand a more thorough attention to the intersection of temporality and form, especially given, as Virginia Jackson has argued, the diverse flora of genres and reading practices that shaped nineteenth- century poetry and poetics, but that were later dismissed, forgotten, or obviated by the conventions of reading, writing, publishing, and teaching poetry and poetics in the long-twentieth century. For more on Jackson’s theory of the lyricization of poetry, see Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Before Modernism: The Invention of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Jackson and Yopie Prins have worked together on the lyricization of poetry thesis, and their co-edited volume, The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) is the most recent product of that collaboration. For more on historical poetics and representative work in this field, see MLQ’s special issue, “Historical Poetics” (Volume 77.1, 2016), edited by V. Joshua Adams, Joel Calahan, and Michael Hansen; ESQ’s special issue on Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Volume 54, 2008), edited by Augusta Rohrbach; the collection of essays edited by Meredith McGill, The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Meredith Martin’s The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Michael Cohen’s The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 15 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print contexts not only laid the groundwork for one of the most innovative recoveries of that early black print archive in William J. Wilson’s seven-part magazine serial from 1859, the “Afric-American Picture Gallery” (Anglo-African Magazine), but it also suggests a correspondence and affinity with the anachronistic readings that underpinned Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s construction of the

(Anglo-)American verse tradition in his long-running, popular anthology,

The Poets and Poetry of America (1842-55).

As an aspiring antiquarian, editor, and anthologist, we might say that Griswold distressed the tradition of American verse in 1842, reading its late-colonial beginnings—some sixty years earlier—as “The Minstrelsy of the Revolution,” and in so doing, turned the then-still nascent and contested idea of American poetry into a popularly circulated and demonstrably historical category of verse.12 In fact, the printing of

Duganne’s Poetical Works had everything to do with Griswold’s work in popularizing distressed reading and publishing practices, and as such, this book reflects the moment when Griswold’s ideas about the untimely historicity of American verse had coalesced to such a degree that Duganne and his Philadelphia publishers, Parry and McMillan, thought to capitalize upon them with the design of their book.13

12 See Griswold, “Editor’s Table: The Minstrelsy of the Revolution,” in Graham’s Illustrated Magazine of Literature, Romance, Art, and Fashion 21.4 (October 1842): 221-28 and the historical introduction to The Poets and Poetry of America (Philadelphia, 1842). 13 In keeping with this argument about reading Griswold’s legacy in the distressed production of Duganne’s Works, the North American Review 16 Nevertheless, because of his contentious and sometimes nefarious relationship with Edgar Allan Poe, not to mention his pecuniary interests in some of the more dubious aspects of 1840s publishing and criticism,

Griswold’s contribution to the historical development of American verse has been overlooked, if not also categorically dismissed, by literary historiography. To simplify, however slightly, this historiographical trend, we might say that Poe has been valorized for his untimeliness, for his outspoken resistance to and excoriation of the literary culture of his day, while Griswold, as Poe’s twinned and abject other, has been read as a figure for the all-too-timely, opportunistic, and short-lived aspects of

American print culture in the 1840s. Thus, in addition to recovering

Griswold’s contribution to the emergent category of American verse and the reading of its historicity at mid-century, my second chapter seeks to complicate the historical determinism of the Poe/Griswold opposition. By returning to the moments when Poe attempted to wrest Griswold’s anthology project away from him through a series of lectures and periodical essays developed in and around Philadelphia, circa 1843-45, we see that what might be mistaken for another bout of personal enmity is actually more revealing. The Poe/Griswold conflict shows how temporalized values saturated the perception, circulation, and understanding of literary value and distinction at midcentury, and further that material artifacts of those temporalized values continue to shape our

cited above reviews Duganne’s Poetical Works alongside the sixteenth edition of Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America (1855). 17 understanding of the historical legacies of Poe and Griswold, as well as the verse of their contemporaries.

Attending to the temporalized values, tropes, and perspectives afforded by the media, formats, and genres of commercially-driven anthologies and commercially-interested literary weeklies places Walt

Whitman’s once-mystified “foreground” in a new light.14 In my third and final chapter, I align the longer history of distressed readings of American verse with Whitman’s print persona as an untimely, primitive poet sounding his “barbaric yawp.” Viewing Whitman’s untimely postures alongside and through his highly-visible year of circulation as a cause célèbre within the pages of the struggling Bohemian weekly, The New-

York Saturday Press (1859-60) allows us to see how American understandings of literary value and distinction were further shaped by two other apparitions of untimeliness: the overnight print sensation and the puffing campaigns that sought to replicate those sensational circulation numbers through the proliferation of reviews, if not actual sales. Within this periodical and publishing context, it becomes increasingly clear that the abstractions and fictions of advertising and

14 Ralph Waldo Emerson is being magnanimous, perhaps, in his mystification of the “somewhere” of Whitman’s gestation as a poet, but his now famous line--“I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start”--also records the nested temporalities of the present epitomized in distressed readings of American verse at mid-century. Emerson reads Whitman as presently just beginning his career, but he also projects that career both forward and back in time to valorize the start he has read in the first edition of Leaves of Grass. See Emerson, “Letter to Walt Whitman,” 21 July 1855. 18 print capitalism had saturated even the earliest materialist accounts of

American poetry; going further, we might say that for Whitman and his contemporaries it was becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a history for American poetry and literature that was distinct from its publicity.15

II. With British Antecedents: Theoretical and Historical Reflections of the

Distressed Protocols of Publishing and Reading American Verse

To an important degree, The Poetical Works of Augustine

Duganne—as well as the larger histories of poetry, authorship, and circulation charted by Untimely Verse—recalled the earlier eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices of imitating and forging “ancient,”

“English” ballads for popular and antiquarian consumption, what Sir

Walter Scott called in 1829 “the fair trade of manufacturing modern antiques.”16 But with Duganne and the American case there was an important difference. While the English manufacture of “modern antiques” invoked a feudal past several centuries removed, the Anglo-

American tradition had no feudal or putatively folk history to recover.

15 Such a view has an obvious corollary in our own day when, thanks to various media feeds like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and SnapChat, our sense of history unfolding is wrapped up in similar acts of publicity and self-promotion. 16 Walter Scott, “Essay on Imitations of Ancient Ballad,” prefaced to the 1830 edition of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, (13, quoted in Manning, “Antiquarianism,” 57). Susan Manning demonstrates that “English” ballad recovery was an ongoing concern throughout the nineteenth century, and that it had everything to do with nationalizing an “English” tradition out of its regional beginnings and differences—be they Scottish, Irish, or Welsh ballads. See Manning, “Antiquarianism, Balladry and the Rehabilitation of Romance,” in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 45-70. 19 Rather, because Anglo-American colonization and history coincided so neatly with the arrival of the printing press on its shores and because the founding of the United States was still less than a century old, the history of American poetry at midcentury could only hope to be understood as a modern, printed tradition. And yet, as Duganne’s 1855 volume declared so boldly, this modern tradition was not without its own aesthetic of the antique. Indeed, we might say, following Susan Stewart’s work in tracing the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century rise of “new antiques” in British literature, that by coalescing as late as the 1840s, the tradition of

American poetry was more transparently and self-consciously “distressed” than its earlier British counterparts.17 For unlike, say, the distressed ballads that Thomas Percy collected, amended, and published as Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and that he attributed to an authentic feudal and minstrel culture that was, in truth, largely invented to suit the historical contingencies and tastes of his age, the distressing of the

American tradition of verse proceeded without the pretense of an authentic connection to an ancient or pre-historical past. Thus the distressing of the American tradition of verse clarified what the authenticity debates of British antiquarians and ballad collectors had obscured: that distressed genres were fundamentally about the

17 Stewart defines these “new antiques” or “distressed genres” of writing as the literary “imitation of older [, folkloric] forms” and includes the eighteenth-century revival of the epic, fable, proverb, fairy tale, ballad, and parody forms in her ground-breaking study (67-68). See especially Susan Stewart, “Notes on Distressed Genres,” Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 66-101. 20 “valorization of temporality” and tradition, whatever the scale of that temporality, and not necessarily tied to the recovery of ostensibly oral, folk, or prehistorical verse artifacts.18

In Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “valorized temporal category,”

Stewart finds a model for thinking about the “evaluative relations between time and genre” that undergirded both the popularity and the esteem that distressed genres held throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

Britain.19 In an instructive passage from his essay “The Epic and the

Novel,” Bakhtin writes:

The absolute past is a specifically evaluating (hierarchical) category.

In the epic world view, “beginning,” “first,” “founder,” “ancestor,”

“that which occurred earlier,” and so forth are not merely temporal

categories but valorized temporal categories, and valorized to an

extreme degree. This is as true for relationships among people as

for relations among all the other items and phenomena of the epic

world. In the past, everything is good: all the really good things (i.e.

18 Ibid., 89. As a theoretical possibility, Stewart anticipates what I am arguing about the mid-century distressing of American poetry when she writes that “the nostalgia of the distressed genre is not a nostalgia for artifacts for their own sake; rather, it is a nostalgia for context, for the heroic past, for moral order, for childhood and the collective experiences of pre-industrial life. Thus we can understand why it makes little difference whether the artifact itself is real or a forgery: distressed genres are characterized by a counterfeit materiality and an authentic nostalgia. In fact, such genres point to the immateriality of all nostalgic objects. [...D]istressed genres are close to kitch objects, artifacts of exaggerated surface and collective experience” (91-92). Of course, detailing and explaining how exactly the American tradition of poetry was distressed is a larger matter, and one that unfolds across the pages of Untimely Verse. 19 Ibid., 73. 21 the “first” things) occur only in the past. The epic absolute past is

the single source and beginning of everything good for all later

times as well.20

Moreover, as Stewart goes on to argue, the “valorized temporal category is not a category or kind that is abandoned [when, for instance, the epic is abandoned as a dominant cultural form]; rather it is a kind that is summoned from the world of the dead for particular purposes and that assumes a particular status by the very fact of its anachronism.”21

Untimely Verse makes the case that the “valorized temporal category” was likewise revived and extended to distress the very idea of American poetry, a broad category of verse forms that had only begun to be popularly recognized as a legitimate category of collection in the 1840s and that only purported to have begun some sixty years earlier with the Revolutionary

War and the country’s republican founding.

Further extending the “valorized temporal category” from the eighteenth-century instances of the distressed epic, fable, proverb, fairy tale, and ballad that Stewart recounts (and that claimed to originate with, if not also to preserve, ancient, oral, and/or folk cultures several centuries or millennia removed), and transposing it to the relatively contemporary phenomenon of American verse was, on its face, a more outrageous step than that previously taken by British readers, writers, editors, and

20 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981): 15, qtd. in Stewart, “Notes,” 73. 21 Stewart, “Notes,” 73-74. 22 publishers in manufacturing and popularizing their “modern antiques.”

After all, when Rufus Wilmot Griswold consolidated and valorized the U.S. national verse tradition along the very lines forged by British antiquarians and anthologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he proposed an equivalence of effect in that distressing, without claiming a corresponding equivalence of antiquity for its historical artifacts. The decoupling of the “valorized temporal category” from a corresponding claim to the antique, the putatively folk, or the ancient past was unprecedented, but it was also, as I have been arguing, a practical and logical necessity given the recent emergence of the U.S. as a nation state and its corresponding claim to a past independent from Britain.22

Moreover, this decoupling upset the idea that the values and aesthetics associated with antique verse forms and artifacts necessarily originated in the distant past, or what Bakhtin designates the “absolute past.” Rather, this way of thinking about distressed forms and traditions recognized the

“valorized temporal category” for what it was: a valorizing process, and not a material measure of either value or age. As such, that valorizing process did not depend upon a set number of years that a tradition must retrospectively claim as its own. Thus the radical compression of the time

22 Kariann Akemi Yokota’s Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) makes the provocative argument that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans preferred British material goods long after declaring their political independence. Thus the process of becoming American and un-becoming British was, in fact, a complicated and drawn- out affair and should not be mistaken for an immediate and absolute separation. 23 required for the American tradition of verse to be read as an antique demonstrated just how malleable and fungible the “valorized temporal category” could be.

Viewed another way, the American version of a distressed poetic tradition reflects an ambition more modest than outrageous or radical.

The newly antiqued American verse tradition did not, for instance, claim what would have been an obviously false origin in antiquity; nor did it pretend to hold a continuity with reading and verse cultures of the far- distant past; and likewise, it dispensed with the epic’s world view that the

“absolute past is the single source and beginning of everything good for all later times.” Instead, with its historical remove of a mere sixty-odd years, the distressed and valorized beginning of American poetry honed rather precisely to the commonly adopted distance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historiography, a distance epitomized in the alternate title of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), which novelized the final uprising of the Jacobin rebellion of 1745. Indeed, as

Mark Salber Phillips has argued, the sixty-year interval provided Scott and other writers with what they believed to be a “privileged distance” for history, because sixty years comprised “two generations” and as such

“marked the natural limit of living memory”; thus the sixty-year interval was, in Phillips’ words, “both recent enough to retain its hold on living memory and distant enough to be past all reclaiming.”23

23 Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013): 82, 63, and 252, note 6. Phillips also reads David 24 The distressing of the modern and printed tradition of American poetry also provided a different kind of compensation than that proffered by the distressed, British forms of the eighteenth century. As Stewart has argued, the beginning of the eighteenth century marked the emergence of large cultural and historical shifts that dramatically “transform[ed] the literary marketplace—the decline of patronage, the rise of booksellers, the advent of mass literary production and copyright, the development of the concept of ‘intellectual property.’”24 Combined with the “real contingencies of enclosure, industrialization, and the end of the old order of village culture,” these distressed genres attempted to compensate distant and unconnected readers with the “encapsulated sense of ‘community’ implied in the reproduction of folkloric forms.”25 Rapid technological and material developments were likewise on the rise and transforming the print marketplaces of mid-century America. As numerous print and literary historians have demonstrated, the dramatic expansion of U.S. print markets and products throughout the 1830s and 40s happened because of larger and faster printing presses, declining material costs, more efficient labor and distribution networks, as well as cheaper and faster means of transporting printed goods across wider swaths of the country thanks to

Hume’s celebrated History of England (1754-61) as being defined by its sixty-year distance from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the events of which determined, in both political and historiographical terms, what Hume took to be his central task—righting the excesses and blind spots of the Whig historians before him; the events of that revolution also provided Hume with an epoch-making endpoint for the final volume of his History (62-67). 24 Stewart, Crimes, 4. 25 Ibid., 70, 69. 25 the significant growth of railroad and shipping lines in these years.26

Recent scholarship in these fields has significantly revised the progressive, and at times, whiggish historical notion that technological and material developments changed the business of letters overnight, everywhere at once, and increasingly for the better. Nevertheless, it is also accurate to say that a national or mass reading public was beginning to be a real possibility in the 1840s, and that, as Trish Loughran has argued in The

Republic in Print (2008), the national political crises of the 1850s were a direct result of the initial consolidations of that mass public over the issue of slavery. In Loughran’s account, the mass-mailing campaigns of northern abolitionists, combined with the on-the-ground efforts of regionally distributed abolitionists, forced Americans to realize just how far apart, ideologically speaking, local reading publics were from one another. According to Loughran’s analysis, the possibility and assumption of consensus in matters of public opinion were some of the first casualties

26 Lara Langer Cohen helpfully summarizes the material, technological, and commercial developments of the 1810s-50s in her introduction to The Fabrication of American Literature, noting that by the 1850s, “[w]hat had been local reading and writing communities thus became incorporated into a national literary market largely dominated by northeastern metropolises, although a plurality of printed cultures persisted nonetheless” (10). See Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959). 26 of a truly national circulation of printed discourse.27 Given this tumultuous and often fractious context for reading, the distressed tradition of

American verse provided a degree of compensation in its nostalgia for the perceived decorum and civility of eighteenth-century public discourse and printed forms. What is more, this nostalgia for the eighteenth-century ideals of printed discourse also helped organize and define nothing less than what Robert Fanuzzi has termed “the strategic anachronism(s)” of abolitionist discourse and culture throughout the 1830s, 40s, and 50s.28

Beyond the backward-looking compensations of nostalgia noted above, the distressed tradition of American verse was also able to reflect and respond to the contingencies and realities of the print explosion of the

1840s. Indeed, much like Svetlana Boym has argued about nostalgia as a

“historical emotion,” the distressed tradition of American verse was as much “prospective” in its ambition toward a future of literary distinction as it was retrospective in its stylings of that distinction.29 By forgoing the claim to a feudal past, the American distressing of its tradition effectively looked forward to a future realization of distinction for American verse that it rendered through the material stylings of distressed verse and print

27 See Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 28 Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 29 Boym writes that “[n]ostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective. Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future.” See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvi. 27 objects.

The lasting consequence of the distressing of American verse was not so much an equivalence achieved vis a vis the British tradition, but instead the further realization that literary value and distinction were abstract categories of value. The distressed tradition of American verse addressed a set of questions and expectations that arose in the midst of the

American print explosion and in light of American literature emerging as a recognized category of material goods. Given that by 1860, New York City was the nation’s largest industrial center and publishing its leading industry, it is not surprising to find that the understandings of literary value were intermixed with perceptions of commercial value in the minds of mid-century print workers of all talents and occupations.30 However unlikely it would be for most writers and print-workers to turn their writing into actual wealth, the explosion of commercial printing in New

York City and other urban centers encouraged wild fantasies about print and its market potential that became oddly normative in the late- antebellum period. We might say, then, that the dramatic foreshortening of the time against which the American tradition was distressed was a temporal measure that aligned quite well with the idea of the overnight print sensation. The archetype of the overnight print sensation was, of course, Lord Byron waking, in his own words, “to find myself famous,” with the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

30 See David Dowling, Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Marketplace (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 18. 28 in March of 1812. As Mary O’Connell describes in Byron and John

Murray: A Poet and His Publisher (2015), Byron’s instantaneous success with Childe Harold was, in fact, overstated, particularly because such a view excised the substantial strategy and long-running efforts of his publisher Murray in promoting, packaging, and selling the book alongside

Byron’s celebrity. Nevertheless, the myth of the overnight print sensation was as infectious an idea as Byron’s Childe Harold construct, and just as likely, it turns out, to be mistaken for the real thing.31 Sandra Tomc has argued that it was Byron, rather than Wordsworth, who most captivated the poetic imaginations of antebellum American readers and writers, but we might also look to an 1844 British review of Griswold’s 1842 anthology,

The Poets and Poetry of America, for a satirical transposition of Byron’s overnight fame to his American acolytes.32 As this reviewer has it, “By dint of hunting up all manner of periodicals and newspapers, and seizing upon every name that could be found attached to a scrap of verse in the obscurest holes and corners, Mr. Griswold has mustered upward of a

31 According to O’Connell, Murray’s advertising and publishing strategies paved the way for the appearance of Byron’s instantaneous success. O’Connell notes that Murray promoted and advertised the book before it was published or reviewed, timed its release to follow quickly on the heels of Byron’s startling House of Lords speech in favor of the Luddites dismantling milling frames, packaged the first edition in an expensive quarto format that only an elite reading audience could afford, and then sold the book in a less expensive octavo edition, once the first edition of 500 copies had sold out. See, Mary O’Connell, Byron and John Murray: A Poet and His Publisher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 84-92. 32 See Sandra Tomc, Industry and the Creative Mind: The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790-1860 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 3. Tomc suggests that Byron “stood as a kind of patron saint of early nineteenth-century American poetry” (3). 29 hundred ‘poets.’ The great bulk of these we have no doubt were never heard of before by the multifarious public of the Union, and many of them must have been thrown into hysterics on awakening in their beds and finding themselves suddenly famous.”33

In addition to representing how an immediate and massive popular circulation could take the place of the literary distinction and value that had once accrued slowly over the course of ten- to twenty- to one- hundred-years’ time, the distressed tradition of American poetry also reflected the abstractions and accruals of surplus economic value that the culture of American reprinting had made increasingly evident. As

Meredith McGill has argued in American Literature and the Culture of

Reprinting, 1834-1853, pirated British literature flooded and sustained

American book markets in these years, and because these books were cheaply reprinted in the U.S. without copyright permissions or royalties paid to British authors or publishers, the profits from these sales should be credited with the construction and maintenance of the first truly mass market for books in antebellum America.34 We might also see in this reprint culture a variation on Marx’s principle of the primitive

33 This anonymous review is discussed at greater length in my second chapter. Poe claimed to have supplied Charles Dickens with many of the thoughts, examples, and arguments featured in this essay; Poe asserted that Dickens must have written it, though other sources were certain that Dickens’ friend, [Supply Name], was, in fact, the author. See, “Poets and Poetry of America,” Foreign Quarterly Review (London) reprinted over two installments in Park Benjamin’s The New World: A Weekly Family Journal of Popular Literature, Science, Art and News (New York), 27 January, 1844, pp. 97-101, and 3 February 1844, pp. 129-134. 34 Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-53 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 30 accumulation of capital, whereby American printers and booksellers expropriated the private property of British authors and publishers through the cheap, pirated, reprint trade and within this un-authorized context of circulation profited off of the evident surplus value of the originary labor of British writers and publishers. In effect, then, the culture of reprinting demonstrated that the abstraction of hard economic capital from literary or symbolic capital (created in this instance by distant, British others and circulated in de-authorized and dislocated contexts) was not only possible, but normative for two decades.

Paul K. Saint-Amour has written about eighteenth- and nineteenth- century aesthetic and economic theories of value as “coeval phenomena” that borrowed language from each other in defining their own terms and therefore stand as “twin discourses.”35 It is helpful to view antebellum ideas about literary and symbolic value in a similar light, since literary value was often conflated with or mistaken for hard economic capital, especially in the puffing controversies of the 1840s and 50s. Moreover, we might view this late-antebellum publishing context as a leading edge, or an untimely apparition perhaps, of what would eventuate as the late-

Victorian “neoclassical” or “marginalist” school of value theory in Britain, which argued that a commodity’s value inhered not so much in the “scene of production”—where Adam Smith’s earlier labor theory of value and

35 See Paul K. Saint-Amour, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 26 and 25. Saint-Amour aims to show “how changing ideas of value have been applied not only to material commodities such as diamonds and iron and water but also to ‘intangible’ ones such as imaginative literature” (25-26). 31 cost-of-production theory of value had once placed it—but rather “in the scene of exhibition, appreciation, and consumption.”36 The American market for British literature was a test bed for the abstraction of commercial value from the literary and symbolic value cemented by distant others, and the American obsession with the practice of puffing became a stage for theorizing how the representation of literary distinction and value through a series of co-authored and published puffs might just take the place of the real thing, netting substantial profits for writers and publishers, too.

III. Ever Emergent Again: Anglo-American Verse and African American

Writing

Maureen McLane’s Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of

British Romantic Poetry (2008) presents an 1855 essay, “Negro

Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern,” anonymously published in Putnam’s

Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art, as a missing link that helpfully conjoins eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British balladeering and minstrel theory with the American blackface minstrel shows and neo- or faux-plantation songs of the 1830s, 40s, and 50s.37 For

36 Ibid., 26. 37 See Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). McLane and other scholars have noted that “J. J. Trux” was one name assigned to this anonymous essay. Bruce Jackson’s edited collection, The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967) reprints this essay, attributing it to Y. S. Nathanson. See [anonymous], “Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern,” 32 McLane, this American essay extends the “elaborate procedures of scholarly authentication” developed by British antiquarians and ballad collectors to the popular plantation songs of the past twenty years; accordingly, the essay offers “stanzaic ‘specimens’ for critical comparison, proposes typologies for classifying ballads (‘Historical Plantation Ballad,’

‘descriptive songs,’ ‘comic ballad’), and appeals to those who are […]

‘patient and laborious students of negro minstrelsy’” along the very lines formalized by earlier British collections of printed ballads, including

William Motherwell’s Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern (1827), Thomas

Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), David Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, etc. (1776), Joseph Ritson’s

Select Collection of English Songs (1783), and Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3).38 What falls out of McLane’s reading of this essay, however, is the very real possibility that “Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern” was written and read as a racist farce. As my first chapter on

Phillis Wheatley details, the gradual abolition of slavery in New York and

Pennsylvania at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the yearly public celebrations of Emancipation Day that followed led to a flourishing of faux-“Bobalition” broadsides that mocked black civic life for being hopelessly and characteristically obsolete in both its styling and import. As one of the most derisive characterizations of the anachronism and untimeliness of “black” print, it is hard not to read the “Bobalition”

Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art, January 1855, 72-79. 38 Ibid., 118. 33 broadsides as a local, Northern architext for “Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern.” The racist and satirical aspects of this essay do not necessarily overturn McLane’s larger arguments about it, but these aspects do underscore the way in which, to recall one of McLane’s larger claims, if minstrelsy marked that “space where poetry is distressed and vexed by history,” then we cannot ignore that “history” in the antebellum American context was also always vexed by racialist and racist implications.39

“Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern” is an interesting record of one person’s reception and transmutation of British balladeering and minstrel theory to the American context. It also reflects the more immediate and local history of reading (Anglo-) American verse as a distressed tradition along the lines that Griswold inaugurated and popularized in 1842. Moreover, when read as a hoax or farce, “Negro

Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern” articulates the politics of posterity and the pejorative valuations of time that commonly dismissed both black and white literature as being ephemeral, provincial, and obsolete cultural productions. The introductory sentence of “Negro Minstrelsy” signals the dramatic shift in temporal scale that I outlined above in my reading of the similarly distressed tradition of (Anglo-) American verse: “It is now some

39 Ibid., 119. Whatever the critical or satirical stance assumed by author and readers in “Negro Minstrelsy,” McLane’s central point stands that “As the place where poetry and history cross, ‘Minstrelsy’ partakes of a specific late-eighteenth-century cultural and intellectual situation; yet the questions minstrelsy raises are […] transhistorical and transmedial. Minstrels migrate, mongrelize, mutate. Endlessly revived, transformed, yet always problematic, always distressed; this is minstrelsy, that is poetry fatally encountering its historical situation” (126). 34 eighteen or twenty years since an enterprising Yankee actuated, it is but charitable to suppose, by the purest love of musical art, by the enthusiasm of a discoverer, or by a proper and praiseworthy desire for posthumous fame, produced upon the boards of one of our metropolitan theatres, a musical sketch entitled ‘Jim Crow.’”40 Distressing the tradition of “Negro

Minstrelsy” across “some eighteen or twenty years” was, I would argue, a clear moment of bathos directed at Griswold’s similar distressing of the

(Anglo-) American verse tradition across a sixty-year span. Similarly, the

“golden age” of “ancient” “negro literature,” according to this essay, commenced with the “immediate and marked [success]” of “Jim Crow” in

1835 or ’37 and ended with “Ole Dan Tucker” in 1841, a span of four to six years, after which, as the essay reports, “African minstrelsy[’s …] decline and fall was rapid and saddening.”41 Interestingly, the period of that decline and fall, 1842-1855, overlaps exactly with the popular circulation of Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America, across its sixteen editions. If

“Negro Minstrelsy” demonstrates the shift in temporal scale required to read either Anglo-American or African-American verse as antique productions, then it also aligns that dramatically truncated time scale with an immediate and popular reception. According to “Negro Minstrelsy,” in the “golden age” of “ancient” “negro literature,” these songs “flew from mouth to mouth, and from hamlet to hamlet, with a rapidity which seemed miraculous”; their circulation through informal and local networks of

40 [anonymous], “Negro Minstrelsy,” 72. 41 Ibid., 74-75. 35 communication outpaced print or stage productions of the songs.42

While the print explosion dramatically increased the scale of literary production both in terms of the number of texts printed and the distribution of those texts, the proliferation of texts did little to combat the ephemeral nature of a literary culture that flourished in periodicals and other cheap print formats. The emergence of American poetry as a proto- tradition and “colored American literature” as a proto-tradition both record the ephemerality of their literary productions as a problem to overcome in consolidating and establishing a tradition of future distinction. John Keese’s “Preface” to his 1840 anthology The Poets of

America describes the problem well:

American Poetry has hitherto been little more than a happy

accident [….] It has been produced mostly by minds devoted to

sterner studies, and in brief intervals of leisure, snatched from more

engrossing toils. [….] The main part of our poetical literature,

therefore, has been occasional and fugitive. It has usually come

before the public eye in small detached portions, with slight

pretension to permanence in the form of its publication, and has

been rescued from speedy oblivion only by its own beauty and

power. 43

Keese suggests that from its earliest moments, American verse was something of an untimely production—out of character with the prevailing

42 Ibid., 72. 43 John Keese, Ed., The Poets of America: Illustrated by One of Her Painters (New York: S. Colman, 1840), 9-10. 36 spirit and labor of its day—and characteristically occasional in its media and form. A contributor who wrote under the name “Dion” for Frederick

Douglass’ Paper records a similar understanding of the “progress and condition” of “colored American literature” in 1853, writing that “The hopes of the coming [colored American literature]... [are] based upon the efforts which have been made by various colored Americans from time to time... [but] even those are not to be spoken of without regret, for they were mainly contained within the narrow limits of pamphlets or the columns of newspapers, ephemeral caskets, whose destruction entail the destruction of the gems of which they contain.”44 Of course, Dion’s outlook is more pessimistic than Keese’s, and for good reason. While both of these proto-traditions emerged in similar moments and media contexts and faced similar arguments against their categorical possibility, the scale of the resistance that antebellum black writers faced, not to mention the financial, material, and institutional difficulties they confronted in publishing this work, dwarfed the challenges perceived by Keese in establishing and defining the tradition of American verse. As Dion

44 Cited in Douglas A. Jones, Jr., “Early Black American Writing and the Making of a Literature, a review essay,” Early American Literature 49.2 (2014): 564. See Dion, “Our Literature,” part of a series entitled, Glances at Our Condition—No. 1, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 23, 1853, 2. Comments about the “progress and condition” of African American life and culture abound in abolitionist, benevolent society, and black-authored texts of the antebellum period, signaling in this context, a current state of being that is emergent and transitional. Griswold announces a similar aim in the front-matter to The Poets and Poetry of America anthology, writing “This work is designed to exhibit the progress and condition of Poetry in the United States.” See his note “To the Reader,” The Poets and Poetry of America: With an Historical Introduction (Philadelphia: Casey and Hart, 1842, second edition, revised), v. 37 continues:

The lines of the poet, Gray, with a few slight alterations, are

unfortunately but too applicable to colored men, who, by the

dispensations of Providence, have found a place within the limits of

this country. Our Miltons are all “mute and inglorious.” For

- “knowledge, to their eyes, her ample page,

Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll;

Chill slavery repressed their noble sage,

And froze the genial currents of the soul.”45

If the African-American tradition of writing at mid-century struggled additionally for the relative muteness of its population, the proto-tradition of (Anglo-) American verse was thought to be overrun by Miltons. As

Duganne satirizes the state of the field of American poetry in his verse satire from 1851, “Parnassus in Pillory”:

O hapless land of mine! whose country-presses

Labor with poets and with poetesses;

Where Helicon is quaffed like beer at table,

And Pegasus is ‘hitched’ in every stable;

[…]

Where Gray might Miltons by the score compute—

“Inglorious” all, but, ah! by no means “mute.”46

45 Dion, “Our Literature,” 2. 46 First published in New York in 1851 under the pseudonym, “Motley Manners, Esquire,” Parnassus in Pillory was reprinted in The Poetical Works of Augustine Duganne (Philadelphia, 1855); Griswold’s Poets and 38 The 1840s and 50s mark the pivotal, if also developmentally awkward, years when national verse and writing traditions were understood as being at once nascent, emergent phenomena and also demonstrable categories of mass circulation and reception. Indeed, as Alan C. Golding notes, early anthologies of American poetry were unique in their “attempt to preserve a national literature simultaneously with its creation.”47 Thus, while Michel de Certeau has written that “modern Western history essentially begins with the differentiation between the present and the past,” the emergence of American poetry as a historical category of verse followed an opposite course. The earliest editors and promoters of American verse struggled to make the distinction between past and present, expressing instead an eternal present of beginnings. Take, for instance, Samuel Kettell’s view from 1829: “In the twilight of the morning of letters which now dawns upon us, the general outline of the view is indistinct and wavering, and the eye meets with hardly a point upon which to rest with steadiness. But nothing lingers; every moment some new element is unfolding, the shadows flee, and the hour cometh, we doubt not, which shall usher in a new scene, and enlighten us with the fulness and splendor of a brighter

Poetry of America is the text that collected all of these “Inglorious” Miltons. See Parnassus in Pillory. A Satire. By Motley Manners, Esquire (New York: Adriance, Sherman & Co., 1851), though the copyright was entered in 1850. 47 Alan C. Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 39 day.”48 If, as Kettell suggests in his anthology of contemporary and historical American poetry, the future as much as the past of American poetry wavered with the constant emergence of newness in the present, then we might view that wavering as a function of the media environment in which this verse circulated. Ephemeral verse and ephemeral publication venues in periodicals meant that most American verse in this period was fugitive and fleeting. In certain instances of exemplary circulation, however, ephemeral verse achieved a curious durability. In the following chapter I take up the after-lives of Wheatley's occasional verse, in order to better understand what kind of durable public or tradition of reading became possible through the cumulative circulation of Wheatley's fugitive, occasional verse.

48 See Samuel Kettell’s “Introduction” to Specimens of American Poetry with Critical and Biographical Notices (Boston: S. G. Goodrich and Co., 1829), xlviii. 40

Chapter 1: Phillis Wheatley’s Antebellum Itineraries and the After-Lives of

Occasional Verse

Phillis Wheatley is a phenomenon: Phillis Wheatley is an event. She is

recalled more for the contexts of her poetry, than for her poetry itself.

--Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “Homage to Mistress Wheatley,” (2010)

Public discourse […] is poetic. By this I mean not just that it is self-

organizing, a kind of entity created by its own discourse, or even that this

space of circulation is taken to be a social entity, but that in order for this

to happen all discourse or performance addressed to a public must

characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate and it must

attempt to realize that world through address.

--Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” (2005)

To the PRINTER.

Please to insert the following Lines, composed by a Negro Girl (belonging

to one Mr. Whealtey of Boston) on the following Occasion, viz. Messrs

Hussey and Coffin, as undermentioned, belonging to Nantucket, being

bound from thence to Boston, narrowly escaped being cast away on Cape

Cod, in one of the late Storms; upon their Arrival being at Mr. Whealtey's,

and while at Dinner, told of their narrow Escape, this Negro Girl at the

same Time 'tending Table, heard the Relation, from which she composed

the following Verses.

--Headnote to Wheatley's “On Messrs HUSSEY and COFFIN,” (1767)

I. Wheatley’s Untimeliness and the Practices of Reading 18th-C.

Occasional Verse

Published on December 21, 1767, in the Newport [Rhode Island]

Mercury, “On Messrs HUSSEY and COFFIN” begins with a headnote “To the PRINTER” explaining that Phillis Wheatley, “a Negro Girl (belonging to one Mr. Wheatley of Boston),” wrote this occasional poem after hearing

Hussey and Coffin describe how their ship nearly capsized while sailing from Nantucket to Boston through a storm.1 The headnote goes on to inform its readers that Hussey and Coffin “told of their narrow Escape” over dinner at the Wheatley home, and “this Negro Girl at the same Time

‘tending Table, heard the Relation, from which she composed the following Verses.” Wheatley’s poem turns the public concern surrounding the potential loss of a “schooner, loaded with oil,” into an occasion for reflecting upon mortality and the question of salvation, and in this way, the poem bears the trace of Wheatley’s domestic and spiritual remediation of a public event:2

1 The headnote and poem are reproduced in Robinson and were published in the December 21, 1767, edition of the Newport Mercury on its third page. Robinson suggests that Susanna Wheatley most likely wrote this headnote. Vincent Carretta, Wheatley’s most recent biographer, surmises that Sarah Haggar Wheaton Osborn, a fellow evangelical Congregationalist and correspondent of Susanna Wheatley living in Newport, likely helped place Wheatley’s poem in the Mercury. See William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1984), 129-30; and Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2011), 65-67. 2 Robinson, Phillis Wheatley, 129; see also the Providence Gazette and Country Journal (10 October 1767): 3. According to this report, the schooner “was cast ashore” on the “back of Cape Cod” on October 5 and 42

Suppose the groundless Gulph had snatch’d away

Hussey and Coffin to the raging Sea;

Where would they go? where wou’d be their Abode?

With the supreme and independent God,

Or made their Beds down in the Shades below,

Where neither Pleasure nor Content can stow.

But perhaps more importantly, the headnote marks and mediates the transposition of Phillis Wheatley’s extempore verses from the Wheatley household to a wider audience of newspaper readers, and in doing so, significantly extends the occasion and the duration of Wheatley’s ostensibly ephemeral verse.

Transposed to this weekly maritime paper, Wheatley's extempore verses become a shipping news poem, and yet, as Wheatley underscores through her hypothetical questions about Hussey and Coffin's spiritual fate had the “groundless Gulf snatch'd [them] away,” this poem was also not quite “news” in two important ways. First, the poem was published eight weeks after the schooner had been “cast ashore” on the “back of Cape

Cod,” and second, the poem's occasion was a public non-event in the sense that no lives or cargo were lost. Instead, the “news” of this poem, and perhaps the actual occasion the poem’s publication was meant to mark, was that Wheatley, “a Negro Girl,” had written it. The poem and its publication therefore mark a number of competing occasions from the

reported that day. Wheatley’s poem was published eight weeks later in Newport. 43

ship running aground to an intimate narrative told at the dinner table to

Wheatley’s reflections upon the near-shipwreck’s significance in manuscript and in print that mirror the layered temporalities, multiple addressees, and staggered relation of printed news that was entirely common to the always already obsolete medium of the colonial weekly newspaper.

Writing about communications in colonial America, Richard Brown has noted that “word-of-mouth transmission together with signed, handwritten messages furnished the primary means of spreading information, with print—newspapers and broadsides—playing only a secondary role,” a trend that, as Trish Loughran has argued, extended through the early national period.3 It is not surprising then to find that delay and aggregation went hand in hand with recovering and circulating the news of the week in this maritime paper as well. Printed just below

Wheatley’s poem, for instance, is a note that reads: “The Severity of the

Weather, and the late Arrival of the Western Mail, have prevented the

Publication of this Paper at the usual Time.”4 And the first two pages of

The Providence Gazette, which reported the near loss of Hussey and

Coffin’s schooner, relayed in October news from Warsaw, Paris, London,

Genoa, and Florence that had happened in July. On another scale, the

3 See Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 247, 254-55, 271 (quoted in Loughran); Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770- 1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 21-22. 4 Newport Mercury 485 (December 21, 1767): 3. Accessed via the Archive of Americana--America’s Historical Newspapers database. 44

news from other nearby colonial ports was a week or two old before it was read in Providence.

Michael Warner has traced “the exotic reference of print” in the early eighteenth century to the prevalence of “foreign intelligence” in colonial, maritime weeklies, where the primacy of place and space within their columns was given over to “foreign intelligence,” in part because

“hearsay” spread local news “faster than the weekly newspaper could print it,” but also because colonial printers, presses, and newspapers were dependent upon the capitalization and information that maritime commerce provided.5 For these reasons, colonial weeklies announced the business and travel of ships “more regularly than any other kind of local news,” and accordingly derived their “authority and material from the shipping trade.”6

If, as Warner contends, the “exotic reference of print came about in a commercial [, shipping] context,” then we might also say the same of

Wheatley as a circulating figure of (news)print. Wheatley's biographers have long noted that Wheatley's historical (and printed) trace began with the shipping news of the arrival of the slave-ship Phillis.7 But Warner's

5 See Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 17-18. 6 Ibid., 18. 7 Vincent Carretta begins his recent biography of Wheatley from the “deck of the Phillis” with the ship's landing on July 11th, 1761, a piece of shipping news reported two days later in the 13 July 1761 Boston Evening Post. While Carretta offers the most thorough explication to date of Wheatley's earliest traces that survive in the print archive, this method of recovering Wheatley through the maritime print archive was anticipated by 45

description of the maritime commercial context doubling as the discursive context for colonial weeklies in the early eighteenth century provides another way for understanding the “exotic” aspects that came to characterize Wheatley's circulation in (news)print in the late colonial era.

The headnote's attention to Wheatley's authorship as “a Negro Girl

(belonging to one Mr. Wheatley of Boston)” relates the most obviously exotic aspects of Wheatley's race, gender, and slave status, and yet another version of the “exotic reference of print” is discernible in the obsolescence of Wheatley's shipping news poem, for it is in the delay, not to mention the poem's marked transposition from the Wheatley table and a conversation overheard to the print of the Newport weekly, that this old, local news is rendered anew.

The given temporal obsolescence of this medium meant that the specificity of one's relation to the news or occasion and its various circuits of mediation trumped the importance of the facts one might relay of the event itself. The headnote to Wheatley's poem makes explicit this shift in emphasis when it recalls the fact of the “Occasion, viz. Messrs. Hussey and

Coffin, […] being bound from thence [, Nantucket,] to Boston, narrowly escaped being cast away on Cape-Cod, in one of the late Storms” as previously established in order to focus more directly upon the mediating

Wheatley's 1834 biographer, B.B. Thatcher. I return to Thatcher's memoir in the fourth section of this chapter. See Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), particularly Ch. 1 “On Being Brought from Africa to America”; B. B. Thatcher, Memoir of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave (Boston: Geo. W. Light, 1834) 32 pp. Also published in New York in 1834 by Moore and Payne publishers. 46

agents who recast that occasion into print and the form of occasional verse.8 The headnote's meticulous attention to the relation of this occasion to its newly printed context--that is, as explicitly mediated through various sources and circuits of transposition--was standard notation for the genres most often represented in the colonial weekly (from excerpted letters and foreign advices delivered by specific ship captains to advertisements of the week). Moreover, this heightened attention to the ways in which colonial newsprint was mediated and circulated before it was printed for others to read bears an important trace of the process that turned previously circulated texts or “news” into public discourse. But how might occasional verse have been read differently than public discourse in this context?

Warner has differentiated public discourse from two other genres of writing that could be considered public and that begin to outline how

Wheatley's occasional verse would have been read in colonial newsprint: lyric poetry and sermons.9 Building on Virginia Jackson's argument about lyricized reading practices and modes of address in Dickinson's Misery,

Warner demonstrates that public discourse is distinct from lyric poetry in the sense that “it is heard (or read) as heard, not just by oneself but by others,” while lyric poetry is “read as overheard,” with a “cultivated disregard of its circumstances of circulation,” and thereby understood “as

8 Newport Mercury 485 (December 21, 1767): 3. Accessed via the Archive of Americana--America’s Historical Newspapers database. 9 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 78. Warner also contrasts public discourse to gossip. I return to the distinction he makes between sermons and public discourse when I analyze Wheatley's funeral elegy for the evangelist, George Whitefield. 47

an image of absolute privacy.”10 In differentiating the reading conventions associated with particular genres (e.g., lyricized conventions of reading) from what have often been considered to be internal, formal, or apriori characteristics that define genres (e.g., a lyric mode of address understood through the figure of apostrophe), Jackson and Warner emphasize the interdependence of genres, modes of address, and reading conventions to the process of public formation and the characteristics that then define those reading publics. From this perspective, which departs from the definitional and taxonomic tendencies of traditional genre theory, the distinctions among genres and reading conventions are notably more relative and informed by broader historical contexts of mediation and reading.11

In the case of occasional verse, we might begin by following Edward

Whitley in his thinking that commemorative or occasional verse stands in contrast to the inherited ideas we likely have about lyric poems: rather than supposing a lyrical reading practice based on poetic voice as fiction,

10 Ibid., 81. Warner derives these terms from Virginia Jackson, who presents John Stuart Mill's 1833 distinction between eloquence and (lyric) poetry as an early apogee of lyricized reading conventions and retroactive definitions of the lyric to come: according to Mill, “Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.” See Jackson, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 129 quoting from Mill’s essay “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 348. 11 As Jackson succinctly puts it, the understanding of genre she means to invoke is “neither an Aristotelian, taxonomic, transhistorical category of literary definition, nor simply something we make up on the spot to suit the occasion of reading.” Jackson, Dickinson's Misery, 15. 48

commemorative verse “opens up dialogue with the audience and creates a space for debate over what it means to be the representative voice of a community.”12 Moreover, as much as occasional verse is about the idea

(and the ideal) of representing a community, it is also thought to reflect a direct mode of public address to a particular audience at a particular time and through particular media that differs significantly from the abstracted sense of a private lyric subjectivity that indirectly addresses readers outside of time that we have come to expect from poems in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.13 And yet, as helpful as these distinctions might be for readers of poetry now—that is, after lyricized conventions of reading have become the normative or dominant mode for reading all kinds of poetry—they do not give us much of a sense for how occasional verse might have been read in the late-eighteenth century or how occasional verse might have differed from other forms of public discourse circulating through similar media and publics at this time.

What instead seems to be the case, and what the headnote to

Wheatley's poem bears out, is that various reading conventions and genres overlapped in newsprint and that this hybridized context for reading

12 Edward Whitley, American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), xi. Funeral elegies comprise the bulk of Wheatley's occasional ouvre, but she also wrote in other genres of occasional verse, including epistolary verse and poems on affairs of state. 13 For a definitive account of the twentieth-century reading practices that collapsed multiple, historical verse genres into the meta-genre of poetry called lyric, see Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery (2005) and Before Modernism: The Invention of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2018). 49

followed a supplemental logic: rather than assuming a traditional, singular, or idiosyncratic convention for reading otherwise familiar genres remediated as newsprint, these readers and printers were clearly interested in preserving the multiply generic sources and resonances of textual material that first circulated elsewhere. In other words, where traditional genre theory would posit a monological or singular convention of reading for a particular genre, the colonial newspaper reading public was clearly accustomed to recognizing and reserving the multitude of genres and routes of circulation that any particular text had assumed before ending up as newsprint.

On the issue of the hybridization of public discourse's forms,

Warner has argued that the address of public discourse is both “personal and impersonal” and that “to inhabit public discourse is to perform this transition continually,” while keeping the contradictory implications of this hybridized mode of address “present to consciousness.”14 We might view the Wheatley headnote as mediating this transition while also marking the hybridized speech and written genres that comprise public discourse in this instance--a dinner conversation overheard becomes the extempore verses that will become a shipping news poem once printed and read in the Mercury. And while the lyricized conventions of reading

14 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 76-77. As Warner elaborates, “With public speech, […] we might recognize ourselves as addressees, but it is equally important that we remember that the speech was addressed to indefinite others, that in singling us out it does so not on the basis of our concrete identity but by virtue of our participation in the discourse alone and therefore in common with strangers” (77-78). 50

described above would not become normative until the late nineteenth century, the distinction of heard versus overheard clearly accords with the terms invoked in the headnote and the media context of the colonial weekly, with a slightly different emphasis. Given the distinction between colonial newsprint and news spread by word of mouth, Wheatley's occasional verse would not have been read as heard exactly; nor, according to the headnote, would it have been read as overheard, since the headnote is clear that the moment of overhearing preceded the composition of the poem. If this poem was read as neither exactly heard nor overheard, the headnote is painstakingly clear about the poem's “circumstances of circulation” and thus marks the hybridized characteristics of Wheatley's occasional verse and its circulation: what began as an intimate scene of circulation (with different modes of direct and indirect address figured as moments of speaking, hearing, and overhearing) at the dinner table is important to the poem's circulation in newsprint but also markedly distinct from its public circulation.15 In this way the headnote articulates a porous convention of reading Wheatley's occasional verse in newsprint, one that is shot through by multiple genres, modes of address, and routes of circulation.

If, as I have been arguing, the variously mediated circumstances of

Wheatley's earliest publication call into question the idea that occasional verse operated through a direct mode of public address bound by a singular occasion and temporality, then we might also challenge the notion

15 Ibid., 81. 51

that the occasional verse printed in the Newport Mercury addressed a singular public. As the “center of the regional slave trade,” Newport was also home to an “Ethiopian Society,” which was hosted by Sarah Haggar

Wheaton Osborn, a fellow evangelical Congregationalist and correspondent of Susanna Wheatley living in Newport.16 This “Ethiopian

Society” included a number of “free people of African descent” and “as many as forty-two slaves, who attended with the permission of their masters,” and who began gathering in 1766 to “sing, pray, read, and discuss religious issues.”17 Given the overlapping interests and circumstances shared by this group and Phillis Wheatley, it is unlikely that her literary, newsprint performance was not, at least partially, addressed to the “Ethiopian Society,” but it is also my point that within this provincial instance of publication two other overlapping and yet distinct, contemporaneous publics are visible: the larger mercantile public and the

Methodist evangelical public that ushered Wheatley’s extempore verses into print.18 All of these publics had a stake in the continued circulation of

16 Joanna Brooks, “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” American Literature 82, no. 1 (March 2010): 9. For more on the “Ethiopian Society” and Newport's “Free African Union Society,” founded in 1780, see William H. Robinson, Black New England Letters: The Uses of Writing in Black New England (Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1977), 7; Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 65-66; and Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 43-45. 17 Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 65-66. In addition to running a boarding school in her home “for nearly seventy students, rich and poor, male and female, black and white,” Carretta reports that Osborn “was instrumental in the evangelical Newport revival of 1766-67.” 18 See Loughran for a compelling account of early American printed matter as “actual objects with limited circulations” that while taken symbolically 52

Wheatley as a local and transatlantic celebrity, but thus far, Wheatley scholarship has been more wont to characterize Wheatley's public in the restrictive terms of the white, sentimental and Methodist patronage network Phillis accessed through Susanna Wheatley.19

The porousness and the proliferation of the publics addressed by

Wheatley’s occasional verse has a corollary in the way that the extended circulation of Wheatley’s occasional verse comes to exceed the restrictive and stipulative characteristics of occasional verse as a meta-generic category. As I will continue to argue in this chapter, numerous things that we might expect to be singular (occasion, public, print temporality, and mode of address) in the earliest circulation of Wheatley's occasional verse proliferated through the extended circulation of Wheatley's verse in the nineteenth century. In this way, the only seeming boundedness of occasional verse gives us reason to rethink Wheatley’s boundedness as presented in contemporary criticism on Wheatley. Max Cavitch, for instance, describes the way in which elegies are both bound to a body but also in excess of that body and part of a longer tradition of American poetry. And yet, when Cavitch produces a reading of African American

to address a “national public,” in point of fact, addressed “'publics' in the most plural, and fragmented, sense of the word;” thus the “national public” would be better conceived “as a series of locally bound and locally defined communities.” Loughran, The Republic in Print, 22. 19 In “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” Joanna Brooks describes Wheatley's public in singular terms as one comprised of white, merchant-class women who conscripted Wheatley into a “sentimental” economy that ultimately failed Wheatley and “blocked the richer, more powerful story Wheatley might have been able to tell” (21). The singularity of this public extends to the present day in Brooks' account, since the “crippling dynamic of white female sentimentality” is still very much with us (21). 53

elegy (and Wheatley) it is nonetheless circumscribed by the structural possibilities of writing from the subject position of a slave and thus from an embodied (and historical) position of natal alienation.20 To a similar end, Kirstin Wilcox and Joanna Brooks describe Wheatley’s boundedness through the limits of her (contemporary) public and benefactors.21 My argument does not seek to overturn these readings of the structural and political restrictions that circumscribed Wheatley’s initial circulation so much as it aims to say that that was just the beginning and that more interesting phenomena happen after poems circulate beyond authorial hands or the limits of an initial reception.

When reading Wheatley, one is immediately confronted with the complexity of reading poetry in relation to time. As I have begun to illustrate, this was true for Wheatley's earliest readers, and it is doubly true for us since our comparative understanding of occasional verse is structured around a lyricized mode of reading poetry that was formalized

20 See Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), particularly chapter five, “Mourning of the Disprized: African Americans and Elegy from Wheatley to Lincoln.” In a recent essay, Cavitch moderates this earlier position by thinking about “the degree to which the history of books and publishing in the era of transatlantic slavery was a history both of foreclosure through brutal objectification and of certain affordances of subjectivity and agency” (212). For more on the nineteenth-century circulation of Wheatley’s poetry in relation to book history and broader temporalities of sympathy and memory, see Cavitch, “The Poetry of Phillis Wheatley in Slavery’s Recollective Economies, 1773 to the Present,” in Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America, ed. Cécile Cottenet (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 210-230. 21 See, Kirstin Wilcox, “The Body into Print: Marketing Phillis Wheatley,” American Literature 71, no. 1 (March 1999): 1-29; and Joanna Brooks, “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” (1-28). I return to these arguments in the final section of this chapter. 54

in the twentieth century. But I am also interested in the story Wheatley’s circulation history has to tell about the way nineteenth-century readers read her verse. The specificity of Wheatley’s modes of address and media, not to mention the temporally distant events her poems commemorated, meant that readers in the nineteenth century encountered her verse with a keen awareness that Wheatley’s compositions did not directly address them in the same way that they had addressed her contemporary readers.

But rather than collapsing this distance through the mode of lyrical reading that became the normative poetry reading practice in the twentieth century, the recirculation and reprinting I trace in this chapter points to another mode of reading historical verse, one where the material conditions of a diachronic and largely periodical print culture structured a reception of Wheatley and her verse that was at once historical and anachronistic.22

II. The Was-ness of Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was, most certainly, “an event,” as Rowan Ricardo

Phillips has observed, but more to the point of this chapter, she was an event that was staged and restaged in multiple iterations across numerous publication contexts, beginning with her earliest, colonial publications in newsprint, broadside, pamphlet, and book formats and extending through

22 Meredith McGill’s work on issues of circulation, reprinting, and the materiality of print have been foundational to my argument in this chapter and across the dissertation as a whole. See McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 55

various abolitionist and benevolent societies' publications of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.23 Given the proliferation of occasions, agents, and media at work in printing Wheatley's verse across the 92 years surveyed by this chapter, I argue for a historical mode of reading Wheatley as a heterochronic phenomenon of print that, pace

Phillips, has everything to do with “context.” Instead of thinking, then, about Wheatley's relation to an autonomous or enclosed tradition that we call poetry, this chapter makes a case for thinking about Wheatley as an oft-circulated and complicated form of public discourse.24 By shifting the emphasis toward public discourse and away from a restrictive, but now normative, mode of reading poetry that Jackson has called “lyric reading,”

23 Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “Homage to Mistress Wheatley,” in A Companion to African-American Studies, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 175. For a more recent version of this essay, see Phillips, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010), 13-42. 24 Other notable essays have made a similar argument, but mine differs in two ways: it deemphasizes the role of Wheatley's subjectivity or agency within contemporary political debates in order to better understand the role of occasional verse in mediating various publics and modes of address; and then it considers Wheatley's circulation on a different scale from what has previously been advanced in order to articulate some of the consequences that Wheatley's extended circulation and reprinting made possible. For an analysis of Wheatley as “political actor,” see David Waldstreicher, “The Wheatleyan Moment” Early American Studies 9.3 (2011): 522-551. Betsy Erkkila locates Wheatley's verse within the political context of revolution-era Boston; see Erkkila, “Phillis Wheatley and the Black American Revolution,” in A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, ed. Frank Shuffleton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 225-40; Kirstin Wilcox, “The Body into Print,” 1-29; Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), particularly Chapter Four “Slavery and the Language of Natural Rights”; Daniel Cottom, Ravishing Tradition: Cultural Forces and Literary History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), Chapter Three “Captioning the Image of Tradition: Phillis Wheatley and Preposterous Authority” 83-111. 56

I do not mean that Wheatley's ability to write in the elevated genres of verse was inconsequential to her contemporary and future readers; nor am

I saying that her readers failed to read her verse as poetry.25 Instead, I mean to emphasize that for the period of Wheatley's circulation covered by this chapter, it was more importantly the case that this poetry—and

Wheatley's attending figure in print—circulated together as public discourse.26

25 As Jackson has argued in Dickinson’s Misery (2005), the tautological notion that there is such a thing as “poetry itself” is part of a long, “uneven” historical process that she calls “lyricization,” the roots of which begin in the late eighteenth century and involve a fantasy of “unmediated” genres that by the mid-twentieth century eventuated into “an idea of the lyric as temporally self-present or unmediated” with its primary context of interpretation as “the occasion of its reading.” For Jackson, the process of lyricization transformed not only the generic category and characteristics of lyric poetry, but it also tended to make invisible or irrelevant “the various modes of poetic circulation” and “address” that once helped define the historical context and contingency of the “variously mimetic poetic subgenres” “considered lyrical in the Western tradition before the early nineteenth century.” Most of the verse genres that Wheatley wrote and published in the eighteenth century--funeral elegies, poems on affairs of state, and verse epistles most prominent among them--were the very subgenres that, according to Jackson, resisted this later collapse into lyric reading because of “their embedded[ness] in specific historical occasions” and their evident mode of direct address. Viewed in this light, Phillips’ argument aptly expresses what it is like to review Wheatley’s poetry from the other side of lyricization expecting to find a lyric subject and coming up with mere history instead. In other words, lyricization might explain our orientation toward Wheatley’s poetry and our expectations of it, and though the literary object would seem to be the same (i.e., Wheatley’s poems) the historical effect of lyricization has made Wheatley’s poetry not really poetry in the contemporary sense. See Virginia Jackson, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 7-9. 26 The commonplace, twentieth-century distinction in value between a poetry that circulates and aims to circulate as public discourse and a poetry that circulates as if it should or could be read as “poetry itself” is not a distinction that obtained within the print contexts that I study here. Poetry was not an idealized or abstracted meta-genre in this moment, and 57

Warner has argued that public discourse already shares something with “poesis” and the “world-making” of poetic address.27 In taking up the after-lives of Wheatley's occasional verse, we might better understand the relation between the two by asking what kind of public or tradition of reading became possible through the cumulative circulation of Wheatley's occasional verse. Whereas Warner approaches the curious construction of a public through an idea of the world-making of poesis and a particular mode of poetic address, I am interested in the reverse situation: what can reading poetry as public discourse tell us about the utility and significance of occasional verse in this period? Likewise, how might the address of

Wheatley's occasional verse, traditionally thought to be direct and temporally bound to its moment of publication or by the occasion itself, construct a different kind of public than the one presumed to be contemporaneous to and synonymous with a text's initial circulation, given that Wheatley's occasional verse was printed again and again and made to address multiple publics across time and space?

As I have indicated, the circulation of Wheatley's verse was exceptional and never just about the poetry. Indeed, the circulation of her poetry was also always about Wheatley herself, or at least the composite

reading poetry as public discourse would not have meant a devaluation of poetry. This is an important reminder in Wheatley's case because reading her verse as something other than poetry might otherwise be taken as a tacit acceptance of Thomas Jefferson's famous slight that her poetry was “below the dignity of criticism,” a slight that retrospective readings of Wheatley’s poetry--as poetry--are often intended to put right. 27 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 113-115. 58

construction of Wheatley that emerged and circulated through print. Thus, part of the complication in reading Wheatley, not to mention reading her various publics, stems from the curious way in which, as Warner argues in the epigraph above, public discourse's “space of circulation,” or its public,

“is taken to be a social entity” even as that public is necessarily imagined into being “through address.”28 Moreover, the various “discrepanc[ies] between persons and texts” that Warner explicated in his earlier work on

Benjamin Franklin as the consummate “man of letters” bear directly upon the case of Phillis Wheatley, whose “being-in-print” is often conflated with, if not retroactively taken to be, the historical person, Phillis Wheatley.29

One consequence of emphasizing the printedness of the Wheatley that we (and others before us) have been reading all along is that her circulation as public discourse becomes the unit of analysis, rather than questions of authorial agency or intention that have long dominated studies and recoveries of Wheatley. For similar reasons, I do not view the various reprintings of Wheatley discussed in this chapter as appropriations of Wheatley, which again would presume that there is an essential or authentic Wheatley to recover within this textual record that later reprintings have ignored or abused. I am also less concerned with the originary moments of composition and publication that typically take precedence in traditional literary and genre histories. While these initial

28 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 113-14. 29 Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 76-77. 59

moments are certainly important and perhaps easier to imagine and relate given the restriction imposed upon the variables involved, they are just the beginning and cannot account for the broader cultural work accomplished by an authorial figure, genre, or text in circulation over time.

The further unfolding of Wheatley as public discourse requires an attention to what Warner calls the “punctuality” of her publication and circulation.30 The temporality of Wheatley's circulation through various media was discontinuous and certainly less structurally punctual or predictable than, say, the weekly colonial newspapers in which she first emerged, but in reprinting Wheatley's occasional verse in particular, which carried with it, embedded in the particularity of its occasion and address, an original temporality and public different than those addressed by the latest reprinting, Wheatley's extended circulation should be considered

“reflexive” and invested in measuring time across and between distinct moments of publication.31 Indeed, as Warner argues, “[c]irculation organizes time and vise versa.”32 In the case of Wheatley's reprinted occasional verse, we might also say that circulation and its attending temporalities organize occasional verse and vise versa--and that this was especially so for Wheatley's historically distant readers.

If publicity is better apprehended in terms of staggered orders of time, we might also say that the prolonged circulation of occasional verse stretched the stipulative function of the genre. The extended, broadside

30 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 95. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 94. 60

circulation of Wheatley’s funeral elegy for the “great Awakener” George

Whitefield illuminates this process while also demonstrating that the stipulative characteristic of the broadside as ephemeral media was malleable as well. Whitefield died on September 30, 1770, in Newburyport,

Massachusetts. Wheatley’s “An Elegiac Poem, On the DEATH of that celebrated Divine, and eminent Servant of JESUS CHRIST, the late

Reverend, and pious GEORGE WHITEFIELD…” was published about two weeks later in Boston.33 Printed and sold by Ezekiel Russell, “in Queen-

Street,” and John Boyles, “in Marlboro’-Street,” for “7 Coppers,” the broadside was advertised as early as October 15.34 On the following day, the broadside was advertised in The Essex Gazette and offered for sale at its printing office in Salem, MA.35 Roughly two weeks later, the broadside was available in Philadelphia, as advertised in the Pennsylvania

33 Jennifer Young suggests that this poem was first published as an 8-page pamphlet in Newport, Rhode Island--the site of Wheatley’s first publication, “On Messrs Hussey and Coffin.” Young also reports that “The elegy was in such demand that the broadside was published in several variations at least thirteen times between 1770 and 1771” (15). See Jennifer Rene Young, Marketing a Sable Muse: The Cultural Circulation of Phillis Wheatley, 1767-1865, Howard University: dissertation, 2004. 34 See the Boston Post Boy 686 (15 October 1770): 3, from Boston, MA. Accessed via the Archive of Americana--America’s Historical Newspapers database. See also the 8-page pamphlet variant of this poem and etched image: Archive of Americana--Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 11813 (filmed), reproduced from the original held by the New York Public Library. Vincent Carretta cites an earlier advertisement in the 11 October 1770 issue of the Boston News-Letter (73). 35 See The Essex Gazette 3.116 (9-16 October 1770): 47, from Salem, MA. Juxtaposed above the advertisement for Wheatley’s broadside is the following runaway notice: “It is thought that a Negro named Pompey, but commonly called Pomp, has taken Mr. Turner’s Horse, advertised above…” (47). Accessed via the Archive of Americana--America’s Historical Newspapers database. 61

Chronicle.36 On the 9th of November, the New-Hampshire Gazette informed its readers that the broadside was available at its printing office in Portsmouth.37 On November 12th, the New York Gazette advertised the poem for sale in two locations in New York City.38 While the record of this broadside’s circulation is likely incomplete, it underscores the fact that periodical circulation and advertising extended the geographical and temporal reach of Wheatley’s funeral elegy, as well as shifting how and why readers read this poem.

Although all writing is, in its own way, occasional, the funeral elegy names its occasion with a specificity rarely matched by other verse genres.39 In typical Anglo-colonial practices of mourning, a broadside funeral elegy was printed and distributed to the attendees of a funeral as part of the funeral rites. In fact, in earlier puritan societies that regulated funeral rites, funeral broadsides were sometimes buried with the casket to avoid an overindulgence in the act of mourning.40 Ola Elizabeth Winslow, who edited a collection of early American broadside verse imprints in

1930, notes that funeral elegies were often “fastened to the pall covering

36 See the Pennsylvania Chronicle 4.40 (29 October 1770): 161, from Philadelphia, PA. Accessed via the Archive of Americana--America’s Historical Newspapers database. 37 See the New-Hampshire Gazette 25.734 (9 November 1770): 4, from Portsmouth, NH. Accessed via the Archive of Americana--America’s Historical Newspapers database. 38 See the New York Gazette 1454 (12 November 1770): 4. Accessed via the Archive of Americana--America’s Historical Newspapers database. 39 Cavitch makes a similar point in American Elegy, page 6. 40 Ibid. As Max Cavitch notes, mourning practices became more elaborate and more expensive in the late seventeenth century, and the proliferation of funeral elegy broadsides in the eighteenth century was a part of that trend. 62

the casket, as had long been the practice in England.”41 (xix). William

Wordsworth encountered this practice in March of 1789 at Cambridge, when according to custom, students “pinned on the coffin” their verses of eulogy for the deceased Master of St. John’s College to be read at the funeral by “the Cambridge public.”42 The fastening of the broadside elegy to the pall marks the extreme end of defining a verse genre’s circulation, readership, and stipulative function in the narrowest of temporal-spatial terms, while also suggesting a material, indexical relation between person and poem, or poem and pall, that has a discernible resonance in

Wheatley’s Whitefield broadsides.

Whitefield’s exalted status as an evangelical celebrity and the colonies’ first mass-attraction explains in part the public’s ongoing desire to own and preserve a memento of his corpse. The Ezekiel Russell broadside caters to this desire by providing an elaborate relief-cut of

Whitefield’s body prepared for burial, an image that the October 15th

Boston Post-Boy advertisement described as “representing the Posture in which Mr. Whitefield lay, before and after his Internment at Newbury-

Port.” The double image attempts to mediate for distant consumers what the attendees of Whitefield’s funeral would have seen in person, while also attending to the perception of Whitefield’s body in relation to time, a theme that structures Wheatley’s elegy, as well.

41 See Ola Elizabeth Winslow, American Broadside Verse from the 17th and 18th Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), xix. 42 See Hunter Davies, William Wordsworth: A Biography (Sutton Publishing, 1997), 39. 63

Wheatley’s opening lines, for instance, imagine Whitefield ascendant and “happy” on his “immortal throne” among the “worlds unknown” of “Heaven’s unmeasur’d height.” This is a common, conciliatory gesture within funeral elegies, but it is also one that

Wheatley’s elegy refuses to commit to entirely. Instead, Wheatley prefers the image of Whitefield “wing[ing]” and “sail[ing] to Zion, through vast seas of day.” Through this image of perpetual movement rather than rest,

Wheatley reminds her readers that they, along with Whitefield, await a future moment when “life divine re-animate[s] his dust.” Until that time,

Whitefield (and those that follow him in death and grace) will remain in a divided state: materially present in a tomb that “shalt safe retain thy sacred trust” and spiritually in a world beyond “sight.” Wheatley extends this sense of a divided temporal and spatial perspective in her figuration of

Whitefield as a “Sun” that, alas, “shines no more.” Whitefield’s passing is lamentable, then, but only from the earthly perspective of time (“Unhappy we, the setting Sun deplore!”), and the poem attempts to orient itself toward another, heavenly apprehension of time, one beyond the diurnal measure of the rising and setting sun, even though understanding this other temporal register will remain, necessarily, beyond the ken of

Wheatley and her readers.

In Wheatley’s elegy the presence of this eternal measure of time is confirmed, if not completely understood, in the rays of “grace divine” that

“shine” in the “future actions” of those who have accepted God’s gift of grace through Whitefield’s example and ministry. Grace thereby mediates 64

between earthly and heavenly realms and provides Wheatley with a quasi- material and spiritual measure of Whitefield’s legacy. Moreover, the circulation of grace offers a partial explanation for what will hold the extended Methodist community together now that Whitefield’s “wonted auditories cease to throng.” Wheatley’s concern for the persistence of

Whitfield’s public once that public can no longer expect to hear “the music of [his] tongue” raises an important question about the stipulative ties that bind a public to an organizing figure (here Whitefield and, in particular, his charismatic persona that circulated extensively in print and in person) or an occasion (more broadly, Whitefield’s sermons, but also in this instance, his funeral). The persistence of Whitefield’s public after his death is the pretext for the circulation of Wheatley’s funeral elegy for Whitefield as a broadside, and out of this concern, Wheatley translates the qualities of

Whitefield’s sermons into a poetic register that she can emulate and extend: “Thy lessons in unequal’d accents flow’d! / While emulation in each bosom glow’d; / Thou didst, in strains of eloquence refin’d, / Inflame the soul and captivate the mind.” Wheatley’s comparison brings

Whitefield’s evangelical legacy (in particular, the circulation of grace through a particular public) into relation with the material and social conditions that make this broadside elegy’s circulation possible. It is, therefore, Wheatley’s understanding of these conditions that prompts her to directly address the Countess of Huntingdon, Selena Hastings, and offer her condolences: “Great COUNTESS! We Americans revere / Thy name, and thus condole thy grief sincere: / We mourn with thee, that Tomb 65

obscurely plac’d / In which thy Chaplain undisturb’d doth rest.” This move toward the Countess and away from Whitefield solidifies the poem’s interest in extending Whitfield’s legacy by bringing to light the kind of sociality that circulated and was, in fact, partially constituted through print and that could, most importantly, still circulate after Whitefield’s death. The poem concludes by reiterating that though Whitefield’s body will remain at rest in “that Tomb obscurely plac’d,” his public (and the

Countess) can insure that he continues to circulate as a figure of print:

“Then let us view him on yon azure skies: / Let every mind with this lov’d object rise.”

Wheatley’s elegy overcomes the obstacle of Whitefield’s passing by pointing both to his spiritual transcendence and the transcendent potential of Whitefield’s continued circulation through a public organized around print media, a point exemplified throughout Whitefield’s career.

Indeed, Whitefield’s career and celebrity were defined by mediations of person and text that likewise inform Wheatley’s emergence as a print phenomenon in the wake of Whitefield’s death. In Awash in a Sea of Faith

(1990), Jon Butler explains that Whitefield’s determinedly itinerant mission meant that in contrast to local, “settled ministr[ies],” “Whitefield announced his grand theme to strangers. He made his reputation and exercised his ministry among people he had never met” (187). Moreover, because “Whitefield worked outside traditional channels,” “his legacy was personal, rather than institutional” (Butler 191). In pursuit of his transatlantic evangelical mission, Whitefield became an early and savvy 66

manipulator of technologies and networks of print: he played “popular news sheets” against the doctrinal critiques that circulated in “learned pamphlets,” and his Journals, published early in his career in 1739 and

1740, created “a persona deliberately crafted for public dissemination and image” (Stout 223). His preaching performances renewed interest in his circulating persona by further focusing “attention on his figure, his face, his voice, his demeanor, and even his notoriety” (Butler 188).

In addition to mass-media communications, Whitefield and his associates relied on other, more personal modes of communication. On his second American tour, for instance, William Seward provided “full-time … publicity” support for Whitefield (Stout 90). Traveling ahead of Whitefield,

Seward wrote hundreds of letters as well as “spreading the word by mouth that Whitefield was coming” (Stout 90). Whitefield’s communications, then, were embedded in overlapping networks of personal and mass print exchange, and it may have been this overlap of intimate and impersonal media and social connections that explains, in part, the public fascination with Whitefield’s person in life and in death.43 Despite the push toward impersonal networks of association in the marketplace and public sphere, attendant crowds and absent readers of Whitefield’s sermons experienced a heady mix of the impersonal and the intimate. And while this experience was often explained as a unique effect of Whitefield’s particular charm and skill as an orator, a less mystifying explanation can be found in the

43 See Cavitch, American Elegy and Robert E. Cray, Jr., “Memorialization and Enshrinement: George Whitefield and Popular Religious Culture, 1770-1850,” for more on the public response to Whitefield’s death. 67

overlapping networks of printedness and exchange that helped constitute these evangelical societies in Anglo-America and England.

Wheatley’s Whitefield elegy has often been read as the poem that launched her career: viewed as the poem that introduced Wheatley to

Selena Hastings and her influential Huntingdon Connexion of Methodists, the Whitefield elegy established Wheatley within a transatlantic patronage system that would eventually see her Poems on Various Subjects,

Religious and Moral (1773) published in London. But Wheatley’s broadside elegy also connected her to Whitefield’s print celebrity and a particular mode of circulating and reading that celebrity in print. Joseph

Roach has written about the emergence of celebrity culture in the eighteenth century as a particular kind of “public intimacy […] rooted in traditional religious doctrine and, more deeply and lastingly, in popular religious feeling” (16). As I have been arguing, Whitefield cultivated a particular version of popular religious feeling that held its focus around

Whitefield’s person even as it circulated through a mix of intimate and mass media and modes of address.

Although the celebrity Wheatley experienced from 1770-1774 was on a smaller scale than that which Whitefield experienced, the material history of Wheatley’s celebrity is likewise consistently focused on her person. All of the advertisements for her Whitefield elegy cite the authorial description printed as a headnote on the broadside, “By PHILLIS, a

Servant Girl of seventeen Years of Age, belonging to J. WHEATLEY, of

Boston.—She has been but nine Years in this Country from AFRICA,” and 68

thereby locate the “extraordinary” characteristics of this funeral elegy within Wheatley’s person and experience. A month after the broadside first became available, an advertisement in the New Hampshire Gazette editorialized that “This excellent Piece ought to be preserved for two good

Reasons, first, in Remembrance of that great and good Man, Mr.

Whitefield, and second on Account of its being worte [sic] by a Native of

Africa, and yet would have done Honor to a Pope or Shakespeare.”44

Moreover, a variant of the Ezekiel Russell broadside, titled “Phillis’s Poem on the Death of Rev. Whitefield” and held by the American Antiquarian

Society, marks a moment of publication decidedly after Whitefield’s funeral, and one that capitalizes on Wheatley’s emerging celebrity as the poet who wrote the well-circulated elegy for Whitefield.45 [See Figure 8.]

The title, “Phillis’s Poem,” registers a telling shift in interest from

Whitefield to Wheatley; furthermore, this broadside has dropped as superfluous the paratextual references to Whitefield’s death as well as the explanation of Phillis’ identity that appeared in a headnote in the earlier variant. In this superlocal example of Wheatley’s circulating funeral elegy, we can begin to see that print temporality and circulation become part of how a poem gets read, a phenomenon that Virginia Jackson describes in

44 See the New-Hampshire Gazette 25.734 (9 November 1770): 4, from Portsmouth, NH. Accessed via the Archive of Americana--America’s Historical Newspapers database. 45 Accessed through Archive of Americana, Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans 1639-1800, no. 42198, Copyright American Antiquarian Society (2002). The broadside is thought to have been printed by Isaiah Thomas in Boston. 69

another context as “reading media as genres and genres as media.”46

Wheatley’s voyage to London in May of 1773 occasioned another view of

Wheatley as a circulating figure of (news)print. The Connecticut Journal reported on May 7, 1773, that the passengers “Mr. Nathaniel Wheatly

[sic.], Merchant, and Phillis Wheatley, the ingenious Negro Poet” were set to sail for “London next Wednesday” with “Capt. Calef, in the Ship

London.”47 The Boston Newsletter marked Wheatley’s departure in a similar fashion, referring to her as “Phillis, the extraordinary Negro Poet, servant to Mr. John Wheatley” and printing beneath this announcement her epistolary verse to “Mrs. S[usanna] W[heatley],” titled “Farewell to

America.”48 Dated as it was in September, the Pennsylvania Chronicle trumpeted the June 26th news brought back from London regarding

Wheatley’s arrival: “Last Thursday the celebrated Negro girl Phillis, the

Poetess, whose extraordinary talents have lately been taken notice of in the newspapers, arrived in London from Boston, in New England. She had a letter of recommendation from a merchant in Boston to a bookseller in

London, and is shortly to be introduced to several of the Literati.”49 One week later, Wheatley arrived back in Boston, a fact the Newport Mercury reported another week after that, adding the now familiar description,

46 See Virginia Jackson, “Whitman’s Publics,” in Before Modernism: The Invention of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2018, pp. 30-34 in ms). 47 See the Connecticut Journal, May 7, 1773. 48 See the Boston Newsletter, May 13, 1773. Below the poem, the Newsletter retracted a statement from the previous issue where it described Wheatley’s “Passage for England, in consequence of an Invitation from the Countess of Huntington, which was a mistake.” 49 See the Pennsylvania Chronicle 133.348 (September 13, 1773). 70

“Phillis Wheatley, the extraordinary Poetical Genius, Negro Servant to Mr.

John Wheatley.”50

By applying Warner's broader theories of public discourse and circulation to these extended contexts of reading Wheatley in the eighteenth century, I am perhaps putting a strain on the expectation that public discourse needs to be circulated and received as “contemporary” and immediate in order to also be perceived as “currently unfolding in a sphere of [political] activity.”51 I am, however, admittedly more interested in a public and politics of the long durée, and as I have demonstrated in my readings of Wheatley’s earliest circulation, the media and publics through which she circulated should revise our expectations of contemporary and immediate circulation, for even when circulated to contemporary readers, Wheatley’s occasional verse was not immediate; nor was it directly about an immediate or distinct political action.

Likewise, the political activity of abolition, toward which reprintings of

Wheatley's verse quickly aspired, was also a case of “longer rhythms” typified in the recourse to gradual abolition that most New England states took in contrast to the immediate abolition decreed in Wheatley's

Massachusetts.52

My readings of Wheatley’s circulation are, therefore, discontinuous.

50 See the Newport Mercury (September 27, 1773). 51 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 96-97. 52 The phrase is Warner's. Ibid, 97. See Trish Loughran for a materialist reading of the gradual and immediate temporalities of antebellum U.S. abolition. Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 71

In the chapter sections that follow, I move from the histories I have just recounted from 1767 and 1770 to 1832 to 1834 to 1859, and in doing so I mean to represent the discontinuous nature of what would eventuate in the 1850s as an emergent but evident African American print tradition that circulated predominantly through periodical and ephemeral forms.

The practice of reading Wheatley as a means to recovering ephemeral media and a fleeting grasp of history is underscored in the chapter's next section that examines two Wheatley memoirs published in 1834. But the production and stakes of a diachronic reading public are best imagined and articulated by William J. Wilson in his 1859 magazine serial, “The

Afric-American Picture Gallery.” Here Wheatley serves as the 21st head in

Wilson’s gallery, but in this section I also make the claim that the steady circulation of Wheatley as an exemplary figure of black print enables

Wilson’s understanding of a diachronic “Afric-American” public that is importantly an accretion of publics past and future. The reprinting of obsolescent occasional verse performs a similar layering of publics past and thus is a crucial part of Wilson’s thinking about publics that exist on terms other than those that structure the contemporaneous, national public of an empty homogenous time.

In thinking about the various publics that the practice of reading

Wheatley (across space and time) retrospectively joined, I am interested in tracing an antebellum tradition of African American literature made in

Wheatley's image. The periodization of this tradition is important, and the

“was” in my section title alludes to Kenneth W. Warren’s title, What Was 72

African American Literature?, which makes the provocative claim that the tradition we call African American literature has expired, given that

“African American literature was a postemancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation.”53 As for what was written by blacks in antebellum America, Warren suggests we recognize that this writing

“became African American literature only retroactively. [….] Indeed, it was largely in the light of imperatives determined by the Jim Crow era that antebellum texts were assimilated into the collective project we recognize as African American literature.”54 Warren is right to point out that the work of establishing a distinct tradition happens “retroactively,” but this is the case for any literary tradition. What is more important to recognize is that antebellum print culture was decidedly, provocatively, and generatively incoherent, especially in its periodical and ephemeral print contexts, which were by and large, as Frances Smith Foster has argued, the

53 Though I agree with Warren’s general call for greater precision in periodizing literary traditions, and think it should be extended to literary figures, genres, and media, as well, the precision of Warren’s definition of African American literature as contiguous with Jim Crow law (beginning, officially, in 1896 with the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision and ending with the Voting Rights Act of 1965) hinges upon an expectation of coherence as the defining characteristic of a distinct literary tradition. This characteristic does not apply to earlier periods and fails to provide a way to think about early African American print culture, thereby rendering it pre-history. Of course, this earlier material is not really what interests Warren in this argument, and the force of Warren’s “wasness” is more crucially directed toward post-1965 writing by African Americans. See Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1-17, especially. 54 Ibid, 7. 73

print contexts for emergent African American writing.55 Thus, I am in agreement with Warren’s point that antebellum African American writing

(and its sense of a collective tradition) is quite distinct from African

American writing in the twentieth century, but the twentieth-century expectation of a coherent and distinct literature is exactly the opposite of what obtained in the antebellum period, and it therefore should not be surprising that it cannot be aligned through this value.

Indeed, my chapter ends with a self-designated, “Anglo-African” periodical and the construction of an “Anglo-African” public that in 1859 performed the consolidating work of establishing an “Afric-American” aesthetic and political tradition that was at once retrospective and prospective. The importance of this text, however, lies less in its implicit challenge to Warren’s periodization and more in its disclosure that the material fact of this archive’s incoherence, comprised as it was from discontinuous and ephemeral print, proved generative of a speculative tradition of reading across publics, ephemeral media, and time that was crucial to its self-conception of an “Afric-American” tradition. Viewed in this light, Warren’s attention to the was-ness of African American literature should encourage us to reconsider the was-ness of Wheatley, as well as the seeming obsolescence of her occasional verse, its media and publics. What I aim to show further in this chapter is that the fact of

Wheatley’s obsolescence has been an important part of her reception all

55 See Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” American Literary History 17.4 (2005): 714-740. 74

along, especially because that obsolescence was an important and obvious part of the media (newspapers and broadsides) through which Wheatley’s occasional verse first circulated. But in contrast to Warren’s emphasis,

Wheatley’s was-ness in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not mean an end to the viability of Wheatley’s occasions or publics. Far from it, since the history of reading Wheatley—and therefore, arguably, the history of African American poetry in print—was always already about that wasness.

III. Wheatley and/as 1830s Abolitionist Print

In Abolition’s Public Sphere (2003), Robert Fanuzzi has argued that

“New England abolitionists hoped to create a deliberately anachronistic public sphere” that would “counterpois[e] … an eighteenth-century theory of libertarian politics and a republican standard of citizenship” to the contemporary “freewheeling, fractious public sphere of Jacksonian political culture.”56 According to Fanuzzi, “[t]he function of … this politics of anachronism was to mediate between distinct historical eras so that successive visions of the American republic could be brought to bear on each other” and ultimately show “the manifest irony of their historical comparisons” when measured against the abuses of liberty and revolution- era ideals that frequently corrupted the present moment and the popular

56 Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xv. 75

print debate over slavery.57 William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator were at the forefront of this “deliberately anachronistic,” print-centric practice of abolition, and throughout 1832 The Liberator serially reprinted

Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) alongside contemporary abolitionist verse.

Wheatley was an ideal figure and her neoclassical verse an ideal set of texts for Garrison's reconstruction of an eighteenth-century public sphere. As David Waldstreicher has argued, Wheatley and her published book of verse presented her republican contemporaries with a ready-made argument for abolition.58 By recirculating Wheatley’s verse in 1832,

Garrison extended that argument, or what Waldstreicher calls “the

Wheatleyan moment,” to the Jacksonian era, but he also created the opportunity for recognizing Wheatley and her occasional verse anew--as a revolutionary, diachronic figure of print herself, a contemporary of George

Washington, who corresponded with her, and Benjamin Franklin, who

57 Ibid, xvi-xvii. Moreover, these New England abolitionists, in Fanuzzi's view, out-idealized the eighteenth-century Anglo-European model of the (white, male) bourgeois public sphere theorized by Habermas since the “million abolitionist tracts and newspapers blanketing the nation […] signified the prospect of an indiscriminately composed public sphere and the threat of full civic participation by disenfranchised Americans,” whether literate or illiterate, citizens or non-citizens (xii-xiii). Like many other abolitionists of his era, Garrison held an enormous faith in the ideological agency of print, such that he measured the progress of the abolition movement through the circulation numbers of his newspaper. As a contemporary abolitionist declared in Right and Wrong in Massachusetts (Boston, 1839): “[t]hose who can be induced to Read, will most assuredly be abolitionized, and THOROUGHLY converted.” Ibid, xi- xii. 58 Waldstreicher describes the “Wheatleyan moment” as being akin to the “Mansfieldian moment” in British abolitionist history. See Waldstreicher, “The Wheatleyan Moment,” 533. 76

visited her in London, in addition to a set of texts that indexed the multiple, printed occasions of Wheatley's verse and the multiple, historical publics that verse had come to address in the years since 1773. In this way,

Wheatley’s occasional verse as much as Wheatley as a figure of print articulated for The Liberator the layered, diachronic, and printed temporalities that Garrison hoped to enact within the abolitionist public sphere.

Much like Garrison’s deliberately anachronistic project, the print temporalities that I have traced in the cases of Wheatley’s first publication,

“On Messrs Hussey and Coffin” in 1767 and the circulation of her funeral elegy for the Rev. George Whitefield in 1770 trouble the notion that colonial newsprint in the American context produced the modern experience of “simultaneity” or “empty, homogenous time,” a concept popularized by Benedict Anderson’s work with print capitalism and derived, in part, from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of

History.”59 Homi Bhabha and other postcolonial critics have argued against Anderson’s conception of the modern experience of temporality especially as it relates to questions of genre and its deployment in the realist novel: according to these critics, the realist novel—the other

59 For Anderson, “what Benjamin calls Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present,” is “an idea of simultaneity […] wholly alien to our own.” Moreover, “[w]hat has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of 'homogenous, empty time,' in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.” See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso Books, 1983), 24. 77

mechanism of print capitalism that functions alongside and in concert with the daily newspaper in Anderson’s account—“articulates competing orders of time,” rather than “homogenous empty time,” and further that the “‘breakdown of a single, enforceable chronology stands as one of the most powerful challenges to the sovereignty of the state.’”60 Lloyd Pratt has extended this critique to the nineteenth-century American context and argued that “however much this period's writing may seem to anticipate a uniform national destiny emerging from the narrowing down of future possibility that the American ideology of progress envisions, the very same literature articulates at the level of form a modernity defined by not one but several distinct temporal dispositions.” For as Pratt continues to explain, “any literary genre (re)introduces into the present […] the anachronistic temporalities” of previous iterations of that genre.61 Along these lines, the reprinting of Wheatley's occasional verse provided an amplified experience of the anachronism available through the reiteration of particular verse genres that Pratt has in mind as well as the anachronism of public address that Garrison intended for the Liberator's reading public, both through the locality and specificity of Wheatley's

60 Wai Chee Dimock and Lloyd Pratt summarize this critique in Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) and Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 8-9, quoting Dimock 74 and 129. 61 Pratt, Archives of American Time, 5. For Pratt, modernity is not about a rupture from tradition or the past; rather “modernity superadds to existing modalities of time. It is not a winnowing or a process of replacement; it involves 'superimposition' and the 'coexistence of heterogeneous times'” (26). 78

address to an occasion and public(s) now past and through the broader history of reprinting Wheatley's verse in abolitionist contexts that would have been familiar to Garrison and his readers at this time. But how might have the heterochronic and multi-media circulation of Wheatley's occasional texts informed and intersected with the self-conception and self-recognition of early African American print?

Thanks to the bibliographic labor of many librarians, historical institutions, and Wheatley scholars, we know that Wheatley's Poems on

Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was consistently reprinted across numerous editions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Following its 1773 publication in London, three editions were published in

Philadelphia (1774, 1786, 1787); one in Albany (1793): one in Walpole,

New Hampshire (1802); one in Hartford, Connecticut (1804); and one in

London and New England (1816).62 The degree to which knowledge of

Wheatley and her verse saturated the broader transatlantic print public sphere is likewise visible in the numerous, printed instances in which

Wheatley and her verse were marshaled to defend, or contradict in

Jefferson's case, the actual and potential merits of black intellectual and

62 See Edward D. Seeber's “Phillis Wheatley,” The Journal of Negro History 24.3 (1939), 259-262, which cites as a substantial source the bibliography of C.F. Heartman, as found in Heartman, Poems and Letters of Phillis Wheatley and Phillis Wheatley: A Critical Attempt and a Bibliography of Her Writings, with Portrait and Facsimiles (Both privately printed by the author, New York: 1915). My bibliographic survey was also aided by the staff, librarians, and catalogues of the Boston Public Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, as well as the Digital Evans project. 79

artistic achievement: Voltaire (1774),63 Jupiter Hammon (1778),64 Charles

Crawford (1784, 1790),65 George Gregory (1785),66 Dr. Joseph Ladd

(1786),67 Thomas Jefferson (1787),68 Lecointe-Marsillac (1789),69 Gilbert

Imlay (1793),70 John Gabriel Stedman (1796),71 and the Abbé Henri-

Baptiste Grégoire (1808)72 were among the earliest contributors to this

63 Voltaire, “Letter to Baron Constant de Rebecq” from Ouvres, Ed. Moland, Paris, Garnier, 1877-1885, XLVIII, 595; as quoted in Seeber, “Phillis Wheatley,” 260. 64 For more on Jupiter Hammon's broadside poem, “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley, Ethiopian Poetess in Boston...,” as well as Hammon’s reading of Wheatley through the historical abstraction of the Poetess, see Virginia Jackson, “The Poet as Poetess” in Kerry Larson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011), 54-75. 65 See Crawford, Observations upon Negro-Slavery (Philadelphia, 1784), 5-7 and Observations upon Negro-Slavery. A New Edition (Philadelphia, 1790) 20, 24-26; as quoted in Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 198-199. 66 See George Gregory, Essays Historical and Moral (London, 1785), 300; as quoted in Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 199. 67 See Joseph Brown Ladd, “The Prospect of America. Inscribed to His Excellency General Washington” in The Poems of Arouet (Charleston, South Carolina, 1786), 22; as quoted in Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 198. See also Seeber, “Phillis Wheatley,” 260, which describes the 1832 reprint published in New York as The Literary Remains of Joseph Brown Ladd, M.D., Collected by his Sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Haskins, of Rhode Island (New York, 1832), 35. 68 Jefferson, “Query XIV,” from Notes on the State of Virginia (first published in English in London, 1787); see Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. Frank Shuffelton. New York: Penguin, 1999. [Format Citation], and Jefferson's correspondent in Notes 69 Lecointe-Marsillac, Le More-Lack (Londres et Paris, 1789), 169; as quoted in Seeber, “Phillis Wheatley,” 261. 70 See Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (New York, 1793), 185-186; as quoted in Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 200. 71 See John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (London, 1796), 259-60; as quoted in Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 200. 72 See Henri Grégoire, De la littérature des nègres, ou Reserches sur leurs facultés intellectuelles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature (Paris, 1808) and An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties of 80

discourse. Wheatley and her verse were further interpellated into burgeoning, transatlantic arguments for the abolition of slavery, a practice that began as early as Thomas Clarkson's quotation of her Poems in his

Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African published in London in 178673 and that also included reprinting the entire volume of her Poems as an appendix to transatlantic captivity narratives, as was the case in The Negro Equalled by few

Europeans. Translated from the French. To which are added, Poems on

Various Subjects, Moral and Entertaining; by Phillis Wheatley, Negro

Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New-England (1801)74 and

Negroes (Philadelphia, 1810), trans. David Bailie Warden, who was American consul in Paris at the time; as quoted in Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 102-103. Minardi notes that “the republican Grégoire actively supported the Haitian Revolution” and was thought, by some planters, to have “inspir[ed] the Saint-Domingue uprising in 1791” (102). Grégoire's Enquiry also inspired or provided source material for multiple iterations of the biographies and anthologies of negroes of note and distinction that proliferated across the “literature of the anti-slave trade movement, and subsequently in the writings of antebellum abolitionists and black historians and ethnologists” (103). Accordingly, the Enquiry became “one of the most commonly used sources for American opponents of slavery,” as demonstrated in the anthologies, Edward Dorr Griffin, A Plea for Africa (New York, 1817) and Abigail Field Mott, Biographical Sketches and Interesting Anecdotes of Persons of Color (New York, 1826), whose entry on Wheatley was later reprinted in The Liberator (1832). 73 See Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (London 1786), 175; as quoted in Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 199. Carretta notes that Clarkson's essay introduced Wheatley and her verse to “Cugoano and Equiano, both of whom were very familiar with his Essay.” 74 Joseph Lavallée, Marquis de Bois-Robert, The Negro Equalled by few Europeans... (Philadelphia, 1801, 2 vols.). Wheatley's volume is reprinted in full, including the numerous paratexts and front-matter, beginning on page 167 of the second volume. According to Seeber, the novel was printed 81

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olandah [Sic] Equiano, or

Gustavas Vassa, the African. Written by himself … to which are added

Poems on Various Subjects by Phillis Wheatley (1813).75 Another notable antislavery text that was once part of William Garrison's library was

Thomas Branagan's A Preliminary Essay on the Oppression of the Exiled

Sons of Africa (1804), which reprinted Wheatley's “Thoughts on the

Works of Providence” and aimed to “pave the way for the publication of a poem on a slavery; a work of considerable magnitude, in which [Branagan] has been employed for some years.”76

Less well known to us, but likely just as important (if not more familiar) to the urban black readers who read Wheatley in the Liberator throughout 1832, were the “Bobalition” broadsides that mocked African

American political celebration and expression through the malapropisms and dialect writing of supposed black communications as well as the

in English throughout 1791 in The American Museum magazine. See Seeber, “Phillis Wheatley,” 260. 75 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative.... (Halifax, 1813); as quoted in Seeber, “Phillis Wheatley,” 260. 76 See Thomas Branagan, A Preliminary Essay.... (Philadelphia: John W. Scott Publisher, 1804), 5. The Boston Public Library holds Garrison's copy of this text. Branagan, as the title page relates, was a “Late Slave-trader from Africa, and Planter from Antigua; who, from conscientious motives, relinquished a lucrative situation in that island; and now from a deep sense of duty, publishes to the world the tragical scenes, of which he was a daily spectator, and in which he was unhappily concerned” (5). Branagan provides a fourteen-page selection from his manuscript poem, written in heroic couplets but with a tone and political orientation decidedly after Wheatley. Branagan's selection ends, for instance, with the following lines: “Wide o'er the world their character has spread; / Disgrac'd their country, and disgrac'd the dead, / Who fought for freedom, and for freedom bled. / Their hypocritic villainy proclaim: / Oh, sing their guilt, my muse, ---- inglorious fame! / For yet more woes their tragic acts inspire, / T'attune with energetic verse the mournful lyre” (50). 82

caricatures of an exemplary black society epitomized in the “Offisairs” and

“Marshals” of the “Africum Shocietee” and the oft-featured characters,

Phillis and Pompey. As other scholars have noted, naming the character

“Phillis” was not an accidental choice since these broadsides emerged in

Boston in 1816, a year when Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects,

Religious and Moral was newly reprinted, and since they took particular aim at Wheatley's verse and cultural aspirations; in one exemplary instance, a broadside reimagined Phillis as taking part in the disreputable scene of a recent “Dreadful Riot on Negro Hill” and relating that event in a letter of verses written in, as this Phillis describes it, “de langrage of Massa

Pope and Milton.”77

While the Bobalition broadsides indexed a particularly ugly

77 See John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 378-392. For the connections between the Bobalition broadsides and Phillis Wheatley, see Sweet, Bodies Politic, 379, 382; and Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 108-111. For the broader context of early African American political celebrations and their representation in print, including the Bobalition broadsides, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 328-348. See also, the broadside Dreadful Riot on Negro Hill! (Boston, 1816), held by the Library Company of Philadelphia; as quoted in Sweet, Bodies Politic, 378. According to Sweet, “other variations” of this broadside “were printed in Boston in 1827 [held by the Library of Congress] and after a riot in 1828 [held by the Boston Public Library] and in New York in 1832.” Other broadsides that feature Phillis and Pompey include: Grand Bobalition of Slavery ([Boston, 1819?]), John Hay Library, Brown University, in which Phillis is addressed through a romantic song, “Phillis, Rose of de Hill,” and Hard Scrabble, or Miss Philises Bobalition (Boston, [1825]), which sets its verses to the popular tune “O Dear, What Can the Matter Be?”; as quoted in Sweet, Bodies Politic, 378-79. 83

iteration of Wheatley as a ready-made exemplar for nineteenth-century black political and cultural mobility as well as the circulation of early

African American print, these broadsides also underscored the different meanings of anachronistic print in this moment. For if, as Fanuzzi has argued, Garrison's anachronistic construction of abolition's public sphere hoped, through its untimeliness, to overcome the inertia that had settled around the revolutionary discourse and politics undermined by the founding fathers themselves on the issue of slavery, then it must also be said that the Bobalition broadsides attempted to render as absurd the rhetorical and political possibilities of a black public life and discourse that also looked back to the unfinished revolutions and cultural stylings of the eighteenth century.78 With this print context in view, the optimism

Garrison seems to have held for an anachronistically constructed public sphere would have been qualified by the black experience of seeing their public life in print reflected back to them as a kind of laughable anachronism. This is not to say that the thinking behind the Bobalition broadsides prevailed and that anachronism became a style or mode of address deployed by white abolitionists alone; rather it is to say that stylized anachronism was an increasingly complicated rhetorical notion for black readers, writers, and orators and that its potential efficacy

78 For an exceptional study of the way belle lettres, printed discourse, and private societies were mutually constitutive of each other in eighteenth- century, colonial America, see David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Shields' work on the printed representations of club life is particularly appropriate for the cultural and celebratory forms and traditions depicted and satirized in the Bobalition broadsides. 84

depended considerably upon the public and audience who heard, read, or overheard and implicitly answered its address. What might have been a deliberate choice for Garrison, then, was something of a double bind for his contemporary black writers and orators, who, much like Wheatley, were encouraged to perform and model, in part for its relative degree of difficulty, the decorum, civility, and eloquence that had defined the public discourse and belles lettres of an earlier, Augustan age. Refusing to do so would have confirmed in the minds of their critics an inferior intellectual capacity, while doing so provided fodder for their satirization, whereby a stylized anachronism represented one more malapropism of black public life.

What the Bobalition broadsides got right about black discourse in this moment, in the midst of attempting to obscure, speak for, and belittle it, was that black print was increasingly organized around public occasions, ceremonies, and orations that commemorated the signal and potentially still-revolutionary events of the past in the ephemeral media of pamphlets, tracts, and broadsides. The abolition of the American slave trade (January 1, 1808) was one such event, and the one that gave the

Bobalition broadsides their name.79 Celebrated on a different day in

79 See Waldstreicher, Perpetual Fetes, 328-332. According to Waldstreicher, the “first recorded black nationalist celebration took place in New York City on July 5, 1800” to commemorate “the state's Gradual Emancipation Act (which would eventually free slaves born after July 4, 1799)” (328). In Boston, July 14 marked the day that the slave trade ended in Great Britain, Denmark, and the United States (329). January 1, 1808, was the day that the “abolition of the United States slave trade had taken 85

Boston (July 14) than in Philadelphia and New York City (January 1), the parades, ceremonies, oratories, prayers, toasts, and songs that commemorated this event often had national aspirations even though they were still localized performances in practice and in print.80

In addition to documenting the publication of many of these black orations commemorating abolition day throughout the early 1800s,

Waldstreicher has relayed a particularly salient performance by William

Hamilton on January 1, 1809, that emphasized the significance as well as the inadequacy of the printed record of these celebrations and orations.

While giving his speech, Hamilton held up for his audience to see what he called “'a specimen of African genius': a copy of the last year's printed oration,” saying: “'If we continue to produce specimens like these, we shall soon put our enemies to the blush; abashed and confounded they shall quit the field, and no longer urge their superiority of souls.'”81 What

Hamilton and other black nationalists and abolitionists like him were working toward was a self-reflexive print discourse, but as this anecdote makes clear, the format and temporality of circulation of the annually printed pamphlet did not provide the degree of reflexivity and familiarity that frequently and punctually circulated newsprint did. Thus, while the dialect of the Bobalition broadsides attempted to mark “black” print as

effect,” and “after 1804,” this date coincided with the “anniversary of Haitian independence” (329). 80 Likewise the experience of abolition happened within a local temporal and juridical realm for particular New England states. 81 Waldstreicher, Perpetual Fetes, 343, quoting Hamilton, An Address, in Porter, ed., Early Negro Writing, 37. 86

hopelessly and literally alienated from the norms of (white) printed discourse, the more subtle and cutting barb extended from the related fictions of their transmission and mode of address--that is, as texts that were only available to be read and circulated because they were intercepted and printed (by whites) as overheard. In other words, as printed broadsides, these letters, verses, songs, and toasts were fictitiously remediated in such a way that they could only be read as overheard, and the consequent association between “black” print and an alienated, overheard address was harder to dismiss than the obviously false caricatures of black public life and its printed discourse represented by the broadsides. Whether read by black and white readers who could have rejected the obvious falsities of these texts and images or read by others who took pleasure in their “callousness and prejudice,” either orientation to these broadsides produced a similar recognition that there really was no black public that could directly “hear” or “answer” these texts.82 In producing the conspicuous absence of a consistently circulating black public, the Bobalition broadsides underscored a galling truth about black print despite the obvious falseness of their caricatures: without a larger and more frequently circulated print presence the conjoined figurations of black print and its public were easily manipulated and distorted.

82 Sweet reads these broadsides as “part of a new cult of racial insensibility, which instead of spurning callousness and prejudice—as antislavery activists urged—took pleasure in them.” See Sweet, Bodies Politic, 381. Though slightly more sympathetic than their antecedents, the series of Reply broadsides fictitiously written as the African response to the Bobalition broadsides confirmed and completed the idea that there was no black public that could answer the abuse of these broadsides. 87

Moreover, the drawback that Fanuzzi has noted with respect to the anachronistic imaginary of the abolitionist public sphere was also true for the emergent black authored and addressed print discourse that, much like Hamilton's oration, circulated through ephemeral formats that simultaneously reflected and yet could not overcome the significant material gaps and silences that characterized their print record within this moment: accordingly black and “abolitionist publicity … could posit the existence of a public only in relation to an event already occurred, a condition that ensured the belatedness and even the irrelevance of the abolition movement…,” as well as the significantly ephemeral presence of an occasionally constructed African American print public.83 In this way, the constitutive features of black print and abolitionist discourse overlapped to a significant extent, but while the two often shared the collective burden of opposing and defeating slavery and prejudice, the process of black public formation was not an objective that could be equally realized within an implicitly white abolitionist discourse.

Thus, while Garrison might have hoped that in modeling The

Liberator after the first black newspapers, Freedom's Journal (1827-29) and Rights of All (1829) and securing their former subscribers, his newspaper could continue the oft-interrupted process of black public formation, the outcome was not the same.84 For even though The

83 Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere, xxvii. 84 Ibid, 105. See also, Donald M. Jacobs, Ed., Antebellum Black Newspapers: Indices to New York Freedom's Journal (1827-1829), The Rights of All (1829), The Weekly Advocate (1837), and The Colored 88

Liberator was explicitly addressed to “the people, the whole people…; every man, and every woman, and every child,” as Garrison's 1831

“Prospectus” for the newspaper had declared, and its public was meant to include the black noncitizens who comprised the bulk of its subscriber lists and readership in the early years, these black readers were interpellated into a discourse and medium with a complicated racial profile that was not quite as inclusive as its universal address purported it to be.85 Fanuzzi has aptly summarized some of these racial ironies: “The Liberator proved that a newspaper could enjoy the favor of black readers, advance the agenda of a largely white organization [, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society], agitate on behalf of freemen and the enslaved, answer to the directives of a single white man, and still be recognized as [a] colored [newspaper].”86

Additionally, there was a creeping, white paternalism at the core of The

American (1837-1841) (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976). According to the brief publication histories written by Jacobs, Freedom's Journal was published weekly in New York City from March 16, 1827 through March 28, 1829. Initially it was co-edited by the Reverend Samuel Cornish, a Presbyterian minister, and John Russwurm, a recent graduate from Bowdoin College. An editorial in the first issue declared: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations.” Cornish ceased serving as co-editor after six months. Russwurm carried on as sole editor and became increasingly interested in Liberian colonization, eventually quitting the paper to emigrate to Liberia. Freedom's Journal ceased publication with Russwurm's exit. Beginning two months later, Cornish edited and published in New York City The Rights of All in six monthly installments between May 29 and October 9, 1829, in an attempt to carry forward the project of a black newspaper that Freedom's Journal had innaugurated. See Jacobs, Antebellum Black Newspapers, 3-4; 161-62. 85 See Garrison, “Prospectus,” The Liberator (May 28, 1831), 3; as quoted in Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere, xiii. Fanuzzi notes that in 1834 Garrison relayed that “three quarters of the subscribers to The Liberator were black” (105). 86 Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere, 103. 89

Liberator's relation to its black readers and subscribing patrons: dedicated to “the people of color” who were, in Garrison's words, encouraged to think of The Liberator as “their organ,” it was written and published predominantly by whites.87 Moreover, Garrison's strategy of privileging

“moral suasion” over politics, based on the idea that “reformation of the self had to precede voting or indeed collective action in general,” meant that much of the newspaper's content was directed towards reforming white prejudice and injustice in the North as well as the South, and thus addressed to white readers rather than black readers who would not have required moral suasion on many of these issues.88 In this way, The

Liberator placed its black readers in a position curiously similar to that of the Bobalition broadsides, asking that they read as overheard many of the arguments dedicated to their advancement, funded by their subscriptions, and pointedly addressed to others even though they comprised the majority of the readership in the early years of the newspaper's circulation.

Given these broader issues and contexts of black print, the reprinting of Wheatley's verse in The Liberator was a signal event since it was, arguably, the first, predominantly black-funded “edition” of

Wheatley's Poems and since it was printed in the newsprint medium that

87 See Garrison, “Open Letter to Our Free Colored Brethren,” The Liberator (January 1, 1831), 3; as quoted in Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere, 105; and Garrison, An Address before the Free People of Color (Boston, 1831), 9; as quoted in Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere, 106. For more on the characteristic paternalism of New England abolitionists, including Garrison, see Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 84-124. 88 Laurie, Beyond Garrison, 2. 90

mattered most to the formation and self-recognition of a black reading public, even if that newsprint was asymmetrically “colored.” Indeed, the long and (thanks to the prefatory documents that continued to be reprinted within the subsequent editions of her Poems) highly-visible history of the structural, political, and racial restrictions that first circumscribed Wheatley's circulation could inform and reflect ironically upon the similarly complicated and racialized construction of black print and its public within The Liberator. One of the telling and ironic correspondences between Wheatley's initial circulation and the later emergence of a black reading public in The Liberator began with “To

Maecanas,” the lead poem in Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects,

Religious and Moral and the first poem reprinted in The Liberator.89

When first printed, this ode of praise and gratitude reflected Wheatley's playful and clever deference to the patronage system that had brought her volume of verse to the London book market, but circulated again in 1832, the ode would have made visible an ironic correspondence between

Wheatley's now anachronistic patronage network and the paternalism of the white abolitionist movement.

89 The Liberator began recirculating Wheatley’s poems on February 11, 1832. One week later a brief biographical sketch of Wheatley from Abigail Mott’s Biographical Sketches and Interesting Anecdotes of Persons of Colour (1826) was reprinted next to Wheatley’s “On Virtue.” Beyond the columns reproduced from Mott, The Liberator made no other attempts to locate Wheatley historically. Her byline eventually came to read in subsequent weekly publications, “By Phillis Wheatley, An African Slave,” and the remainder of her poems from the 1773 volume were printed alongside contemporary abolitionist verse for the rest of that year. There were two interruptions to this routine: June 16-June 30 and August 4, 1832. 91

While I have been emphasizing the material and discursive realities that impeded the realization of a contemporary black print public in the

1830s, it was also the case that these limitations encouraged a historiographical understanding of early black print and its public that were not limited to or defined by the singular, contemporary moment of its initial circulation.90 Wheatley's recirculation throughout 1832 was one exemplary instance of an emergent diachronic understanding of Afric-

American print that was both retrospective and prospective in its import.

“To Maecenas” is again illustrative of this turn in thinking about

Wheatley's initial circulation and its later nineteenth-century circulation among an increasingly organized and self-interested black reading public.

The fungibility of direct address when mediated by print is made clear when we begin to think about the patrons that Wheatley might have initially meant to address in “To Maecenas,” the ode of praise and gratitude that opens Wheatley's 1773 Poems on Various Subjects,

Religious and Moral. Wheatley's dedication of her volume of poems to the

Countess Huntingdon, not to mention the role that Huntingdon played in securing the volume's publication, makes Selina Hastings the likeliest candidate for the honor of Maecenas, but addressing her patron through this historically mediated and gendered figure also meant ironically (or awkwardly) addressing Hastings as masculine, a “great Sir” whose

90 For more on the historiographic impulse in antebellum African American print, see the compelling argument and evidence advanced in John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 92

“paternal rays” Wheatley hopes will continue to “defend [her] lays.”91 John

Wheatley occupies another privileged place within Wheatley's volume of poems and serves as an alternate addressee of “To Maecenas”: the phrase

“Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston,” both frames Wheatley's portrait and competes for ownership of the volume on the title page, in addition to the actual defense of her “lays” and education that he provided in the biographical note that accompanied her poems in book format.92 Mather Byles, Boston poet, minister, and possible tutor to

Wheatley, has also been considered the addressee of the poem.93 Finally,

91 See Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, John C. Shields, Ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 12. Gaius Cilnius Maecenas was an advisor to the first Emperor of Rome and patron to Horace and Virgil, among other Augustan poets. Carretta notes that despite the arguments made in the past for Mather Byles and John Wheatley as Maecenas, the Countess of Huntingdon is more likely the poem's addressee since “[t]he closing request that 'Maecenas' 'defend my lays' echoes the hope Wheatley expressed in her 27 July 1773 letter to the countess that through her patronage 'my feeble efforts will be shielded from the severe trials of unpitying Criticism.'” Carretta also makes the point that as a widow, Hastings' wealth and power would have been equivalent to the more typically male patrons. See Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 106. 92 Julian D. Mason has suggested John Wheatley as Maecenas. See Mason, ed., The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 3. See also, Mary Louise Kete, who argues that Maecenas stood “in for all of Wheatley's patrons: John Wheatley but also the group of the 'most respectable Characters in Boston' who so famously judged her as 'qualified' to have written these poems; Kete, “The Reception of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry,” in Kerry Larson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011), 21. On the complications of patronage and print, as well as ownership and authorship, Roger Chartier has noted that sixteenth and seventeenth-century patrons and publishers were often credited as co-owners of the works and writers they supported or printed. See Chartier, The Order of Books, 46. 93 See John Shields, “Phillis Wheatley and Mather Byles: A Study in Literary Relationship,” CLA 23.4 (1980): 377-90, which ultimately 93

the poem closely aligns reading with the act of writing, and as Susanna and her daughter, Mary Wheatley, most directly encouraged and oversaw

Phillis Wheatley's education, they, too, could be considered addressees of the poem.94 Thus, where we might want or expect to discover a singular addressee hailed by the singular historical referent of Maecenas, we instead find a number of patrons playfully invoked through this stylized moment of direct address mediated most pointedly through the elevated market of London book-print.

In other words, this proliferation of addressees was not accidental and Wheatley's stylized address to “Maecenas,” in fact, anticipated a different print context and extended circulation than what had previously been achieved by her patronage network's circulation of her manuscript verse as well as the newsprint and broadside publication of her verse. In contrast to Wheatley's direct address to the Countess Huntingdon first pronounced in her Whitefield elegy broadside (“Great COUNTESS! We

Americans revere / Thy name, and thus condole thy grief sincere: / We mourn with thee, that TOMB obscurely plac'd, / In which thy Chaplain undisturb'd doth rest” [ll. 45-48]) and later sent along with a letter directly addressed to Huntingdon, the book-printed context for “To Maecenas” and the stylization of its direct address could play at the very proliferation

advocates for reading the Maecenas figure as “a conflation of both Byles and Pope,” given the increasingly obvious borrowings from Pope in the final stanza of Wheatley's poem. See also, Shields, ed., The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 276-277. 94 For details of Wheatley's education, see Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 37- 44. 94

of possible addressees that I have outlined. This proliferation of possible addressees was further extended by the 1832 printing of “To Maecenas” in

The Liberator. In this later instance, both Garrison and the newspaper’s black readership would be implied as patrons, with each possibility reflecting ironically upon the other.

Published in book format in 1773, “To Maecenas” skillfully dispensed with the task of declaring Wheatley's inexperience only to performatively transcend it. In its third stanza, for instance, the poem declares with regret and humility:

O could I rival thine and Virgil's page,

Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage;

Soon the same beauties should my mind adorn,

And the same ardors in my soul should burn:

Then should my song in bolder notes arise,

And all my numbers pleasingly surprise;

But here I sit, and mourn a grov'ling mind

That fain would mount and ride upon the wind. (ll. 23-30),

However, by the penultimate stanza, that once “grov’ling mind” finds a precocious triumph in the thought that virtue and distinction might just be available for the taking and thus circulate down as well as up the hierarchical chains that connected poets to patrons:

Thy virtues, great Maecenas! Shall be sung

In praise of him, from whom those virtues sprung:

While blooming wreaths around thy temples spread, 95

I'll snatch a laurel from thine honour'd head,

While you indulgent smile upon the deed. (ll. 43-47)

In one sense, this rehearsal of Wheatley’s progression from a state of relative inexperience as a poet to one of evident mastery of the Augustan figures and neoclassical stylings that saturate this poem echoed the terms and the temporality of the acculturation process John Wheatley described in his biographical note appended to Wheatley's Poems.95 But viewed from the vantage of the 1832 publication of the poem in The Liberator, we might also see that in “snatch[ing] a laurel from thine honour’d head,”

Wheatley has set the example of rewriting the paternalistic, paratexts that framed not only her work but also the larger publishing contexts of (black) abolitionist print and The Liberator, in particular.

If, as I have been arguing, Wheatley’s stylized form of direct address in “To Maecenas” was designed to accommodate multiple addressees across an extended, transatlantic circulation in 1773, then we might also recognize its utility in addressing a future public of black readers in 1832 and inflecting that poem’s reading with a renewed sense of urgency and

95 In this letter sent to the London publishers, Messrs. Cox and Berry, and printed as an opening paratext to Wheatley's Poems, John Wheatley emphasized the stunning rapidity of Wheatley's acculturation, writing: “Without any Assistance from School Education, and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time from her Arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her. As to her Writing, her own Curiosity led her to it; and this she learnt in so short a Time, that in the Year 1765 [four years after her arrival in Boston and approximately twelve years old], she wrote a Letter to the Rev. Mr. Occom, the Indian minister, while in England.” See Shields, Collected Works, 6. 96

relevance. In this publishing context of 1832, Wheatley’s historical invocation of the Roman playwright of African descent, Terence, who was once a slave and eventually freed because of his literary accomplishments, stood as an untimely presentiment of Wheatley’s own standing in 1832 as the notable first within the “rolls” of an emergent, belletristic tradition of black writing in the American context.96 As Wheatley writes:

The happier Terence all the choir inspir'd,

His soul replenish'd, and his bosom fir'd;

But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace,

To one alone of Afric's sable race;

From age to age transmitting thus his name

With the first glory in the rolls of fame? (ll. 37-42)

Here Wheatley neatly exposes the stinging singularity of exemplary figures like Terence and herself. Though one could emulate their learning and strive toward their accomplishments, their power as exemplars hinged upon the relative impossibility of replicating those achievements on a mass scale. In this way, Wheatley was at once the exemplar of the black uplift narrative that was gaining ground in abolitionist print discourse of the 1830s and a critical voice against its general application.

96 Radiclani Clytus’ foundational account of William J. Wilson’s belletrism argues for a more thorough appraisal of the performative styles that shaped the political and literary substance of antebellum black print and self-fashioning. Wheatley is certainly a source and inspiration for Wilson’s belletrism, if not also the foundational figure for Wilson’s understanding of the history of “Afric-American” print. I return to this issue in the fifth section of this chapter. See Radiclani Clytus, “Visualizing in Black Print: The Brooklyn Correspondence of William J. Wilson aka ‘Ethiop,’” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 6.1 (Spring 2018), 29-66. 97

IV. Wheatley In / As the Media of Memoria

In 1834, George W. Light published Memoir and Poems of Phillis

Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave in Boston. This edition reproduced the features of Wheatley’s 1773 edition, including the paratexts of the earlier volume, the “Dedication” to Countess Huntingdon, the

“Preface,” “Mr. Wheatley’s Letter to the Publisher,” and the printer’s note

“To the Public,” along with a lithograph reproduced from Wheatley’s 1773 image. A new “Introduction” and “Memoir” were written for this edition, and the volume was dedicated to the “Friends of the Africans.”97 The 1834 introduction makes the case that Wheatley’s exemplarity, her “talents and virtues,” should inspire those who find themselves “in the lowest condition of humanity,” which is to say, living under the condition of slavery and/or the “fetter[s]” of racial “prejudice.”98 Wheatley figures here as an early representative of the uplift narrative, which promised that “the Negro” would be a slave no more, once “acquainted with the wealth of his own spirit—his own strength—and his own rights,” exemplified through

97 See, Phillis Wheatley, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave (Boston: Geo. W. Light, 1834). Max Cavitch reports important bibliographic information about the 1830s recirculation of Wheatley’s Poems, including Margaretta Matilda Odell’s biography of Wheatley, which was appended to two editions of Wheatley’s Poems published in 1834 and one in 1838, thanks to the efforts of abolitionist print workers William Lloyd Garrison, Isaac Knapp, and George Light. See Cavitch, “The Poetry of Phillis Wheatley in Slavery’s Recollective Economies, 1773 to the Present,” in Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America, ed. Cécile Cottenet (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 210- 230. 98 Wheatley, Memoir and Poems, 5. 98

Wheatley’s acquisitions of mind and, likewise, that white prejudice, the

“poisonous,” residual effect of “slavery on public sentiment,” could be overcome through the “unvarnished record of African genius.” The introduction argues that happiness, spirit, strength, and rights stem from access to education and it therefore urges: “Let the coffers of science be unlocked to the African. Give him free access to the treasures of knowledge,” and accordingly, the mind that “is [the] most developed, enlarged and improved” is sure to possess “the greatest capacities for happiness.”99

And yet, as much as Wheatley provided the “Friends of the

Africans” with an historical precedent for being optimistic about the contemporary “amelioration of the condition” through education and reform, she was also made to represent the fragility and fleetingness of historical memory within a culture that had so quickly forgotten its own historical ties to the slave trade. According to the introduction, “the stain of slavery has long been erased from the annals of New-England. The groan of the African is not heard among her beautiful hills, nor the whip of the task-master in her pleasant valleys.”100 Wheatley serves, however paradoxically, as a historically recoverable connection to that early slave history in New England as well as a figure for the very erasure of that history. Moreover, the “Memoir” extends this treatment of Wheatley as a figure of exemplarity and ephemeral history and reads these retrospective

99 Ibid., 6. 100 Ibid., 5. 99

traits (most curiously) as characteristics that Wheatley herself embodied.

The memoir argues that much like New England’s fleeting relation to its slave-owning past, “the waters of oblivion are rapidly erasing

[Wheatley’s] name from the sands of time” and that “[h]ere and there we find a solitary pilgrim, belonging to the days of the years that are gone, treasuring Phillis’s poems as a precious relic. But when they shall have passed away, who will remember her?”101 However strange and unlikely this idea might appear to us—that historical memory must be transmitted through a living, personal connection to that history—it was, nonetheless, an idea consistently applied throughout this memoir, as well as a common measure of historical distance and living memory throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though the memoir was published anonymously, its author, Margaretta Matilda Odell, described herself as “a collateral descendent of Mrs. [Susanna] Wheatley” and one “familiar with the name and fame of Phillis from her childhood,” and thereby attached the authority of her memoir to the living memory of familial history.102 Of course, Wheatley’s consistent circulation through abolitionist discourse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries makes Odell’s direct question (“who will remember her?”) the wrong one to ask.103 And yet, the

101 Ibid., 24. 102 Ibid., 29. 103 Cavitch calls Odell’s impression “out of date,” since “Wheatley had begun to emerge from the reliquary imagination of ‘years that are gone’ to enter the progressive, incorporationist [that is to say, anti-colonialist] imagination—and publishing marketplace—of the new abolition” two years earlier with The Liberator’s reprinting of Wheatley’s verse in 1832. Moreover, that reprinting history was clearly an inspiration to George 100

more implicit question that Odell raises regarding the value of Wheatley’s poems once they could no longer be read through the mode of direct address--that is by Wheatley’s original and now increasingly historical audience--is also what redeems and motivates the strangest details of this memoir.

That Odell imagines the value of Wheatley’s poems dying with her historically contemporary audience tells us, most importantly, that Odell was reading Wheatley’s occasional verse through the normative mode of direct address, and that, because this mode, to Odell’s way of thinking, could not address readers in 1834 as it had in Wheatley’s day, the occasional verse genres that characterized Wheatley’s surviving body of work presented Odell with the problem of their obvious obsolescence in a volume committed to explaining Wheatley’s contemporary relevance. It should also be said that the form of occasional verse and the mode of direct address were still normative and relevant in Odell’s day. Thus, it was not the form or the mode of address that produced the problem of obsolescence so much as the historical particularity of Wheatley’s occasional verse and the audience she addressed. Odell’s memoir shows this strain most concretely when it describes a “peculiar” attribute of

Light’s 1834 edition of her verse—and should have been very familiar to Odell, since Light’s edition was the first to publish Odell’s Wheatley memoir. Ultimately, in Cavitch’s view, the flourishing of Wheatley reprintings throughout the 1830s reflected how Wheatley’s “valorized” “traditionality” served the contemporary moment, offering a logic and method for incorporationist views on abolition, such that Wheatley’s learning and “traditionality” were the grounds for establishing “black character and authority in the present.” See Cavitch, “The Poetry of Phillis Wheatley,” 216 and 220. 101

Wheatley’s mind. According to Odell’s intimate and familial sources,

Wheatley did not “have the power of retaining the creations of her own fancy, for a long time, in her own mind. If, during the vigil of a wakeful night, she amused herself by weaving a tale, she knew nothing of it in the morning.”104 Such a trait strains belief, as Odell herself acknowledges, but she remained committed to it as fact, leaving her readers to “draw their own inferences” once she had demonstrated her own.105 Along these lines,

Odell hesitates to say that Wheatley’s memory was flawed, for one could not “have made such progress in various branches of knowledge, if she had not possessed a retentive memory--and still less, that she could have succeeded in the attainment of one of the dead languages. We are rather inclined to refer the fact […] to some peculiar structure of mind--possibly to its activity--perhaps occasioned by lack of early discipline--one fancy thrusting forth another, aad [sic] occupying its place.” And yet, as Odell continues to deliberate, “the difficulty still remains, that she could not recall those fancies. Most persons are aware that, by a mental effort, […] they can recall scenes and events long since forgotten; but Phillis does not seem to have possessed this power, as it respects her own productions, -- for we believe this singularity to have affected her own thoughts only, and not the impressions made upon her mind by the thoughts of others, communicated by books or conversation.”106

Without necessarily conceding the fact of this trait, we should

104 Wheatley, Memoir and Poems, 15. 105 Ibid., 16. 106 Ibid. 102

recognize the importance and the prescience of Odell’s interest in what

Wheatley failed to remember. As Max Cavitch has argued in American

Elegy, Wheatley’s legacy was wrapped up in the politics of mourning. She was allowed to ascend to a certain height in social circles but also kept at the margins. As a slave she wrote from a structural position of natal alienation that was defined by what it cannot recall.107 There is, however, another way of reading Odell’s account, and that is as a reading of

Wheatley as figure for the ephemeral media and forms through which her verse circulated, but for which there were no formalized institutions or structures of preservation and memory.

A few months after the publication of Memoir and Poems of Phillis

Wheatley, George Light published a 36-page memoir of Wheatley written by B.B. Thatcher. Odell’s memoir served as the primary source material for

Thatcher’s Memoir of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and Slave.

Printed in New York and Boston, Thatcher’s memoir was directed toward helping the “condition and prospects of our colored brethren,” “especially to the young,” and it would focus this and other like-minded publications

“upon the grand object of presenting anecdotes and traits of the history, biography, capacity and condition of the race of which we speak….”108

Most significantly, Thatcher extends Odell’s interest in the erasure of slavery’s trace within what Odell called the “annals of New England,” but he suggests that that trace was more materially evident than Odell had

107 Cavitch, American Elegy, “Chapter Five: Mourning of the Disprized.” 108 B. B. Thatcher, Memoir of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave (Boston: Geo. W. Light, 1834), 3. 103

implied.

Accordingly, Thatcher urges his readers to “look up the Boston papers of that day,” where they would discover that “almost all of them, from week to week, […were…] filled with advertisements of slaves; sometimes singly, and sometimes in ‘lots’; sometimes naming them and sometimes not--to be sold, perhaps, or wanted to buy, or to be given away, or run away….”109 Thatcher goes on to give a sample of the advertisements

“in one of the old Boston papers of 1764, which is now before me as I write, a ‘likely negro boy’ published in this way to be sold, in the same advertisement with ‘a black moose, about three months old.’ Here is another, which I copy from the same paper: ‘Cesar, a negro fellow, noted in town by having no legs, is supposed to be strolling about the country. If he can be brought to the printers for one dollar, besides necessary expenses, it shall be paid.’”110 Thatcher recalls the material and newsprint traces of New England’s slave history in part to remind his readers “how short a time it is, comparatively, since respectable people, in

Massachusetts,--where we now boast so much of our freedom and our regard for the equal rights of all men—were concerned in this business of buying and selling the African like so many cattle in the stalls of a cattle- show.”111

But Thatcher is also interested in aligning that material past with

Wheatley’s earliest emergence in newsprint. As he writes,“To return to our

109 Ibid., 6. 110 Ibid., 6-7. 111 Ibid., 9. 104

little African--she was found out and purchased soon after the advertisement of her appeared (in 1761).”112 In Thatcher’s memoir,

Wheatley is at once a figure shaped by this colonial media context, and an exception to it. Unlike the subjects of the runaway ads that Thatcher reproduces, Wheatley has mastered the discourse of verse, and thereby became more than a mere subject of that discourse or that newsprint media. In both the memoirs of Odell and Thatcher, then, we see that

Wheatley’s legacy—and even more, the memory of her person—was read in close relation to the media, temporality, and genres of her occasional verse.

V. Phillis Wheatley and the “Afric-American Picture Gallery”: Picturing a

Diachronic Public among the “Ephemeral Caskets” of Early Black Print

In July of 1859, William J. Wilson (writing under his pseudonym

“Ethiop”) presented “A Head of Phillis Wheatly [sic]” as the twenty-first

“picture” in the “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” an Anglo-African

Magazine serial that imagined a gallery space—as well as the artifacts and art within—that would represent the history and achievements of “Afric-

American[s],” or as Ethiop explains to a “supercilious” and “sarcastic” visitor, the “pictures […] serve as simple reminders of what the people of color were, now are, and will yet be. What they have gone through, are

112 Ibid. 105

going through, and have yet to go through.”113 By 1859, Wheatley’s status as the first black woman—and a slave—to have a book of poems published in England and then America was a well-rehearsed fact. Her biographical information and poems were frequently printed in abolitionist publications throughout the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in 1849 Rufus Griswold published a comprehensive entry for Phillis

Wheatley Peters in his widely popular (and oft-reprinted) anthology, The

Female Poets of America. Indeed, Ethiop’s description of Wheatley’s portrait quickly gives way to a familiar rehearsal of her biographical facts and accomplishments: “Stolen at the tender age of seven years”; “ferried over in the vile slave ship from Afric’s sunny clime to the cold shores of

America”; “sold under the hammer to a Boston merchant”; and yet, “she mastered …the English language in sixteen months”; “composed her first poem at fourteen”; “became a proficient Latin scholar at seventeen”;

“published in England her book of poems dedicated to the Countess of

Huntington at nineteen”; and so on.114 At first reading, these comments appear to merely index the biographical narrative that was first appended to her poems in the prefatory material of her landmark publication, Poems

113 See William J. Wilson [Ethiop], “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” in The Anglo-African Magazine, Volume 1-1859 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 217 and 90. Subsequent citations of The Anglo-African Magazine and William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery” series refer to this 1968 facsimile reprint. See also the digitized edition of the “Picture Gallery” series and related paratextual materials, co-edited by Leif Eckstrom and Britt Rusert for Just Teach One: Early African American Print, Common-Place.org, American Antiquarian Society, http://jtoaa.common-place.org/introduction-afric-american- picture-gallery/, Fall 2015. 114 Ibid., 218. 106

on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) and later extended by the

Odell and Thatcher memoirs discussed above. But taking the whole of the

“Afric-American Picture Gallery” into consideration, Ethiop’s admission that Wheatley’s image is “both a constant charm and study” for him and

“one of the finest in the collection” points to the larger role that Wheatley

(and her extended circulation in print) played in Wilson’s conception of the gallery and the mediated history it might hope to recover.

Much like Odell, Ethiop sees in Wheatley the epitome of the uplift narrative and asks: “a chilly, dreary world before her, a chain on her feet and a thorn in her bosom, and an iron mask on her head, what chance, what opportunity was there for her to make physical, moral, or mental progress? In these respects, how get up to, or keep pace with, other and more favored people?--how get in the advance?--how ascend, at last, without a single competitor, the highest scale of human eminence?”115 In these questions, Wilson articulates the difficulty of reckoning with

Wheatley’s uncanny firstness, which as we have seen, Wheatley herself anticipated through the figure of Terence in her “To Maecenas” poem, but

115 Ibid. In his essay on William J. Wilson and his print pseudonym “Ethiop,” Clytus traces the genealogy of DuBois’ idea of the “Talented Tenth,” a cornerstone of the uplift narrative in the twentieth century, to Wilson’s notion of the “Black Aristocracy Pill” and other ideas circulating through mid-nineteenth-century periodical culture and its dynamic personalities, including Nathanial Parker Willis’ similar idea about New York’s “hereditary gentry” that he dubbed the “Upper Ten Thousand.” As Clytus reminds us, “DuBois admittedly fashioned his ‘Talented Tenth’ thesis after the activism of several black abolitionists who participated in FDP’s correspondence column and whom he also cites throughout his eponymously titled essay.” See Clytus, “Visualizing in Black Print,” 65, note 85. 107

that exemplary distinction takes on greater significance within Wilson’s gallery, which stands as one of the earliest and most provocative historiographical projects to place Wheatley at the head of an “Afric-

American” print tradition. If Odell and Thatcher suggested, however awkwardly, that Wheatley was an apt figure for thinking about an ephemeral verse, print, and/or historical culture that struggled to remember itself, then we might see in Wilson’s gallery the extension of that idea and the realization of an “Afric-American” tradition of writing refracted through the exemplary circulation of Wheatley and her work through the antebellum period.

As much as Wilson’s gallery foregrounds the art and history collected therein, his serial is also fundamentally about the historical contingencies of “Afric-American” print—its unique history of circulation, the odd temporalities of reading that circulation engendered, and the numerous publics that these recirculated texts addressed over time. This idea of a text addressing multiple or diachronic publics over time emerged, arguably, from Wilson's thinking about the starts and stops and gaps that characterized the circulation of early African American print within a periodical and ephemeral media context.116 Of course, Wheatley and her

116 For more on the continuities and discontinuities of African American print culture, see Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African American Print Culture,” American Literary History 17.4 (2005): 714-740, and Joanna Brooks, “The Unfortunates: What the Life Span of Early Black Books Tells Us About Book History,” in Early African American Print Culture, eds. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein 108

oft-reprinted occasional verse were signal instances of this larger phenomenon: the specificity of her eighteenth-century addressees and media marked a public and a moment that had clearly passed, and yet, the reprinting of this same verse across multiple media formats of the nineteenth century had the effect of renewing Wheatley’s public and the occasions it might comment upon. Indeed, the gallery and its public could be thought of as having a discontinuous, print-mediated gestation of its own, since Wilson announced his interest in black artistry and a gallery to hold these images as early as 1853. In a letter published in the March 11,

1853, issue of Frederick Douglass' Paper under Wilson's pseudonym

“Ethiop,” Wilson describes Ethiop's visit to two portrait galleries in New

York City that had reminded him of the glaring absence of “distinguished black” figures in American visual culture. The absence of positive black images (and the multitude of negative images) leads Wilson to conclude

“we must begin to tell our own story, write our own lecture, paint our own picture, chisel our own bust....”117

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012): 40-52, among other essays in that volume. 117 Wilson was a frequent contributor to Frederick Douglass' Paper, where his letters were published under the pseudonym “Ethiop” and from the vantage of Brooklyn Heights, New York. His correspondence and sketches about the goings on in New York City or “Gotham” were printed alongside (and often in conversation with) those of fellow NYC resident, James McCune Smith, who published under the pseudonym “Communipaw.” See Ethiop [William J. Wilson], “March 5, 1853, Letter to Douglass,” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, N.Y.), 11 March 1853; reprinted in The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. IV, ed. C. Peter Ripley et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 140-145. Smith's experimental sketch serial Heads of the Colored People (published in ten installments from 1852-54 in Frederick Douglass' Paper) provides 109

While this proto-installment of Wilson's gallery offers a rationale in

1853 for the ekphrastic images that Wilson would eventually construct in his 1859 “Picture Gallery” serial, another 1853 discussion in Frederick

Douglass' Paper suggests some of the impetus behind Wilson’s thinking that a durable and diachronic black public had developed out of the discontinuous past and present of African American literature and print.

In the September 23 issue of Frederick Douglass' Paper, “Dion” laments the absence of a continuous contemporary African American literature, writing that “The hopes of the coming [colored American literature]...

[are] based upon the efforts which have been made by various colored

Americans from time to time... [but] even those are not to be spoken of without regret, for they were mainly contained within the narrow limits of pamphlets or the columns of newspapers, ephemeral caskets, whose destruction entail the destruction of the gems of which they contain.”118 In keeping, then, with the material facts of an ephemeral and oft-interrupted periodical circulation, Wilson used his gallery to historicize and further theorize the mutability and durability of an “Afric-American” reading public that had transcended—and would continue to transcend—the temporal and material limits of a text's initial circulation. Wilson's

an interesting comparison to Wilson's “Picture Gallery.” See James McCune Smith, The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist, ed. John Stauffer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 185-242. 118 Cited in Douglas A. Jones, Jr., “Early Black American Writing and the Making of a Literature, a review essay,” Early American Literature 49.2 (2014): 564. See Dion, “Our Literature,” Frederick Douglass' Paper, 23 September 1853, 2. 110

representation of the curious durability of ephemeral texts and their reading publics within his gallery provides a compelling and startlingly reflexive model for thinking about the utility and history of African

American reading publics that extended beyond the financial determinisms of print markets and the initial temporalities of circulation that often define a text's historical significance in our day.119

In the earliest stages of the narrator Ethiop's encounter with the gallery, Wilson turns self-reflexive about the gallery's essential status as print. “Picture Number 1” portrays the landing of the first slaves in

“Jamestown harbor, Virginia, in 1609 [sic, 1619].”120 In popular colonial histories of the mid-nineteenth century, this event doubled as the earliest recorded purchase of “20. odd Negroes” within the British settlement and the beginning of the slave system in the American South.121 One such

119 In contrast to Michael Warner's contention that the political efficacy of a public and its discourse is directly related to the regularity and immediacy of its “temporality of circulation,” Wilson's gallery takes a longer, cumulative view of “Afric-American” print culture, its diachronic public, and its political import, revealing throughout his serial a critical ambivalence to contemporary publics and immediate politics. In so doing, Wilson's gallery complicates, along temporal lines, the print-capitalism thesis developed by Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin, Jürgen Habermas, Benedict Anderson, and Michael Warner, among others. See Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 96-97. For an overview of the print-capitalism thesis, as well as recent work that questions its suppositions, see Cohen and Stein, introduction to Early African American Print Culture, 13-16, and Sandra M. Gustafson, “American Literature and the Public Sphere,” American Literary History 20.3 (2008): 465-478. 120 Anglo-African Magazine, 53. 121 John Rolfe’s “A Letter to Sir Edwin Sandys” recorded the 1619 purchase of “20. odd Negroes.” The manuscript of the letter was archived by Magdalen College, Cambridge, and a copy of it was among the Virginia Records Manuscripts collected by Thomas Jefferson and later donated to 111

history, Henry Howe’s Historical Collections of Virginia (1852) also described this landing as the singular moment when an indelible conflation of slavery with the phenotype of black skin began.122 Wilson pointedly opposed his gallery to histories of this kind which aimed to naturalize the fictions of race through a print culture that was normatively white and racist in its thinking, what Wilson called in a later segment, the

“American prejudice Market.”123

“Picture Number 2” marks a rapid transition from the colonial origins of the American slavery system to what Wilson thought to be the primary means of refuting a racist, slaving culture and the print that undergirded it: the archive of the black periodical press. This painting, entitled “The First and the Last Colored Editor,” offers a remarkable perspective on a print culture that circulated predominantly through ephemeral media and discontinuous periodicals. As Ethiop describes it, the “Last Colored Editor” is shown to be “quite a young man,” most certainly Thomas Hamilton, the editor of the Anglo-African, who sits “in chair editorial, with the first number of the Freedom’s Journal, the first journal ever edited by, and devoted to the cause of the colored man in

the Library of Congress. See Henry Howe’s popular history, Historical Collections of Virginia (Charleston, S.C.: Wm. R. Babcock, 1852), 42 and George Tucker, Life of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 1 (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1837) 4-6. 122 Ibid. Howe’s preface helps explain the teleological impetus behind this reading of the “20. odd Negroes” when it describes one of its advantages over formal histories as being the ability to place “the past and present […] in juxtaposition,” in addition to relaying “events usually considered of minor importance, but forming the undercurrent of history, and useful in illustrating the advancement and condition of society” (iv). 123 Anglo-African Magazine, 88 (emphasis in original). 112

America, held in one hand. Surrounding him are piles of all the journals edited by colored men from the commencement up till the present, among which the Freedom’s Journal, Colored American, People’s Press, North

Star, and Frederick Douglas’s [sic] paper are the most prominent.”124 “The

First Editor” is depicted as an old man, most likely the editor of Freedom’s

Journal, Samuel Cornish, who peers, “unperceived,” over the shoulder of the younger, contemporary editor, and reads again “his own first editorial,

[…] the first ever penned and published by a colored man in America.” The scene, Ethiop declares, “is the linking together of our once scarcely hopeful past with the now bright present.”125

Like many other paintings described in the gallery, this picture accomplishes a feat of historical, pictorial, and discursive perspective.

Wilson’s image consolidates an archive that is at once a material print history (however ephemeral it would have been in 1859) and an aspirational one in the sense that its point of access is through a fictional gallery and a fictional painting. Wilson’s “piles of all the journals edited by colored men” represent the layered temporalities of the periodicals themselves, while also gesturing toward a future readership that is the beneficiary of all that print, even if Wilson’s readers could not actually read the text of the print archive buried within the piles. Wilson’s reflexivity about the gallery’s circulation through the print of the Anglo-

African Magazine produces the neat effect of linking his readers to the

124 Ibid., 53. 125 Ibid., 53-54. 113

various print temporalities described in the image. As Ethiop writes, the image links “together […] our once scarcely hopeful past with the now bright present,” a present that must register with Wilson’s contemporary readers as simultaneously the present they occupy, an immediate future with respect to the serial’s moment of composition and publication, and also a past that will soon be.126 The effect of recognizing these layered temporalities in miniature is something like that produced by a mise-en- abyme image, but Wilson’s interest lies less in the dizzying effect of that encounter. Rather, Wilson is more interested in outlining the familiar shape of this temporal layering and in tracing its source to the material facts of the ephemeral, periodical, and often discontinuous circulation of black print. Out of these contingencies of print, Wilson imagines a diachronic reading practice that could, and in fact, had to, transcend the gaps and interruptions that characterized the early, black print archive.

With a similar end in sight, John Ernest's Liberation

Historiography (2004) describes the “multivocal and multiperspectival” modes of reading and writing African American history that developed out of antebellum newsprint media as a serialized form. In one of his examples that demonstrates just how an emerging historical tradition “connect[ed] to the dynamic and multiple needs (material, cognitive, and theoretical) of the African American community” within this periodical context, Ernest relates that “The Colored American published in several installments

James McCune Smith's 'Lecture on Haytien Revolutions' in the fall of

126 Ibid. 114

1841, [and] thus blend[ed] this meditation on the Haitian revolutions with regular reports on the daily events, progress reports, and political campaigns of the African American and antislavery communities.” 127 In

Ernest's view, serialization and other formalized practices of newsprint like reprinting encouraged “an extended and dynamic process of reading” whereby the reading of history in periodicals doubled as a reading of how that “construction of the past [was] designed to serve the present.”128

Ernest is right to argue that this broad practice of liberation historiography was most commonly directed “toward applying the lessons of the past to the immediate needs of the present,” but I would argue that one of the unique contributions made by Wilson's “Picture Gallery” was its tendency to underscore the discontinuities of “Afric-American” print alongside of the continuities that linked the historical to the contemporary moment.129 While the “piles of all the journals edited by colored men from the commencement up till the present” represented to Ethiop an arrival at a “now bright present,” that same pile also should have reminded readers that previously bright presents had diminished and passed, and that many of those periodicals had folded after a year or two of publication—a fate that, by March of 1860, would also include the Anglo-African

Magazine.130 Against these material and financial constraints, and against

127 John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 279, 280, 291. 128 Ibid., 291, 290. 129 Ibid., 308. 130 Anglo-African Magazine, 53, 54. 115

the interruption and gaps that characterized early black print culture,

Wilson and his images register the historical and imaginative traces of a diachronic “Afric-American” reading public that was at once an accumulation of publics past and a projection of that public's durability into the future.

In the figure of Cornish (1795 – 6 November 1858) reading again the first editorial he wrote for Freedom’s Journal over the shoulder of the younger editor, Hamilton, Wilson literalizes a scene of diachronic reading, and in joining that scene to the reading of the Anglo-African Magazine,

Wilson raises the possibility of addressing a future diachronic public through his gallery serial. The ambitious temporal and historical perspectives achieved by his narrative, not to mention the structure and force of his dialectical images, show that Wilson remained optimistic about the transcendent potential of a diachronic mode of reading, a mode of reading history that precipitated out of his encounter with a discontinuous “Afric-American” print culture, and one that he modeled in the “Afric-American Picture Gallery” in the hopes of attracting a future diachronic public. Viewed in this light, the fictional qualities of publics prove to be both a liability for coherence and action in the way that Wilson satirizes in future installments of his series and an advantage in the sense that as fictions publics are not limited to an immediate circulation or an immediate politics.

Writing in 2005, Joanna Brooks has argued that late-eighteenth- century African Americans entered the public sphere as an interested 116

collective, and that their counterpublicity was consciously constructed to mirror their spatial experience of institutional life within the urban centers of the northern U.S.131 Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s 1794 pamphlet

Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the Late

Epidemic in Philadelphia is but one early instance of what Brooks heralds as a long-standing “black historical tradition of theorizing about the public sphere.” Much like the fantastic, public, and printed interiors of Wilson’s gallery and the dialectical construction of his images, this tradition of theorizing and constituting black counterpublicity is, as Brooks describes it, “multistranded, internally diverse, and nuanced; it is not homogenous across time and space, nor is it uniform and continuous in its historical development. It has no single point of origin.”132 Because of its late- antebellum vantage, the Picture Gallery is able to survey and be reflexive about some of the cumulative and historical effects—both imagined and realized—that once ephemeral and locally situated texts like those

131 See Brooks, “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic,” The William and Mary Quarterly 62.1 (January 2005): 75. Brooks’ characterization of the black counterpublic opposes earlier theorizations of the print public sphere advanced by Jürgen Habermas and Michael Warner, most particularly their emphasis of white bourgeois republican values in determining the character of the public sphere as an ideally disinterested, anonymous, and disembodied sphere of rational debate. See note 118 above, as well as Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991); Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), for early arguments about publics and counterpublics. 132 Ibid. 117

produced by Jones and Allen could not be so reflexive about. As such,

Wilson’s serial extends the “black historical tradition of theorizing about the public sphere” toward a theoretically savvy and literary understanding of “print’s ability to constitute a counterpublic imagined as limitless and unending” in ways that we are only catching up to now.133 Focusing on the diachronic temporalities of print in the gallery, we see that Wilson is projecting these once ephemeral publics into a longer durability through the reflexive circulation of the gallery as a printed serial. As such, Wilson’s counterpublic assumes a distinct temporal register that is an accretion of numerous projected publics past and present.134

The “Picture Gallery” provides another memorable “artifact” of this diachronic temporality and the possibility of a future-oriented diachronic public in a carved tablet that Ethiop finds while exploring a cave in the

“Black Forest.” The tablet is scored with the characters of a new language that Ethiop is able to decipher through “hard study,” but as for its origins and meaning he can only wonder: “Is it fiction, is it history, is it prophesy?

Who can tell?” The table encodes a complex experience of temporality. It hails from a year it marks as “4000” and describes the dissolution of what it calls the “Amecans, or the Milk White Race.” The tablet addresses an

133 Joseph Rezek, “The Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Uses of Print in the Early Black Atlantic,” Early American Literature 45.3 (2010): 655. 134 Rezek is similarly interested in these orations as annual reoccurring events with a layered temporality, but he emphasizes the “limitless” character of this imagined counterpublic in spatial terms: for Rezek these orations imagine themselves to address neither merely a local nor a national audience, but a Black Atlantic counterpublic. 118

audience who live in an “age of pure light and perfect liberty” and who no longer retain the memory of slavery. Accordingly, the tablet informs them that they are the descendents of a people once held in “cruel bondage” by the Amecans, but that eventually “these people dwindled at last to leanness; and their bones became small, and thin… and their minds became feeble… and finally they disappeared from among the children of men.” Obviously, the tablet presented its readers in the Anglo-African

Magazine with a fascinating counterfactual, but I’m most interested in the odd temporality it delivers. The tablet offers a vision of future’s past that has not yet come to be, and likewise it addresses a public that has not yet come to be. Perhaps this tablet and the complexity of its temporal signatures and mode of address give us a nineteenth-century way of accounting for Wheatley’s consistent recirculation across a variety of publics that her occasional verse did not directly address in the eighteenth century.

VI. Wheatley’s Obsolescence, Lately Observed

In The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003), Henry Louis Gates, Jr., describes an incredible recuperation of Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” According to Gates, a “freelance writer” from

Connecticut determined that “this eight-line poem, was, in its entirety, an anagram” and had recently sent it to Gates via a “public fax machine in

Madison, Connecticut” (87-88). Gates then relayed, first to the audience of his 2002 NEH Jefferson lecture and later to the readers of variants of this 119

lecture in The New Yorker (January 20, 2003) and The Trials of Phillis

Wheatley (in book format), that:

If you simply rearranged the letters, you got the following plea:

Hail, Brethren in Christ! Have ye

Forgotten God’s word? Scriptures teach

Us that bondage is wrong. His own greedy

Kin sold Joseph into slavery. “Is there

No balm in Gilead?” God made us all.

Aren’t African men born to be free? So

Am I. Ye commit so brute a crime

On us. But we can change thy attitude.

America, manumit our race. I thank the

Lord.

It is indeed the case that every letter in Wheatley’s poem can be

rearranged to produce an entirely new work, one with the reverse

meaning of the apologetic and infamous original. [….] I don’t claim

that this stratagem was the result of design, but we’re free to find

significance, intended or not, where we uncover it. And so we’re

reminded of our task, as readers: to learn to read Wheatley anew,

unblinkered by the anxieties of her time and ours. (87-89)

While Gates’ “plea” might seem to offer a superficial solution to the problem of Wheatley’s political relevance to African-American public culture of the 1960s and after, it nonetheless raises an important question about the relation between poetry and publics across time. Gates’ “plea” 120

attempts to return, through a perverse stretch of the historical imagination, a Wheatley-like construction, as figure and text, to a general public in 2002 and 2003.135 Most interestingly, this rhetorical move of making Wheatley and her poem publicly new again conserves a trace element of Wheatley’s occasional verse in the sense that it directly addresses a particular public gathered in Washington, D.C., for the occasion of Gates’ Jefferson lecture, but it also effectively writes over

Wheatley’s historicity in the process, or the particularity of Wheatley’s verse and her initial public at least. As an “occasional” text and much like occasional verse, Gates’ “plea” remains--in its conception--closely bound to the rhetorical function and performance of his lecture, and yet as a public text it is easily exported to other reading contexts, as I have done here. That we, as academics, would likely balk at Gates’ rhetorical embellishments and historical indiscretions demonstrates, among other things, that we are not the public Gates intends to address. And yet, we are

135 Gates’ tendency throughout this lecture to “elaborate upon [a sparse historical record] with a tissue of conjecture” situates this text and its performance outside the disciplinary practices of African-American scholarship. Of course, Gates’ position as a leading figure within this discipline, not to mention the status associated with this lecture series, made it highly unlikely that such a radically unacademic disclaimer would be acceptable to Gates’ academic reading public or escape its notice. For what it is worth, Gates’ lecture is more interested in Wheatley’s public reception than in her academic reception. Perhaps with a general reader or auditor in mind, Gates’ reception history effectively stops with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, ignores the scholarly recuperation of Wheatley and her poem “On Being Brought” that had already happened in the 1980s and 90s, and explains instead her decanonization in public places and public culture, more generally, after the 1960s—why one would no longer find Wheatley’s name christening “YMCAs, schools, dormitories and libraries” or spoken alongside those of “Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” (69). 121

also Gates’ readers.

Such an odd scenario of reading Wheatley “anew,” as Gates has literalized it here, recalls, however inadvertently, the long-standing tradition of reprinting Wheatley’s verse in new historical contexts that I have traced throughout this chapter. What is interesting, of course, is that the Wheatley that Gates writes anew in this plea is very much a nineteenth-century abstraction of abolitionist and black print, a Wheatley modeled after those many Wheatleys published anew by Garrison, Knapp,

Light, Odell, Thatcher, and Wilson in the 1830s and 50s. However, unlike

Gates’ recuperation, these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reprintings and readings of Wheatley’s verse often foregrounded her historicity and measured a critical difference (and distance) separating the contemporary public they aimed to address from the one originally addressed by

Wheatley’s verse. Indeed, this earlier archive of Wheatley’s circulation shows that obsolescence did not have to mean irrelevance.

Gates’ gesture in recuperating Wheatley for the twenty-first century is at once a historical enterprise and a disavowal that Wheatley’s importance within the African American literary tradition was merely historical in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Of course, Gates’ disavowal is remarkable because it responds so directly (and extremely) to the threat of Wheatley’s obsolescence by rewriting one of her poems, but it is also representative of a larger trend within African-American scholarship that has registered the problem of obsolescence as variously attached to Wheatley’s period, style, verse, reception, and public but that 122

has stopped short of historicizing the problem as Wheatley’s obsolescence per se. In this light, Gates’ argument could be read as having less to do with its ostensible goal of tracing the long-running authenticity debates surrounding Wheatley’s poetry and subjectivity and more to do with eliding an argument that emerged in the early 1980s and began to question the relevance of Wheatley’s eighteenth-century verse practices to twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry reading and writing practices.

As Joanna Brooks has noted, Gates’ argument about Wheatley’s

“trial” serving as the “primal scene of African-American letters” began with his 1985 essay, “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” published in Critical Inquiry’s special issue on writing and race, a cultural moment when, I would add, the specter of Wheatley’s obsolescence was taking shape in African-American scholarship.136 Gates’ response to these arguments illuminates the troubling edge of what Kenneth Warren has more recently described as a tendency within historical discussions of

African-American culture “to make discrete periodizations beside the point, and to attach a taint of injustice to periodization itself, which by its very definition has to be concerned as much with discontinuity as continuity and has to insist on some distinction between past and present”

136 Gates, “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” Critical Inquiry 12 (autumn 1985): 7. See Joanna Brooks for a comprehensive account of the multiple printed forms and contexts in which Gates’ “trial” scene appeared. Brooks, “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” American Literature 82.1 (March 2010): 1-28. 123

(84).137 Robert Hayden wrote in 1984, for instance, that “the poetry of

Phillis Wheatley and her fellow poet, Jupiter Hammon, has historical and not literary interest for us now. The same can be said of eighteenth- century American poetry in general.”138 Hayden recognized that

Wheatley’s poetic obsolescence in the twentieth century was a function of an expired period style, a position that, contra-Gates, distinguished between historical and contemporary African-American literary and poetic traditions. To a similar end, Charles Scruggs described the periodization of poetry as an unacknowledged problem for Wheatley scholarship, writing in 1981 that “[e]ven in the twentieth century, criticism of her poetry has been shaped by prejudices inherited from the Romantic period. To listen to her modern critics, ‘neo-classicism’ was the bête noire of her brief poetic career” (279). Scruggs argued that twentieth-century readers tended to view eighteenth-century poetry as “impersonal, stylized, and ornate,” with

“poetical fashions … dictatorial and absolute,” and that detractors accordingly found Wheatley’s poetry inauthentic, “artificial and insincere”

(280). For Scruggs and Hayden, reading Wheatley meant grappling with the historicity of her verse, but in Gates’ account, the terms that Scruggs used to describe the obsolescence of Wheatley’s verse from a twentieth- century perspective (inauthentic, “artificial and insincere”) are made to

137 Kenneth Warren, What Was African American Literature?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 84. 138 See Robert Hayden, 1984: 57; qtd. in Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “Homage to Mistress Wheatley,” in A Companion to African-American Studies, eds. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 184. 124

describe Wheatley’s perceived obsolescence as a founding figure of

African-American literature.

Speaking in 2002, Gates mischaracterizes Wheatley’s reception “by contemporary African-American critics” as “largely negative,” a reception that in Gates’ account is overdetermined by the disdain for Wheatley advanced by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which was, in his estimation, itself a recuperation of Thomas Jefferson’s critique of

Wheatley put forward in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). “Too black to be taken seriously by white critics in the eighteenth century,”

Gates writes, “Wheatley was now considered too white to interest black critics in the twentieth. [….] Phillis Wheatley, having been pain-stakingly

[sic.] authenticated in her own time, now stands as a symbol of falsity, artificiality, of spiritless and rote convention” (82). In so doing, Gates conflates the obsolescence of Wheatley’s verse with the obsolescence of her person. Wheatley’s earliest circulation history reveals that this conflation of person and print artifact was an important and consistent aspect of her circulation and reception, but in Gates’ argument we can also see its rhetorical force in the twenty-first century, as it is decidedly more troubling to dismiss a person for being obsolete rather than a style, period, or culture of verse.

More recently, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, a contemporary poet and scholar, has questioned Wheatley’s relation to African-American literary discourse given the conspicuous lack of influence to trace between

Wheatley’s verse and the poetry of African-Americans who wrote after 125

her—“save for those poets such as Jupiter Hammon, Robert Hayden, June

Jordan, and Naomi Long Madgett who have written poems about Phillis

Wheatley.” Phillips concludes that Wheatley is “recalled more for the contexts of her poetry, than for her poetry itself. [….] Strangely, she is at the center of African-American literary discourse and adamantly outside of it.”139 Max Cavitch makes a similar point about Wheatley’s legacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writing that although she is

“considered by many literary historians to be the root of an African-

American poetic genealogy, Wheatley’s almost complete disregard by later elegists makes her seem more like ‘a branch that from the tree is torn’….

One seeks in vain for Wheatley’s posthumous incorporation into anything like the pattern of interlinked elegies she helped create for her owners and their associates.”140

If, as Phillips and Cavitch contend, Wheatley’s verse fell into an early, if not immediate, obsolescence that registered as the failure to bear the fruit of citation and allusion in other poets’ poems, then that failure could also be attributed to an inadequate reception among her initial

139 Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “Homage to Mistress Wheatley,” 175. 140 Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 192-93. Cavitch has located one elegy for Wheatley written in 1784 under the pseudonym “Horatio” and titled “Elegy on the Death of a late celebrated Poetess”; this elegy, according to Cavitch, imagines “Wheatley as an Orphic poet with an as yet uncultivated African readership, one that might bridge the oldest classical traditions of poetic mourning and an emergent tradition of African-American elegy. However, later black poets would seldom remember Wheatley explicitly. There are few elegies for her—none that I have found between the unidentified Horatio in 1784 and John Willis Menard’s in 1879” (192). 126

public. Kirstin Wilcox implies as much when she asks what publishing context could explain why Wheatley’s “power to foreground the injustices of chattel slavery in carefully chosen language finally mattered so little.”

For Wilcox, Wheatley’s published work was “simultaneously possible and irrelevant” because her immediate circle of white readers and “boosters” ensured through their promotional efforts that the potentially subversive aspects of Wheatley’s condition of servitude did not disturb contemporary expectations of authorship as inherently “white and free.”141 Joanna

Brooks has argued along these lines that Wheatley’s reception was further structured by an economy of sympathy wherein Wheatley was

“conscripted into emotional labor, trading consolation for the attentions of well-connected white women.” Brooks underscores that this “sentimental formula” and Wheatley’s “circle of white women supporters” “ultimately failed her,” but her larger point is that “white sentimentalism” continues to

141 Kirstin Wilcox, “The Body into Print: Marketing Phillis Wheatley,” American Literature 71.1 (March 1999): 1-29. Quotations from p. 1, 2, and 8. Wilcox argues that Wheatley’s “groundbreaking collection of poems had to be supplemented by concerted marketing initiatives in order to insert an enslaved black woman into the cultural spaces normally occupied by writers whose race and class sanctioned their literary activity. Contemporary reading audiences would be able to recognize the subversive longings at the heart of ‘Farewell to America’ only if the parameters of eighteenth-century authorship were reshaped in Wheatley’s image. Readers would have to come to her poetry with the expectation that it represented an experience of the world that was unlike--and in some cases directly opposed to--their own. Wheatley’s readers had no such expectations, and her verse alone was not likely to bring them into being. Not only did Wheatley’s dependence on white patrons who countenanced slavery make it impossible for her to write unambiguously about her experience of oppression, but the transatlantic promotion of her poetry deliberately directed readers away from the interpretive frame supplied by her servitude” (8). 127

structure “racialized divisions of emotional labor” and, more consequentially, the mechanisms and strategies of female empowerment in U.S. culture. Thus, for Brooks, the seemingly obsolete structures of sentiment that effectively “blocked the richer, more powerful story

Wheatley might have been able to tell” are still with us in the twenty-first century, and in this way, the inadequacies of Wheatley’s public culture are also our own.

As this chapter has demonstrated, multiple, historical publics and publishing contexts did, in fact, create a “richer, more powerful story” to tell about Wheatley and her verse in the antebellum period. This chapter has posed a number of different ways of reading Wheatley’s untimeliness, the obsolescence of her various media, publics, and occasional verse forms, as well as the anachronism that framed various readings of

Wheatley from the eighteenth century to the recent present. From her earliest emergence in colonial newsprint, the actual temporality of print circulation and distribution changed the stipulative (or normative) implications of occasional verse addressing an immediate public upon an immediate occasion. Similarly, the extended circulation of her verse changed the kinds of publics that this poetry was made to address. While

Wheatley was and is an anomaly of the early black print archive, she is also an apt representative of its discontinuous but manifestly historical circulation. Indeed, the fugitive aspects of Wheatley’s historical verse—its media, forms, and publics—should be read as the very conditions that informed Wilson’s theorizing of not only the possibilities of an “Afric- 128

American” tradition of aesthetics and politics in 1859, but also the future possibilities and liabilities of an historically diachronic black reading public. This was Wheatley’s legacy in 1859, and as I have argued, that legacy had everything to do with the perception of obsolescence, historical distance, and the anachronistic practices of reading that quickly enveloped

Wheatley and her verse.

We might see in the anachronistic printing and reading of Wheatley in the nineteenth century a template for Gates’ recovery of Wheatley at the start of the twenty-first century—that is, as a pattern of reading Wheatley always slightly out of the circuit of direct address. As I have shown, even in the earliest and immediate printing contexts of the eighteenth century,

Wheatley’s predominant form of direct address was always already impossible, and thus the poetry reading publics that developed around her and her verse were always created through a misreading of the time of that address and its circulation.

129

Chapter 2: Colonial Minstrels, American Poets: Rufus Wilmot Griswold,

Edgar Allan Poe, and the Distressed Tradition of American Verse

Gris, you must not get up books so jobbingly. You will never get above

journeyman’s wages unless you amend.

– Letter from Horace Greeley to R.W. Griswold, November 13, 1843

I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate—the

vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in reverie of the

future.

– Letter from E.A. Poe to James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844

Rev. Dr. Griswold will publish in early June a royal octavo, entitled “The

Advertisers and Advertisements of America.” The Reverend Doctor has

had free access to the extensive exchange lists of the Weekly Philadelphia

press; and we have no doubt this work will be fully equal in value to his

last.

– The Town, 24 May 1845

I. “In Reverie of the Future”: the Politics of Posterity and the Legacies of

Poe v. Griswold

The editor and anthologist, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, was lampooned throughout the 1840s and 50s for the venal role he was thought to play within the burgeoning business of American letters. He was vilified by his 130

contemporaries for being: a literary parasite; a poet, critic, editor, and anthologist without taste, talent, intelligence, or genius; an “arrant literary quack”; a sycophant and “toady” to the poetasters of the elite and wealthy classes of New England; the “Grand Turk”; and perhaps most colorfully, the “Reverend Rumpus Grizzle”--“now Preacher, now Literary Pirate, at all times the Pink of Servility, the Cream of Humbug, the Skim milk of

American Book Charlatanism.”1 When he was mentioned at all, Griswold’s reputation fared little better in the hands of twentieth-century critics and historians. Perry Miller, for instance, has written of Griswold’s symbiotic affinity with the literary culture of his day, claiming in The Raven and the

1 Edgar Allan Poe and/as Henry B. Hirst describe(s) Griswold as an “arrant literary quack” and a “toady” in an anonymous, 1843 review of Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America (1842) that I discuss at length in this chapter; associated with a “harem” of female poets, “the Grand Turk” was a popular epithet attached to Griswold in response to his public flirtations with the poet Frances Sargent Osgood, his anthologies of female poets, as well as the notorious bigamy suit that alleged he had married his third wife without officially divorcing his second wife; the “Reverend Rumpus Grizzle,” also spelled “Grizzel,” was George Lippard’s pseudonym for Griswold in “The Spermaceti Papers” of 1843. According to his sole, twentieth-century biographer Joy Bayless, Griswold was only an occasional Baptist preacher, filling in for “clergymen friends in New York and Philadelphia” and giving sermons, but never taking on the official duties of pastor (93). Though the evidence is often reported by Griswold or anecdotally described by his friends or family, Bayless writes that Griswold first obtained a license to preach in 1837 after pursuing an independent course of what Griswold called “theological studies” (24); he first assumed the title “Reverend” in 1842 through an affiliation with the Eleventh Baptist Church in Philadelphia (266-67, note 144); and finally, he assumed the honorary title of “Doctor” or “D.D.” (Doctorate of Divinity) sometime in 1844 or 1845, through an honorary degree thought to have been conferred upon him by Shurtleff College, a Baptist college in Illinois, in exchange for his print-work as editor of the American Protestant Association’s Quarterly Review of the American Protestant Association, an anti-Catholic, anti-Irish political and religious organization (274, note 53). See Joy Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold: Poe’s Literary Executor (Nashville, TN: Vanderbuilt University Press, 1943). 131

Whale (1956) that “Griswold was about as devious as they came in this era of deviousness; did not ample documentation prove that he actually existed, we might suppose him […] one of the less plausible inventions of

Charles Dickens.”2 Of course, Griswold’s ignominious reputation is most commonly explained through his contentious relationship with Edgar

Allan Poe, which effectively placed Griswold on the wrong side of literary history. This view of Griswold’s legacy typically begins with his penning, under the pseudonym of “Ludwig,” a pitiless, salacious, and erroneous obituary for Poe that was published in Horace Greeley’s New-York

Tribune two days after Poe’s death in October of 1849. Griswold’s authorship of the review was quickly discovered, and since it was frequently reprinted and cited, it maligned Poe’s reputation in the years immediately following his death. However, in a curious twist of literary history, or, if one is so inclined, as part of a mendacious scheme, Griswold also became Poe’s literary executor and served as the sometimes-author, compiler, and editor of Poe’s memoir, surviving papers, and collected works.3 In this way some of Griswold’s misinformation, editorial mistakes,

2 Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 168. 3 The facts are light with respect to Poe’s wishes for a literary executor, as are Mrs. Clemm’s reasons for choosing Griswold. As for the possibility of Griswold holding a grudge against Poe, it would certainly seem that Poe earned that grudge, given the record of letters that do survive. I would also agree with Killis Campbell who argues that Griswold’s editorial errors— with respect to Poe’s criticism and essays—are most likely the fault of careless and hasty proofreading, rather than an outright attempt to falsify Poe’s record and Works. That said, it is also most likely that Griswold added material to a handful of Poe’s letters. Griswold’s published versions of these letters contain material not found in the original, post-marked 132

and/or enmity continued to color Poe’s legacy well into the twentieth century. While it is true that the worst of these allegations against

Griswold—that he falsified parts of Poe’s letters—is editorially reprehensible, it is also worth noting that reducing Griswold’s legacy to a personal rivalry with Poe tends to obscure, if not also erase, Griswold’s contribution to the broader history of American letters and most particularly to the then-nascent history of American poetry, a history that, as this chapter demonstrates, both Poe and Griswold were heavily invested in authorizing.4

To add a further, temporal twist to this history of rivals, in 1843 Poe offered up a vicious and prophetic obituary for Griswold that has come true, while Griswold’s egregious obituary for Poe has been overturned and dismissed. As Poe most likely wrote in 1843 on the occasion of Griswold publishing a third edition of his anthology, the Poets and Poetry of

America: Griswold was fated to be “[f]orgotten, save only by those whom he has injured and insulted, he will sink into oblivion, without leaving a landmark to tell that he once existed; or, if he is spoken of hereafter, he

letters from Poe, and this additional material is further suspect for the way it credits Griswold as a rather magnanimous fellow, while casting Poe in a negative light. See Killis Campbell, “The Poe-Griswold Controversy,” PMLA 34.3 (1919): 436-464. 4 Poe reveals his interest in this project in multiple ways: through his reviews of Griswold’s Poets and Poetry anthology, through his lectures on American poets and poetry, and through his notes and manuscripts, which record his plans to write the contemporary history of American poetry in The Stylus magazine, as well as in his “Living Writers of America” project. See Burton R. Pollin’s reproduction and annotation of this manuscript in “The Living Writers of America: A Manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1991): 151-200. 133

will be quoted as the unfaithful servant who abused his trust.”5 From the perspective of literary history to the fact that he remains buried in an unadorned grave, Griswold has sunk—or slunk, again depending upon one’s outlook—into oblivion.6 As Miller describes the aftermath of their personal rivalry, the scales of literary judgment quickly tipped in Poe’s favor, for “…despite the malice of Griswold, the cult of Poe increased, not only in America but in England and France. Actually the cult, in the form of a reply to Griswold, formed immediately.”7 Indeed, we might alter

Miller’s emphasis and come to a different insight about the historical twinning of Poe and Griswold. That is, if we think, as Miller suggests, of

Griswold’s structural role within the cult of Poe, we might recognize that because of Griswold’s presumed “malice, the cult of Poe increased,” and likewise, that without the substantial evidence of Griswold having existed and having undermined Poe’s reputation, the Poe cult might very well have had to invent Griswold.

In Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (1999), Terence Whalen challenges the widespread critical view of Poe as a “romantic-outcast,” a

“visionary” who, in the words of Louis Rubin, “inhabited a realm that was

5 See Edgar Allan Poe (and/as Henry B. Hirst), “The Poets and Poetry of America,” reprinted in James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume XI (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965), 242-243. 6 According to Bayless, “Griswold’s wish to have a monument placed at his grave was never carried out. In a small lot unmarked by any stone lies all that is left of the energetic, dynamic man who once was known all over literary America. Surrounded by imposing monuments erected to the memory of his contemporaries, his final resting place in Greenwood Cemetery is as obscure as the lonely farm which he left in his boyhood.” Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, 255. 7 Miller, Raven and the Whale, 269. 134

‘out of place, out of time.’”8 Though dated now, this formulation of Rubin’s is similarly useful for thinking about Griswold’s structural role within the cult of Poe. As much as Poe has been mythologized as standing at odds with his contemporaries and his economic and literary milieu, Griswold has been characterized as Poe’s opposite—a cultural and literary opportunist, slavishly rooted to his time and place, and faithfully serving the crass mechanizations of the budding antebellum literary marketplace.

And while literary histories like Whalen’s have heightened our understanding of Poe’s actual embeddedness within his culture, illuminating how, in Whalen’s phrasing, Poe should be considered “both product and portent of an emerging mass culture,” there has not been a similar reappraisal of Griswold’s role within that emergent culture.

Given the degree to which Griswold produced a poetry anthology for nearly every conceivable antebellum market, from gendered gift-book annuals to didactic anthologies designed for schools, one might expect to find more of him in the excellent studies of nineteenth-century poetry and gender produced in the last twenty years.9 There is little of Griswold,

8 Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4, quoting Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 178. 9 Building upon his work with the Poets and Poetry of America anthology, Griswold repackaged and extended selections from that larger anthology as Gems from the American Female Poets (1842) and Readings in American Poetry for the Use of Schools (1843). Griswold’s extensive anthology of historical and contemporary women poets was published in 1848 as Female Poets and Poetry of America. His cheap gift book titles included The Poetry of Love, The Poetry of the Sentiments, The Poetry of 135

however, in Eliza Richards’ Gender and the Poetics of Poe’s Circle (2004),

Mary Loeffelholz’s From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century

American Women’s Poetry (2004), or Paula Bernat Bennett’s Poets in the

Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry,

1800-1900 (2003).10 Bennett gives a good reason for minimizing

Griswold’s presence in her book. She describes her choice to focus upon

“those many, yet typically isolated, moments when […] individual women writers resisted the pull of genteel conventions to construct subjectivities of their own,” instead of further representing the normative genres of female, domestic, and bourgeois subjecthood that dominated nineteenth- century anthologies like Griswold’s.11 For Bennett, the first anthologies of female American verse (including those by Griswold, Caroline May, and

Thomas Buchanan Read, which were all published in 1848) and continuing through Edmund Clarence Stedman’s anthologies of the late

the Affections, The Poetry of Flowers, and The Poetry of the Passions. He also compiled religious gift books, including The Cyprus Wreath, The Christian’s Annual, The Illustrated Book of Christian Ballads, and Scenes in the Life of the Savior; by the Poets and Painters. Griswold initiated the series of gift books titled The Opal, which Nathanial P. Willis took over as editor. See Bayless, Rufus Griswold, 79-83. 10 I wish to point out Griswold’s diminished role in these books without implying that it should have been otherwise. These books have made foundational contributions to the history of nineteenth-century poetry and poetics, as well as to the gendered fields of literary production and consumption in the nineteenth century. See Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Poe’s Circle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Mary Loeffelholz, From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Paula Bernat Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 11 Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere, 27. 136

nineteenth century reproduced what was, in essence, one, single poem— what Bennett calls “the ‘genteel lyric’ or, since, practically speaking, they amount to the same thing, the lyric of ‘literary sentimentality.’”12 Thus, while the “genteel lyric” was the genre or ideology most frequently embraced by female writers and readers throughout the nineteenth- century, it was also, to Bennet’s thinking, irreducibly “masculinist [in its] valorization of middle-class domestic life” and steadfast in its “privileging of male sensibility.”13 If, as Bennett has argued, Griswold and his anthologies got in the way of seeing more women’s poetry that was legitimately a female-centric discourse, then Sandra Tomc has suggested another reason why it remains difficult to see Griswold in recent scholarship of this period. In her essay, “Poe and His Circle,” Tomc writes that Griswold created a print persona for himself that was self-erasing, that placed his “protean lack of identity in the service of promoting his famous contemporaries.” In Tomc’s view, Griswold became something of a medium or catalyst for “the pure conveyance of publicity” that absented himself from the publicity he fostered.14

12 Ibid., 20. 13 Ibid., 26-27. Loeffelholz and Richards give ample evidence for rethinking Bennett’s absolutist stance about the poetry of female sentimentality offering no agency whatsoever for female writers. 14 William Charvat and Lara Langer Cohen describe Griswold in similar terms, as, respectively, a “patron of publicity” and “the era’s most energetic critic-for-hire.” See Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 175 and Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 51. Tomc is the only recent scholar to give sustained attention to Griswold. See Tomc, “Poe and His Circle” in The 137

As Tomc’s perspective begins to suggest, recent materialist accounts of antebellum literature and print culture have laid the groundwork for a different kind of appraisal of Griswold’s work. By connecting various insights and methodologies from media studies, print culture studies, as well as the history of the book, a more nuanced and interesting history of this period has emerged. These recent critical and historical perspectives have challenged the implicitly romantic biases of nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism, which tended to undervalue, if not ignore outright, the commercial, material, and social aspects of the production of antebellum literature in favor of an author-centric and transcendent model of literature and writing.15 Indeed, because of these shifts in

Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 21-42; 31; and her more recent iteration of these ideas and figures in her book, Industry and the Creative Mind: The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790-1860 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012). 15 Lara Cohen provides a pithy critique of the transcendent model of literary value and its evident tensions in antebellum writing and publishing. As she writes, “Ideologically, the concept of literary value derives from a division of labor that distinguishes the creative from the manual and elevates the former above the latter. This distinction depends on two imaginative elisions: first, its notion of literary production must ignore the material processes that bring literature into being (paper- making, typesetting, printing, sewing, etc., as well as ambiguously literary activities like editing) in order to define literature solely as writing, and second, writing must be understood as a rarefied matter of inspiration rather than a laborious arrangement of words. Economically, however, the literary marketplace must put a price on the very values that the division of labor insists transcend it. [….] To many observers, the antebellum literary commodity’s double nature—its simultaneous claims to artistic value and exchange value—appeared as duplicity.” See Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature, 12. Other important studies on this topic include: Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of 138

historical perspective on the antebellum publishing scene and the growing recognition that estimates of literary value are acutely and historically contingent, we might recognize that a substantial part of Griswold’s ignoble reputation stemmed from the “book-making” and “job-printing” aspects of his literary career. As Ina Ferris has argued about the British anthologist and book-maker Isaac D’Israeli, most famous for his long- running Curiosities of Literature (1791-1849) miscellany, the kind of literary labor that D’Israeli and Griswold epitomized has seldom secured the respect of critics, because it is “typically seen as parasitical, secondary, dim of mind and vision, as in the proverbial book-worm scorned by

William Hazlitt […as…] someone who sees ‘only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.’”16 Griswold’s timely fall into oblivion had, then, as much to do with the role he played as an

“anthological czar” within the emerging field of American literary publishing as it did with his sins against the romanticized legacy of Poe.17

What is more, the twinning effect of Griswold and Poe’s literary legacies has an earlier beginning than the 1849 obituary Griswold penned

U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Leon Jackson’s The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); and Lloyd Pratt’s Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 16 Ina Ferris, “Antiquarian Authorship: D’Israeli’s Miscellany of Literary Curiosity and the Question of Secondary Genres,” Studies in Romanticism 45.4 (2006): 523-42. According to Ferris, the genres of “collection, compilation, and republication […] were typically gathered under the suspect sign of ‘book-making,’ [and thereby] regarded less as literary forms than as adjuncts of the book trade” (523-24). 17 I borrow the phrase “anthological czar” from Bayless. 139

as “Ludwig.” As I argue in this chapter, 1842 through 1844 mark the years when Poe defined his career, talents, and legacy in opposition to those of

Griswold. However, their rivalry in these years was as much about the idea of American poetry as it was an expression of personal animosity. For this reason, the twinning of Poe and Griswold does not need to be dissolved so much as enriched by this greater interest in the development of “American poetry” as a category of mass circulation and readership. While we might not be able to extract a historical sense of Griswold without seeing his doppelganger in Poe, we may not actually need or want that history. We may, in fact, be able to read both Poe and Griswold more effectively by tracing their doubling with greater particularity and by exposing the ways in which their thinking about American poetry and distressed artifacts of printing overlapped and developed interdependently. We might read their conflicts, the enmity and distinction each earned, as a reflection of the casualties, rewards, and possibilities of the field they shared in literary publishing.

II. Colonial Minstrels, American Poets: The Poets and Poetry of America

(1842)

Though hardly original as a collection of historical and ephemeral verse, Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) produced the novel effect of turning the much-dismissed idea of American poetry into a category of verse that was both commercially viable and

140

demonstrably historical.18 Thirteen years earlier, Samuel Kettell’s

Specimens of American Poetry, with Critical and Biographical Notices

(1829) reflected the necessarily antiquarian labor that went into recovering the poems, poets, and contexts that comprised this initial, three-volume history and anthology of seventeenth-century to then- present-day American verse. Kettell’s “Preface” underscores that he had worked without “guide or direction,” since there were no earlier histories of this literature to consult. As he elaborates, “[t]here was no where […]

18 Much of the dismissal of American poetry in the antebellum period was framed around Anglo-U.S. dependence upon British literature and traditions—both in terms of its inheritance of the English language and culture, as well as its preference for the British supply of books and other material goods. The traditional view of Britain’s long-standing cultural dominance changes, however, when we recall that the monumentalization and canonization of Britain’s literary tradition was very much an ongoing project in the early years of the nineteenth century. In fact, “English literature,” according to Katie Trumpener, “constitutes itself in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the systematic imitation, appropriation and political neutralization of antiquarian and nationalist literary developments in Scotland, Ireland and Wales.” Thus, while Britain could claim a literary past that extended further back than that of its former colony, it was not so far ahead of the U.S. in the monumentalization of that past. In explicitly linking his nationalizing efforts to recent British precedents in doing the same, Griswold brings the emergence of these two traditions into closer relation and proximity. See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xi. For a fascinating account of the ways in which eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Americans ambivalently embraced their post-colonial status as evidenced by their relations with British material goods, see Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Mark Salber Phillips’ On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) marks the early nineteenth century as a crucial moment of historiographic revival in Britain, especially in terms of monumentalizing its national past. See Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007) for more on monumental histories and countermonumentalism as a strategy of political resistance. 141

even a tolerably accurate list of American authors. Their works were scattered as diversely as the leaves of the Sybil, and many of them were about as easily procured. We have no collections of them in public libraries, and some had become so completely forgotten that I was indebted in many cases to accident for their discovery.”19 Notable in

Kettell’s account is the absence of thinking about American poets and their poetry as a communal or historically connected enterprise. Even within the libraries and historical institutions that Kettell consulted for his materials, “American poetry” was not a recognized category of collection.

According to Kettell, he had searched the holdings of the “principal libraries in Boston and the neighborhood, New York, Philadelphia, and

Worcester,” but “[i]n neither of these does there appear to have been any attempt made at such a collection.”20 And yet, despite the path-breaking aspects of Kettell’s Specimens, the volumes did not sell well; in fact, the phrase “Goodrich’s Kettell of poetry” became something of a publishing

19 See Samuel Kettell, Specimens of American Poetry, with Critical and Biographical Notices, in Three Volumes (Boston: S. G. Goodrich and Co, 1829): vii. Kettell’s three volumes survey American poetry from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, including a useful bibliographic appendix of the volumes consulted in making the anthology. Indeed, Roger E. Stoddard has recently recognized Kettell as contributing the first “bibliography of early American verse” with his “twenty-eight page ‘Catalogue of American poetry.’” See Stoddard, preface to A Bibliographical Description of Books and Pamphlets of American Verse Printed from 1610 through 1820, ed. David R. Whitesell (University Park, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press for the Bibliographical Society of America, 2012), xiii. 20 Kettell, Specimens, vii. The personal library of Professor George Ticknor (1791-1871) was especially valuable for Kettell’s project as it included “about seventy volumes of the scarce old writers.” At this time, Ticknor was Smith Professor of modern languages and belles-lettres at Harvard, the position that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would assume in 1836. 142

“proverb of misfortune or misjudgement” according to the 1857 memoir of the Specimens’ publisher, Samuel G. Goodrich.21

In contrast to the exemplarily limited circulation of Kettell’s

Specimens (and the limited circulation of other, early anthologies of

American verse), Griswold’s anthology secured an immediate and long- lasting popular circulation. The first edition of the anthology was published in mid-April of 1842 in an issue of 1000 copies. By July these copies had sold, prompting Griswold to prepare a second edition. This minimally revised second edition was published in an issue of 500 copies in July, followed by another 500-copy edition in December. According to

Griswold’s twentieth-century biographer, Joy Bayless, and the manuscript records of the Carey and Hart publishing office, this pattern of brisk sales and quickly revised editions continued for fifteen years as “editions of five hundred or one thousand copies” were published “at least once, and often twice,” each year, resulting in seventeen editions within Griswold’s lifetime. 22 Thus, while Kettell deserves the credit for sourcing, compiling,

21 Samuel G. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, or Men and Things I Have Seen (1857; rpt. Detroit, 1967), II, 289, quoted in Rose Marie Cutting, “America Discovers Its Literary Past: Early American Literature in Nineteenth-Century Anthologies” Early American Literature 9.3 (1975): 227. 22 Griswold substantially revised the 1847, 1849, and 1855 editions, amending and extending the selection of poets and poems and often incorporating criticisms of earlier editions. The sixteenth edition, published in 1855, added the phrase “Carefully Revised, Much Enlarged, and Continued to the Present Time” to the title page. Richard Henry Stoddard revived Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America in 1873, serving as second editor to the anthology and updating its selections. This edition was published in New York and re-issued in 1877. See Joy Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, 44-47 and 266 (notes 104 and 107); and the 143

and reproducing the “American poetry” that would eventually be read as a historical category of verse throughout the 1840s and 50s, the popular reception of the historicity of American poetry begins with Griswold’s anthology in 1842.23

Griswold entry in Jacob Blanck, Bibliography of American Literature, Volume Three (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959): 289-90. Other entries related to The Poets and Poetry of America include numbers 9565 (William Dean Howells’ entry in Bibliography of American Literature, Volume Four, page 392) and 19111 (Richard Henry Stoddard’s entry in Volume Eight, page 25). 23 Rose Marie Cutting’s 1975 essay “America Discovers Its Literary Past” provides a useful introduction to nineteenth-century anthologies and Griswold’s place among them. For Cutting, these anthologies demonstrate that Americans “were studying their literature long before” Moses Coit Tyler published his A History of American Literature, 1607-1765 in 1878, a book often lauded, according to Cutting, as the “beginning and end” of American literary historiography written in the nineteenth century (226). Cutting notes that Griswold plagiarized the contents of his historical introduction from Kettell’s Specimens (1829), and she traces how Griswold extended his coverage of this period through subsequent editions. Griswold’s most significant revisions to this historical introduction and its selections of colonial and revolutionary verse were made in 1855, in response to the competitive, two-volume anthology produced by Evert and George Duyckinck in that year: the Cyclopedia of American Literature (New York: Charles Scribner, 1856). According to Cutting’s analysis, the rivalry between Griswold and the Duyckinck brothers “stirred [each of] them to greater efforts” and greatly expanded the reprinted archive of early colonial and American verse in their anthologies from 1855 and 1856; what is more, these anthologies inspired the “study of early American verse, as well as [the] nineteenth-century literature” published alongside it (238). Finally, she suggests that Griswold’s historical introduction “proved one of the most popular parts of the books,” as evidenced by contemporary reviews of Griswold’s anthology (244). See Cutting, “America Discovers Its Literary Past: Early-American Literature in Nineteenth-Century Anthologies,” Early American Literature 9.3 (Winter 1975): 226-251. Cutting revises Perry Miller’s account of this rivalry in The Raven and the Whale, where Griswold stands as the clear victor in this anthology war with the Duyckincks. According to Miller, “Griswold performed a minute scholarly analysis, bringing to bear an antiquarian knowledge that remains staggering, proving in column after column […] that the Duyckincks were not only ignorant but sloppy. The mass of their errors are committed in the colonial 144

Without acknowledging the scale of his debt to Kettell’s first volume for the historical details and verses collected within his “Historical

Introduction,” Griswold and his anthology steadily circulated an historical introduction to American verse and a catalogue of historical poems and poets to go along with that introduction. The extensive circulation of

Griswold’s anthology thereby solved two of the problems that Kettell’s

Specimens had intended to address: by popularizing the evident historicity of American verse, Griswold’s anthology trumped the limits of access to the earliest examples of American verse highlighted in Kettell’s preface; moreover, the increasingly familiar history of American verse stood as an obvious contradiction to the famous British slight that, in Kettell’s rephrasing, “there was no such thing as an American book worthy of being read.”24 Contrary, in other words, to the insult levied by Syndney Smith in the January issue of the Edinburgh Review in 1820—“In the four quarters

and revolutionary periods, but even about things that happened under their noses they are careless…. Griswold made lists, state by state, of authors of whom the Duyckincks showed no awareness, pointed out the discrepancies between the large spaces given to minor writers as against the little to those of greater importance; he found the whole ‘chaos of arrangement’ explicable only on the hypothesis that they ‘transferred’ material from the most accessible and generally inaccurate magazines. Otherwise, they simply pillaged Griswold. [….] [Evert Duyckinck] still had his magnificent library; to the admiration of all New York, there it stood, a constant reminder that demonic Griswold had learned more out of a collection of 3,000 volumes than Duyckinck would ever achieve out of his 17,000.” See Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 329-31. For another helpful survey of American anthologies and collections of poetry spanning the late-eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, see Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), particularly Ch. 1 “A History of American Poetry Anthologies,” 3-40. 24 See Kettell’s “Preface,” iv-v. 145

of the globe, who reads an American book?”—the anthologies of Kettell and Griswold made it abundantly clear that British colonists and

Americans had been reading “American” books and poems for nearly two hundred years.25

This distinction in the circulatory effects, if not the basic design or composition, of Griswold’s anthology over Kettell’s is additionally important for its borrowed and abstracted relations to the material artifacts of Anglo-America’s early verse. While Kettell’s editorial labors bore a more authentic relation to the surviving materiality of this print and manuscript history that he had found scattered across the libraries and personal collections of New England, Griswold’s contribution to American poetry should be measured by and through its abstractions, for it is in the abstracting process, his antiquing of this history and its verse, that

Griswold’s design for American poetry and the reading of that history becomes most significant. Whereas Kettell supplied the antiquarian labor of collecting the historical verse that ended up in Griswold’s anthology,

Griswold’s labor was in aestheticizing and theorizing that verse and history

25 See the special issue of Common-place.org, “Who Reads an Early American Book?,” for a recent discussion of Sydney’s famous slight, particularly Max Cavitch’s point that Irving’s popularity in 1819 made Syndney’s claim dubious and out-dated from the start. Max Cavitch, “Who Publishes an Early American Book?,” in Common-Place 9.3 (April 2009): http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-09/no-03/cavitch/. Griswold answered this question in The Prose Writers of America (1847), when he wrote, “Our country has been regarded as a Nazareth of mind. The old question, ‘Who reads an American book?’ is asked with most pertinence in the United States. […] Foreigners have out-grown the ignorance and prejudice which first suggested it; and many of our authors are now much better known in London and Edinburgh, than in New-York, Boston, or Philadelphia” (5). 146

according to the distressed protocols of reading historical poetry that he gleaned from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British antiquarian theories of minstrelsy and their practices of ballad-collecting.

In Crimes of Writing (1991), Susan Stewart describes the rise in the popularity and production of “distressed genres” of writing at the very moment in the eighteenth century when Britain’s national verse tradition was being consolidated in anthologies like Thomas Percy’s Reliques of

Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our Earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric kind.) Together with some few of later Date (1765) and Thomas Warton’s History of

English Poetry, From the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1774-81).26 Stewart presents the eighteenth- century revival of the ballad, epic, fable, proverb, and fairy tale as exemplary of a broader interest in what she terms “distressed genres,” or

“the literary imitation of folklore forms,” that valorized a distant and, in truth, largely invented feudal past.27 By extending to this eighteenth- century context Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “absolute past” as a

“valorized temporal category” within the genre of the epic’s world view,

Stewart argues that the “valorized temporal category is not a category or kind that is abandoned [when, for instance, the epic is abandoned as a dominant cultural form]; rather it is a kind that is summoned from the

26 Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), particularly the “Notes on Distressed Genres” chapter, pp. 66-101. 27 Ibid, 68. 147

world of the dead for particular purposes and that assumes a particular status by the very fact of its anachronism.”28 Stewart is predominantly concerned with the eighteenth-century history of these genres—the ballad foremost among them—when so-called authentic and pre-historical examples of these genres were collected and published alongside modern revivals, imitations, and forgeries of these forms. In adapting this antiquarian practice to the American context, Griswold extended the scale of the “valorized temporal category” in two different ways. The first was by applying the distressed protocols of reading genres like the ballad to the

American tradition of poetry writ large. And the second was by dramatically shortening the temporal scale of that distressing. Where

British antiquarians read the distressed category of the ballad as a modern glimpse at an ephemeral folk artifact that connected a contemporary, nationalized verse culture with its ancient, pre-literary, and communal origins some three to four-hundred years distant, Griswold hoped to distress the reading of American poetry that began some sixty years earlier with the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War.

In addition to his “Historical Introduction” to the Poets and Poetry of America anthology, Griswold further developed his distressed reading of American poetry in two other essays, “The Minstrelsy of the

Revolution,” published in October of 1842 in Graham’s Magazine and in a

60-page essay titled Curiosities of American Literature that was first published in 1844 and appended to an American imprint of Isaac

28 Ibid, 73-74. 148

D'Israeli's popular antiquarian miscellany Curiosities of British

Literature.29 In all of these texts it is the process of distressing rather than the survival of a putatively folkloric form or artifact that most concerns

Griswold. As I have argued in the introduction to Untimely Verse, the relatively short history of the Anglo colonization of America meant that there was no feudal or pre-literary past to recover in the American context.

Therefore, Griswold began his “Historical Introduction” (as had Kettell before him) with the earliest specimen of poetry written in the English colonies in 1623: the episcopal cleric William Morrell’s “description of

New England” that he had composed in Latin hexameters. According to

Griswold and Kettell, the poem was published in London upon Morrell’s return from New England, and eventually reprinted later by the

Massachusetts Historical Society, where Kettell first read it.30 Obviously, this specimen is a written artifact with a printed history that made no claim upon a pre-literary age. Nevertheless, Griswold did his best to summon new antiques written in the distressed vein. Witness his call, in his note “To the Reader” (1842) for future American epics on the following historical and romantic themes:

29 See Griswold, “Editor’s Table: The Minstrelsy of the Revolution,” in Graham’s Illustrated Magazine of Literature, Romance, Art, and Fashion 21.4 (October 1842), 221-28; and “Curiosities of American Literature” in the American reprint of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature, and The Literary Character Illustrated (New York: Appleton and Company, 1844), appendix pages 1-64, particularly the section “Minstrelsy of the Indian Wars and the Revolution,” 27-41. Bayless reports that this American imprint with Griswold’s appendix was “sufficiently popular to be appear in several editions.” Bayless, Rufus Griswold, 79. 30 See Griswold, Poets and Poetry, xv and Kettell, Specimens Vol. 1, xviii. 149

The perilous voyages of the old Norsemen; the sublime heroism of

COLUMBUS, his triumphs, and his sufferings; the fall of the

Peruvian and Mexican empires; the vast ruins indicating where

annihilated nations once had their capitals; the colonization of New

England by the Puritans; the belief in witchcraft; the persecutions

of the Quakers and Baptists; the wars of PHILIP of Mount Hope;

the rise and fall of the French dominion in Canada; the extinction of

the great confederacy of the five nations; the settlement of New

York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, by persons of the most

varied and picturesque characters; the sublime and poetical

mythology of the aborigines; and that grand revolution, resulting in

our political independence and the establishment of the democratic

principle, which forms for the present a barrier between the

traditionary past, and our own time, too familiar to be moulded by

the hand of fiction: all abound with themes for the poet. A true

creator, with a genius great as John Milton’s, might invent an epic

equal to “Paradise Lost,” by restoring Palenque and Copan [ancient

Mayan cities] to their meridian splendour, peopling them with a

polished and chivalrous race, and describing their decline and final

extinction, so that only ruins of temples and palaces, overgrown

with trees whose roots penetrate the loam of centuries, tell the brief

history that they were and are not.31

31 Griswold, Poets and Poetry, v. 150

While Griswold might have waited in vain for the great Copanian epic to emerge, he did not wait for another to develop his idea that the revolution, as “barrier between the traditionary past, and our own time,” served as the incredibly truncated but nevertheless liminal space in which an American poetry first fomented and came into being. Stewart has argued that we should view new antiques “as an attempt to bypass the contingencies of time: by creating new antiques, the author hopes to author a context as well as an artifact”32 In packaging the historical artifacts he gleaned from

Kettell and eventually extended through his own research in colonial and revolution-era literature, Griswold produces the anachronistic context in which he hoped both the contemporary culture of American verse and its antecedents would be read.

In Griswold’s anthology, Phillip Freneau stands at the “legitimating point of origin for all consequent national literature,” to borrow a phrase from Stewart, precisely because Freneau straddled both sides of that revolutionary barrier and thus served, as Griswold writes, with “both lyre and sword […] the independence of the United States” and the realization of a newly born American tradition of poetry out of the minstrelsy of colonial and revolutionary times.33 In a 2013 essay, Lloyd Pratt has underscored the conflicting definitional criteria behind what constitutes literature and poetry as “American” within Griswold’s anthologies. As

Pratt writes, Griswold’s simple “chronological justification for inclusion

32 Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 67. 33 Stewart, “Scandals of the Ballad,” Crimes of Writing, 107 and Griswold, “Historical Introduction,” Poets and Poetry, xv. 151

(i.e., these poets are American because they wrote after the establishment of a national government)” stands at odds with his “quasi-aesthetic arguments (taste, fancy, feeling, meter)” for inclusion within these volumes.34 While it is true that for Griswold the historical category of

American poetry begins with the revolution and the popular wartime verses of Phillip Freneau (a beginning that could be said to be normatively historical and marked on the calendar alongside other, more typical events), it is also true that Griswold presents this beginning through the distressed and antiquarian category of minstrelsy, an aestheticized historical form that attempted to connect oral traditions and “songs” to a modern literary age. Moreover, given the broader antiquarian context and interests that shaped Griswold’s poetry anthologies, we should recognize

34 Lloyd Pratt, “Early American Literature and Its Exclusions” PMLA 128.4 (2013): 985. In his argument for extending the capaciousness of early American literature as a category and field of study, Pratt reads Griswold as “less certain about what to call literature and what to exclude from this category,” and thus, is “in this respect, […] our near contemporary as much as he is a product of his moment” (984). While Pratt remains suspicious of Griswold’s “quasi-aesthetic arguments” and the “power of apposition” that undergirded the stadialist and nationalist philosophies of literature that shaped both Griswold’s criticism and that of his contemporaries, Pratt ultimately holds dear “Griswold’s especially generous definition of literature” since it now serves as an apt model for a “radically inclusive definition of literature” that was also present (in and through Griswold’s anthologies) at “one of [American literature’s] earliest instantiations as a nameable phenomenon” (985-987). Pratt’s larger interest in the intersection of early American literary studies and African American literary studies, given that both fields are premised upon “the belief that the hierarchical exclusions embedded in conventional—that is, mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American academic—notions of literature have made the significance of pre- and extra-American Renaissance North American expressive cultures more or less indiscernible,” is one that I share. For this reason, Untimely Verse prioritizes the 1840s and 50s as the moment when the first consolidations of these literatures as traditions were attempted and contested by both British and American presses. 152

that these criteria that Pratt highlights were not as contradictory to

Griswold’s nineteenth-century readers as they might appear to be to us.

Susan Manning has described, for instance, how, as “collectors of the fragmentary remains of the past,” eighteenth-century British antiquaries

“inhabited the boundary between two prevailing, and complementary, models of Enlightenment historiography: the empirical, analytical

‘Newtonian’ tradition which accumulated evidence and inferred social organization from it, and the conjectural modes of Scottish Enlightenment philosophical or ‘stadialist’ history which posited the universal progress of all societies through a uniform set of ‘stages’ from primitive hunter- gathers, through a pastoral existence to civil society and (ultimately) decadence and disintegration. Continental interest in ‘natural’ and

‘primitive’ states, most tendentiously explored by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, reinforced these stadialist views. […T]hough valuable for its provision of

‘raw materials’ for higher forms of history, antiquarianism’s uncertain conceptual placing and primary rationale in the accumulation of material without subordination to system or theory rendered its implications ideologically promiscuous….”35 The strain, then, that Pratt notices between

Griswold’s aesthetics of collecting and reading American poetry and the vagaries evident within his developmental history of that literature were in keeping with the distressed publishing and reading contexts in Britain that

Griswold hoped to re-create with American materials.

35 Susan Manning, “Antiquarianism, Balladry and the Rehabilitation of Romance,” in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 49. 153

Throughout his “The Minstresly of the Revolution” essay and its counterpart section within his Curiosities of American Literature appendix, Griswold blends the historically mediated acts of printing, circulating, reading, and reciting this seventeenth- and eighteenth-century verse into a more historically ambiguous and suggestive amalgam he calls

“singing.” As ballads and songs that were, according to Griswold, communally “sung” by puritans and later colonists, Griswold aligns these early proto-American martial verses with the oral traditions of British balladry and minstrel theory that British antiquarians revived in the late- eighteenth century. Griswold writes, for instance that the “puritan settlers of New England, while carrying on war against the Indian tribes, deemed it right to spend the hours their enemies devoted to profane dances and incantations, in singing verses, half military and half religious.”36 Set appositionally proximate to the “profane dances and incantations” of

“Indian Tribes,” puritan verse singing, in Griswold’s account, is shown to be coincident with the oral and ceremonial traditions of Native Americans, but also clearly more advanced and part of a literate age that is carried forward by the revolution-era colonists who succeeded them in New

England. According to Griswold, the “actions” of the puritans in battle

“were celebrated in ballads which lacked none of the spirit and fidelity of the songs of the old bards, however deficient they may have been in

36 Griswold, “The Minstrelsy of the Revolution,” 221; Griswold modifies the title of this essay in the section “Minstrelsy of the Indian Wars and the Revolution” published as part of his “Curiosities of American Literature” (1844) essay. 154

metrical array and sentiment.” The referent here is to British antiquarian protocols of reading and authenticating ballads from a pre-literary age.

However, as a liminal, proto-tradition of American verse, these “ballads” are marked by Griswold as written verses, and therefore remain distinct from the putatively feudal, oral, and collectively-authored or sung ballads that British antiquarians’ collected and prized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, Griswold’s contention that these ballads display a similar “spirit and fidelity of the songs of the old bards” suggests that later American verse might be read as if it had an antique origin in colonial, rather than feudal, times.

Meredith Martin’s work on the “ballad-theory of civilization,” which she develops in relation to Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient

Rome (composed in India, but published in London in 1842), further illuminates the distressed terrain that Griswold treads in these essays. In

Martin’s account of the “ballad-theory of civilization,” ballads were,

“crucially and ideally,” “comparable across national boundaries and borders. Ballads were at once imagined to be the authentic record of a nation’s earliest poets as well as evidence of early songs that appeared at the beginning of every culture. Now collections of fragments, authentic ballads had to be in some way corrupted or faded so that their re-creation could accommodate the nostalgic projection onto the past of a purer form of connected society, via poetry….”37 As Martin’s work suggests, the

37 Meredith Martin, “‘Imperfectly Civilized’: Ballads, Nations, and Histories of Form,” ELH 82.2 (Summer 2015): 348. 155

“ballad-theory of civilization” assumed and pronounced that ballads were

“at the beginning of every culture.” Thus, Griswold’s project in distressing the tradition of American poetry was simply to literalize that claim by reproducing the earliest “ballads” of the British colonists, “sung” in apposition to the primitive “incantations” of “Indian Tribes.” What is interesting, of course, about Griswold’s distressing of that tradition is that its nostalgia is more accurately directed toward a future American society and its poetical forms.

In his initial version of this essay, “The Minstrelsy of the

Revolution,” Griswold cites these ballads by title only and provides just four examples: “Lovewell’s Fight,” “The Gallant Church,” “Smith’s Affair at

Sidelong Hill,” and “The Godless French Soldier.” In the later version of this essay printed in 1844, Griswold publishes eighteen stanzas of

“Lovewells Fight,” which is written in ballad meter and narrates a violent skirmish between colonists and Native Americans near Fryeburg, Maine in

1725. From these rather paltry beginnings, Griswold transitions to Freneau and other minstrels of the Revolution, including “Barlow, Trumbull,

Dwight, Humphreys, and other ‘Connecticut wits.” He reproduces a New

England ballad “War Song—Written in 1776,” which he calls a

“characteristic specimen.” The oldest of the Revolutionary ballads that

Griswold presents is titled “The Patriot’s Appeal,” and as Griswold notes it was “printed in the Pennsylvania Chronicle, at Philadelphia, on the 4th of

July, just eight years before the Declaration of Independence. We copy it

156

from a ballad sheet, dated 1775.” Griswold’s earnest notations of the printed histories of these artifacts echo, however slightly off-key, the authentication strategies of the British ballad collections he has clearly studied. As Griswold notes in a later passage, “We may as well here remark that the orthography and rhythmical construction of many of the old songs and ballads varies in the different editions—the earliest usually being most correct—and that we have copied from the least inharmonious and corrupt, sometimes giving one verse from one and another verse from another impression of the same production.” In Griswold’s hands, the project of recovering the authentic, printed history of this verse from the relatively-recent Revolutionary past is suggested to be as fraught with inaccuracies and corrupt variants as the ballads that Percy recovered and

Ritsom disputed.

Griswold closes his “The Minstrelsy of the Revolution” essay with an explicit reference to Percy and Motherwell, who clearly serve as the source texts for Griswold’s adaptation of minstrel theory to the American context.38 Griswold remains ambivalent about the “poetical” value of these colonial and revolution-era verses, but for Griswold, their significance lies less with the individual artifacts that he preserves, and more with the distressed context of reading contemporary American verse that these early, proto-American verse artifacts authorize and make possible. As

Griswold writes, with an eye clearly directed to the future historical significance for this verse:

38 Griswold, “The Minstrelsy of the Revolution,” 228. 157

The “old and antique songs” we have quoted are not eminently

poetical, and the fastidious reader may fancy there are in some of

them qualities that should have prevented their publication. We

appeal to the antiquaries. The ‘Cow Chase’ will live long after

the light airs and recollected terms

Of these most brisk and giddy paced times

are forgotten, and other songs and ballads of our Revolution will in

the next century be prized more highly than the richest gems of

Percy and Motherwell. They are the very mirrors of the times in

which they were sung.39

In Griswold’s reading of this distressed context for American verse, which also looks back and cites Shakespeare’s imagined, feudal minstrelsy within

Twelfth Night, the temporally truncated scale of the American antique is projected toward a future century when that temporality is not so obviously out of proportion to its British antecedents.

As I have begun to suggest, Griswold’s production of the distressed tradition of American verse was, at times, rough and awkward in its adaptation of British ballad theory. Griswold’s desire to reproduce the material histories of these verses as they circulated through manuscript and print formats meant that he had to undercut the notion that these

39 Ibid. Earlier, popular British collections of printed ballads that are likely source texts for Griswold, include William Motherwell’s Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern (1827), Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), David Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, etc. (1776), Joseph Ritson’s Select Collection of English Songs (1783), and Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3). 158

ballads were “the very mirror of the times in which they were sung.” When he introduces the verses of “Ballad of the Tea Party,” for instance, he records a significant temporal delay separating the “mirror” of the event

“from the times in which they were sung.” As Griswold writes, “We have copies of four metrical accounts of the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor, two of which appear to have been written since the close of the war.”40 In a similar way, Griswold’s attention to the individual authorship of most of these ballads cuts against the idea that these ballads were recognized or circulated as communal “songs.” Similarly, Griswold opened both variants of this essay with a quotation from Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1655-

1716), a Scottish statesman who opposed the 1707 unification of Scotland and England. The quote is unattributed in Griswold’s essay, and although

Griswold parses the meaning well enough, he is clearly ignorant of its initial context of circulation. As Griswold clumsily writes, “Permettez que je faisse les chansons d’un people, et il fera les lois qui le veut, remarked, in substance, some shrewd Frenchman;41 and that he rated not too high the power of song is shown by numerous instances in both ancient and modern history.” Taken on the whole, the crooked seams and faulty joints

40 Ibid., 222. 41 The quotation appears to have first circulated as Fletcher’s “A Letter to the Marquiss of Montrose, the Earls of Rothes, Roxburg and Haddington, From London the first of December 1703,” which relayed to the Marquiss in French that “I said I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Christopher’s sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation, and we find that most of the ancient legislators thought that they could not well reform the manners of any city without the help of a lyric and sometimes of a dramatic poet.” 159

visible within Griswold’s construction of the distressed tradition of

American verse are less important than the context he authorizes for the reading of American verse as a distressed tradition. His interest in aligning the “ballads,” “songs,” and “minstrelsy of the Indian Wars and the

Revolution” with “the martial lyrics” of “the older nations” is also directly in step with the larger imperial project that Martin reads at work within

Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome and the “ballad-theory of civilization.”

For Martin, this project aims “to impose a vision of martial action as an accepted universal urge and to merge that vision with the discourse of both poetics and civilization. […For j]ust as the literature of Rome civilized primitive England, so too would the literature of England civilize,

Macualay writes, the primitive, ‘Hindoo.’”42 In the American context of the

1840s, the imperial U.S. martial project would come to include the rampant westward expansion of territories known as manifest destiny, the mounting of additional wars with Native American tribes, as well as the further annexation of territories through the Mexican-American War.

III: Poe vis a vis Griswold and the Poets and Poetry of America (1842)

Three anonymous reviews of Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of

America (1842) have been attributed to Poe. In the first, published in

Graham’s Magazine in June of 1842 and unlikely to have been written by

Poe, the reviewer favors Griswold with praise of his anthology in general,

42 Meredith Martin, “‘Imperfectly Civilized’: Ballads, Nations, and Histories of Form,” ELH 82.2 (Summer 2015): 346. 160

calling it “the best collection of the American Poets that has yet been made, whether we consider its completeness, its size, or the judgement displayed in its selection.”43 The reviewer allows that the historical introduction “evince[s] considerable research,” though he projects onto

Griswold his own notion that “prior to the revolution, the pretenders to the muse in the colonies scarcely rose to the level of versifiers.”44 Quibbling a bit with the selection, the reviewer suggests that Griswold has, however unknowingly, “unduly favored the writers of New England” and “scarcely done justice to some of our younger poets,” particularly Lowell and

Holmes.45 This regional critique, voiced apologetically in this iteration and in the following review by Poe, was also made by William Gilmore Simms on behalf of Southern poets and extended most dramatically, as we will soon see, by friends of Poe in Philadelphia in the following years.

43 “The Poets and Poetry of America, With an Historical Introduction,” Graham’s Magazine 20.6 (June 1842): 356, reprinted as Poe’s review in James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume XI (Reprint, New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965), 124-126, and likewise credited to Poe in Burton R. Pollin, “‘The Living Writers of America’: A Manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1991): 151 and 160, note 1. The Poe Log cites another similarly worded review as appearing in the 23 April 1842 issue of Graham’s Saturday Evening Post, when Graham was pursuing Griswold to replace Poe as editor of Graham’s. The Poe Log attributes the June 1842 review to another editor at Graham’s, Charles J. Peterson. Poe left Graham’s near the first of April, and Poets and Poetry of America was first published and delivered to Graham on April 18, making it unlikely that Poe authored either of these April reviews. See Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849 (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1987), 363-368. 44 “The Poets and Poetry,” Graham’s Magazine, 356. 45 Ibid. 161

In the review titled “Mr. Griswold and the Poets” and published in the Boston Miscellany of November 1842, Poe takes a more expansive view of Griswold’s project.46 Poe critiques the popularly received notion that Americans “are not a poetical people” by upsetting a similarly popular dogma that “the calculating faculties” must, necessarily, be opposed to

“the ideal”: “Because we were not all Homers in the beginning, it has been somewhat too rashly taken for granted that we shall all be Jeremy

Benthams to the end.”47 While Poe exposes the false divide that was thought to separate the practical sciences from the fine arts, he is also criticizing the stadialist view that all nations develop through a similar set of cultural stages and necessarily trod the same paths through those

46 See Edgar Allan Poe, “Mr. Griswold and the Poets,” Boston Miscellany November 1842, reprinted in James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume XI (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965) 147- 160. There is a problem with Harrison’s presentation of this text, since it includes extraneous comments upon two of Griswold’s works that were published after 1842: Prose Writers of America from 1847 and The Female Poets of America from 1848. It is most likely the case that Harrison reproduced this review from Griswold’s 1850 edited volume on Poe’s criticism, and that either Poe or Griswold collated the material from various reviews of Griswold’s anthologies. For more on Griswold’s editorial practice with Poe’s papers, see Killis Campbell, “The Poe- Griswold Controversy,” PMLA 34.3 (1919): 436-464. According to letters of Griswold and Poe, Griswold compensated Poe for writing the 1842 review and placed it for publication in the Boston Miscellany, though according to a letter that Griswold wrote to publisher James T. Fields, Griswold thought it “not decidedly as favorable as it might have been.” In a letter to Frederick William Thomas dated 12 September 1842, Poe tells Thomas that Griswold insinuated “a bribe to puff his book. I accepted his offer forthwith, wrote the review, handed it to him and received from him the compensation:—he never daring to look over the M.S. in my presence, and taking it for granted that all was right. But that review has not yet appeared, and I am doubtful if it ever will.” See Thomas and Jackson, Poe Log, 377-380. 47 “Mr. Griswold,” Complete Works, 147-48. 162

stages, what Meredith Martin has more recently termed the “ballad-theory of civilization.” According to Poe,

The principles of the poetic sentiment lie deep within the immortal

nature of man, and have little necessary reference to the worldly

circumstances which surround him. The poet in Arcady is, in

Kamschatka, the poet still. The self-same Saxon current animates

the British and the American heart; nor can any social, or political,

or moral, or physical conditions do more than momentarily repress

the impulses which glow in our own bosoms as fervently as in those

of our progenitors.48

Such a view posits an abstract, ideal, and ahistorical quality to verse, showing Poe’s preference for those ethereal qualities, the deeply ingrained

“poetic principles,” that he deemed in excess of the merely historical, personal, or worldly aspects of a poem. Indeed, in proposing their idealized definitions of poetry, Griswold and Poe could be considered near echoes of each other—an alignment eased, perhaps, in Poe’s mind by his suspicion that Griswold’s definition was taken from Poe’s own efforts to define poetry in his review essay “Ballads and Other Poems—Part II” from the April 1842 issue of Graham’s. As Griswold wrote in his preface “To the

Reader” and as Poe emphasizes here, poetry is defined as the “creation of beauty, the manifestation of the real by the ideal, ‘in words that move in metrical array.’” Poe reproduces Griswold’s version of that definition with

48 Ibid., 148-49. 163

approval in this instance, because, as he writes, “it embodies the sole true definition of what has been a thousand times erroneously defined.”49

Poe’s idealized expectations for verse find their parallel in his description of the ideal compilation, which would present to the American public what it had, according to Poe, long and sorely lacked—an accurate compendium of the verse that its popular and immediate public had found valuable. By constricting the selection of this verse to the criterion of contemporary recognition within a popular reading public, Poe is striving to find a neutral criterion of selection and reproduction: one that would avoid reflecting “the compiler’s peculiar views upon poetry” or distorting the popular history of verse by either “rak[ing] up from the by-ways of the country the ‘inglorious Miltons’ who may, possibly, there abound” or

“reject[ing] those who have long maintained supremacy in the estimation of the people.”50 According to Poe, once a compilation was made according to this publicly neutral criterion, the ideal critic would then be free, and indeed expected, to evaluate the relative merits of the verse collected therein. With the compendium of poems before them, readers likewise would be able to “decide […] upon the justice or injustice of the

49 Ibid., 154. However, it is unlikely that Poe approved of Griswold’s definition for long; the anonymous review of Poets and Poetry of America published in the 28 January 1843 Philadelphia Saturday Museum treats Griswold’s definition as outright theft: “what is this but a direct amplification by our poet, [Griswold,] of the definition of poetry—“the rhythmical creation of beauty”—which appeared in Mr. Poe’s critique on Professor Longfellow’s ballads, from which we know and he knows he stole it?” See “The Poets and Poetry of America,” reprinted in James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume XI (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965) 220-243. 50 Ibid., 151. 164

reputation attained” by poems and poets, as well as the rightness of the critic-compiler’s taste and opinions regarding his view of American poetry’s progress and current condition.51

According to Poe’s logic, the ideal compilation would accurately reflect the history of verse’s popular reception, but the excesses of that public reception would also be held in check by Poe’s elite reader, the critic-compiler, who would bring to his work “a distinct impression of the nature, the principles, and the aims of poetry; a thorough contempt for all prejudice at war with principle; a poetic sense of the poetic; sagacity in the detection, and audacity in the exposure of demerit; in a word talent and faith; the lofty honor which places mere courtesy beneath its feet; the boldness to praise an enemy, and the more unusual courage to damn a friend.”52 Poe’s heaping list of the (irreducibly subjective) qualifications necessary to performing such a task underscore the unlikelihood of an ideal compilation coming to pass or, more to the point, meeting with Poe’s approval. Nevertheless, despite perching his ideal critic-compiler and ideal compilation upon a wobbling tower of qualifications, Poe articulates his interest in an accurate and neutral historical record of the reading patterns and values reflected in the poems selected for republication in a compilation, but one that would also proffer an elite view of that tradition by way of the critic-compiler’s paratexts, which contemporary readers could evaluate for themselves.

51 Ibid., 152. 52 Ibid., 152. 165

Leah Price’s The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (2000) documents a similar desire among British anthologists to strip away what

Vicesimus Knox termed “Private judgement” in his Elegant Extracts of

1784 and to collect instead such works “as were publicly known and universally celebrated.”53 As Price argues, Knox’s “self-conscious sacrifice of ‘private’ or ‘singular’ to ‘public’ or ‘popular’ taste” reveals “two competing models of literature” at odds within British reading cultures and print markets of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the

“[a]ristocratic inheritance” or antiquarian model that “compares

[literature] with heirlooms valuable for their rarity [and also their relative obscurity]” and the “bourgeois commerc[ial]” model of literature whereby literary “worth depends on its circulation.”54 At first glance, Poe’s ideal compilation would seem to embrace the commercial-bourgeois model of literature whereby circulation serves as the neutral metric for deciding questions of literary-historical value and representation within the anthology form. And yet, his clear preservation of the elite reader in the figure of the ideal-compiler, not to mention his notorious, personal derision for the mass and common(place) readers that he voiced throughout his letters and reviews, underscores the strain within Poe’s

53 See Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 68, quoting from Knox, ed., Elegant Extracts: or Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Youth in Speaking, Reading, Thinking, Composing; and in the Conduct of Life (London: C. Dilly, 1784), iv-v. 54 Price, Anthology, 69 and 72. 166

articulation of the ideal compilation and compiler-critic.55 If, as Price has argued, Knox’s editorial self-erasure attempted to keep “the act[s] of evaluation [and selection] decorously offstage,” then we might say that

Poe’s conflicted and deeply personal understanding of circulation as a metric for literary value could not help but slosh conspicuously onto the page.56

In detailing the compilations that preceded Griswold’s anthology,

Poe humorously undermines the notion that circulation numbers necessarily reflect literary value or provide an accurate record of reading habits. Poe recalls the “‘Specimens of American Poetry,’ by Kettell; the

‘Common-place Book of American Poetry,’ by Cheever; a Selection by

General Morris; another by Mr. Bryant; the ‘Poets of America,’ by Mr.

Keese” as having been “widely disseminated and well received,” but he provides a decidedly local and deflating explanation for their positive reception and commercial successes. According to Poe, these sales numbers were undoubtedly inflated by the poets who wished to see their poems in print as well as their friends who were compelled to buy the

55 For more on Poe’s ambivalent desire to both master and reject a common, mass public of readers, see Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Cultur, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Terence Whalen cites a review for Graham’s that is representative, wherein Poe argues that popularity “is evidence of a book’s demerit, inasmuch as it shows a ‘stooping to conquer’—inasmuch as it shows that the author has dealt largely, if not altogether, in matters which are susceptible of appreciation by the mass of mankind—by uneducated thought, by uncultivated taste, by unrefined and unguided passion.” See Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 73. 56 Price, Anthology, 69. 167

compilation; meanwhile, those poets excluded from the book would have bought it in order to “abus[e] it with a clear conscience and at leisure.”57 In the hypothetical—if not also hyperbolic—scenario that Poe describes, the metric of circulation is shown to be neither neutral nor accurate, since certain consumers are cajoled into purchasing the compilations by their friends, while others buy the book only to disparage it. In both of these cases, what the neutral sales record would tally as positive instances of circulation and reception are—in theory, if not also in fact—negative instances of the same. By emphasizing the irreducibly local and likely contradictory experience behind national estimations of literary success,

Poe suggests that a deep irony divides the idea of a national verse tradition from its actual material circulation in the compilation or anthology form.

Moreover, Poe suggests, however benignly in this instance, that a similarly local political economy has influenced Griswold’s selection and, therefore, the representation of America’s poets found in his volume. Much like the

57 “Mr. Griswold,” Complete Works, 150 and 149. In his critique of the “compilations” that preceded Griswold’s anthology, Poe names Kettell’s Specimens, George B. Cheever’s The American Common-Place Book of Poetry, With Occasional Notes (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1832), General George P. Morris’ American Melodies; Containing a Single Selection from the Production of Two Hundred Writers (Philadelphia: Henry F. Anners, 1840), William Cullen Bryant’s Selections from the American Poets (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840), and John Keese’s The Poets of America: Illustrated by One of Her Painters (New York: S. Colman, 1840) as all missing the ideal mark of supplying the public with a “more distinct view of our poetical literature than the scattered effusions of our bards and the random criticisms of our periodicals could afford.” According to Poe, the worst of these was Kettell’s since his “‘specimens’ […were specimens…] of nothing but the ignorance and ill taste of the compiler” (150). It is unlikely, however, that he had read Kettell’s Specimens himself, for reasons I will soon divulge. 168

Graham’s review discussed above, Poe finds that the “writers of New

England” are overrepresented and that in “two or three cases” Griswold has mistaken the quality of a friend’s “fellowship” and “wine” for the quality of his verse.58

IV. All Circulation Is Local: Poe and “The Poets and Poetry of

Philadelphia”

Nevertheless, Poe’s interest in the value and esteem conferred by circulation numbers is more complicated than the humorous conjecture of this review implies. As Terence Whalen has discovered, in 1843 Poe strategically constructed his biography around the metric of circulation in the hopes of securing the capital investment required for his Stylus magazine project. As part of a series titled, “The Poets and Poetry of

Philadelphia,” the Philadelphia Saturday Museum printed a lengthy biography of Poe along with an introduction to his poetry. As Whalen notes, the piece was attributed to Henry B. Hirst, a “Philadelphia lawyer, sometime poet, and friend of Poe,” and later scholars have found it to be rife with “inaccuracies and fictions undoubtedly emanating from Poe himself.”59 According to Whalen, an overlooked fiction within this biography—and one crucial to the modern understanding of Poe’s unappreciated editorial genius—has been the editorial and circulation history that it provides.

58 Ibid., 150. 59 Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe, 63-64. 169

The biography claims that Poe took over the editorship of the

Southern Literary Messenger, and in what soon became a self-fashioning

“fable of circulation” for Poe, increased the circulation of the journal from

“about four hundred subscribers” to “between three and four thousand subscribers” in the seventeen months that he served as editor. As the

Saturday Museum biography declares, “The success of the ‘Messenger’ has been on all hands attributed to his exertions in its behalf, but, especially, to the skill, honesty, and audacity of the criticism under the editorial head.”60 Whalen exposes Poe’s “hand in the biography” through evidence gleaned from Poe’s correspondence, which reveals that Poe had first offered a set of biographical notes to his friend Frederick W. Thomas, who

“politely declined Poe’s request” that he write the biography. As Whalen then recounts, “After Thomas returned the notes, Poe passed them along to Hirst, and Hirst in turn claimed that the information had actually come from Thomas, thereby affording Poe a measure of what is today called plausible deniability.” After establishing the dubious (and self-serving) origins of Poe’s “circulation fable,” Whalen counts “every name on every

List of Payments published between 1834 and 1843” and thereby reconstructs as “precise [a] set of data” on the actual paid circulation of the

Messenger as is retrospectively possible for those years. What he finds is that “Poe grossly and intentionally misrepresented his impact on the

Messenger. Paid circulation did not increase from 700 to 5,500, nor even

60 Ibid., 64, quoting Henry B. Hirst, Philadelphia Saturday Museum, vol. 1, no. 13 (4 March 1843): 1. 170

from 500 to 3,500, but rather from 1,298 to 1,814. Moreover, circulation did not ‘immediately and permanently decrease upon Mr. P’s secession.’

Instead, it enjoyed a general upward trend throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s, even though the country was then in the midst of a depression.”61 In Whalen’s final analysis, “Poe knew all along that his daring reviews did not produce a ten-fold jump in the circulation of the

Messenger, and he also knew that the alleged affinity between genius and capital was a fabulous lie.”62

I have quoted Whalen’s detective work at length because of its importance to an anonymous review of Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of

America published in the Philadelphia Saturday Museum under similar circumstances one month earlier. Much like the Poe biography discussed above, this review has been attributed to Hirst and Poe.63 And while there

61 Ibid., 66. 62 Ibid., 75. 63 For a reproduction of the anonymous review of Poets and Poetry of America published in the 28 January 1843 Philadelphia Saturday Museum, see “The Poets and Poetry of America,” reprinted in James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume XI (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965) 220-243. Burton R. Pollin notes that this review has been “erroneously ascribed in part to Henry Hirst,” and more emphatically, he argues that this review was “clearly not written by Hirst, as often alleged, but solely, by Poe to judge from the style, content, tone, and general circumstances of publication” (160, note 1; and 185, note 48). See Pollin, “Poe’s The Living Writers,” 160 and 185. The Poe Log claims to the contrary that the review “is unquestionably by Hirst, Poe’s admirer and companion who repeated many of his opnions” (395). In another note about Hirst, The Poe Log writes that his “vaunted knowledge of versification […was…] frequently satirized in the city’s newspapers” (432). Joy Bayless sides with Pollin, writing that “the attack on Griswold and The Poets and Poetry of America, appearing Jan. 28, 1843, bears all the earmarks of Poe. The style, the minute analysis of the metre of one of Griswold’s poems, references to Poe’s friends in matters known to himself 171

is less of a paper trail suggesting who authored which positions against

Griswold, the review is written in such a way that the positive image of Poe as poet, editor, and critic rises up, unmistakably, out of the smoldering ashes of Griswold’s wholly negative and decimated reputation. The review argues in none-too-subtle terms that Griswold is absolutely unqualified for the task of preparing and executing an accurate, meaningful, and historical anthology of American verse, while Poe stands, however un-coincidentally, as the sole critic, editor, and poet with the talent, courage, and genius to properly produce such an anthology of record. As such, the review provides an early record of Poe developing his own strategies for self- fashioning through the negative construction of his rival’s image, which suggests that Poe himself played a hand in the twinning effect of his and

Griswold’s literary reputations. Moreover, Poe and/as Hirst use Griswold’s editorial record to construct the inverse of the equation of editorial genius begetting capital that he would apply to himself in the Saturday Museum biography one month later (and that Whalen would eventually uncover).

The review begins by rehearsing Griswold’s editorial career, noting his assistant and sole editorial positions at The New-Yorker, Brother

Jonathan, the Philadelphia Daily Standard, Boston Notion, Post, and

Graham’s Magazine. The review singles out the fate of the Philadelphia

Standard, laying its demise at Griswold’s feet: “The paper (a notorious

and to Griswold, the bitter animosity toward his successor as editor of Graham’s, and similarities between remarks in the article and statements in Poe’s letters convince me that Poe himself wrote the review.” See Bayless, Rufus W. Griswold, 271, notes 68 and 69. 172

fact) immediately fell off in circulation, and died in less than three weeks after his assuming the editorship.” The review then asks, “Did the

‘Jonathan’ or the ‘Notion’ attain any higher position than before, during

Mr. G’s connection with them; or have the ‘Post’ and ‘Graham’s Magazine’ improved under his supervision? The ‘Standard’ we leave out of the question, as it expired under his management. Certainly not as to the former; and the brilliant career of ‘Graham’s Magazine’ under Mr. Poe’s care, and its subsequent trashy literary character since his retirement, is a sufficient response. Mr. Griswold’s genius, at least, has not benefitted his employers.”64

In addition to using the so-called “facts” of diminished circulation and failed papers as a measure of Griswold’s lack of editorial or publishing genius, the issue of circulation also takes on an increasingly local meaning in this this review. In an essay devoted to obliterating Griswold’s claim to being an authority on the poets and poetry of America, Poe and/as Hirst fail to mention the obvious fact that in composing his historical introduction to the Poets and Poetry, Griswold plagiarized Kettell. Why would Poe, of all critics, fail to accuse Griswold of this outright theft? A clue lies within Poe’s manuscript notes for “The Living Writers of America” project, which detail the following “Books Wanted”:

--“Griswold’s Poets & Poetry of Am[erica]” & “Prose Writers of

A[merica]”.

Kettell’s “Specimens”.

64 “The Poets,” Saturday Museum, 221-222. 173

Keese’s Collection

Morris’ “ [Collection].

Cheever’s “Common-Place-Book.”

Bryant’s Collection.

Tuckerman’s “Thoughts on the Poets”

S[outhern]. L[iterary]. Messenger-Vols 1, 2, 3.

“Graham” complete.

Am[erican]. Rev[iew]--complete.

Articles, ab[ou]t 3 years ago, in Lond[on]. For[eign]. Quar[terly]. on

Am[erican]. Poetry & Am[erican]. Romance.

Simms’ Views & Reviews.

Curios[ities]. of Lit[erature]:Griswold-Greeley & McElrath.

Lardner’s Lect[ures].65

65 Pollin, “Poe’s The Living Writers,” 171-72. The note “ab[ou]t 3 years ago, in Lond[on]. For[eign]. Quar[terly]. on Am[erican]. Poetry & Am[erican]. Romance.” refers to a review essay titled “Poets and Poetry of America” published in January of 1844 in the Foreign Quarterly Review (London), which would suggest that Poe wrote this note as late as 1847. The Foreign Quarterly essay was reprinted over two installments in Park Benjamin’s The New World of 27 January 1844 and 3 February 1844. In a 30 March 1844 letter to Lowell, Poe writes of this same essay, “It has been denied that Dickens wrote it—but, to me, the article affords so strong internal evidence of his hand that I would as soon think of doubting my existence.” Lowell responded to Poe in a letter dated 27 June 1844 that the review essay “was not (I am quite sure) written by Dickens, but by a friend of his named Forster…. Dickens may have given him hints. Forster is a friend of some of the Longfellow clique here which perhaps accounts for his putting L. at the top of our Parnassus.” In a letter to Lowell dated 2 July 1844, Poe contradicts Lowell’s view writing, “I had two long interviews with Mr D. when here. Nearly everything in the critique, I heard from him or suggested to him, personally. The poem of Emerson I read to him.” See, The Poe Log, 456; 465; and 466. 174

Though this “Books Wanted” note was likely written three years after the

Saturday Museum review, Poe’s failure to notice Griswold’s plagiarism indicates that he likely never had Kettell’s Specimens in hand, or never read the first Volume, from which Griswold had clearly cribbed the figures, biographical details, and verse selections of Kettell’s Specimens. This remarkable instance of well-circulated anthologies not circulating to Poe suggests another wrinkle in Poe’s circulation metric—namely, that the theoretical possibilities of mass circulation are also always subject to revision by the local reading and consumption habits of individuals.

The Philadelphia Saturday Museum review of Griswold’s Poets and

Poetry of America also provides the most likely source text for the notorious criticism that Poe is known to have circulated about Griswold in his lectures on “The Poets and Poetry of America.” Indeed, we might view these lectures as fulfilling the review’s obvious desire to see Poe in control of Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America project. Throughout the fall and winter of 1843 and the winter and spring of 1844, Poe gave lectures on the subject of American poetry to audiences in Philadelphia, PA;

Wilmington, DE; Newark, DE; Baltimore, MD; Reading, PA; and in New

York City, NY, in February of 1845.66 Writing for the 29 November Citizen

66 The Poe Log supplies the dates and newsprint reports of these lectures. 21 November 1843: “Lecture on American Poetry,” Juliana Street Church, the William Wirt Literary Institute Lecture series (Poe Log 440-443); 28 November 1843: “American Poetry” lecture delivered to the Franklin Lyceum at Temperance Hall in Wilmington, Delaware (Poe Log 442-43); 23 December 1843: “American Poetry” lecture delivered to the Newark Academy for boys in Newark, Delaware (Poe Log 446-447); 10 January 1844: Philadelphia Museum Lecture (Poe Log 448); 31 January 1844: 175

Soldier about the first of Poe’s lectures, George Lippard reiterates a number of the points made in the Saturday Museum review. Lippard declares, for instance, “It was Mr. Poe that made Graham’s Magazine what it was a year ago…” and that Poe’s lecture “placed all the pseudo- critics, the Rev. Mr. Rufus Griswold, Esq. among many others, to the blush,” demonstrating to the audience “how a man born a poet could describe the true nature and object, [a]s well as the principles of poetry.”67

According to Lippard, Poe corrected Griswold’s neglect of certain

Philadelphia poets, pleasing his local crowd. Poe read from Judge Robert

T. Conrad’s sonnets on “The Lord’s Prayer” and gave favorable notice to

Mr. Robert Morris, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.68 Newsprint reports of Poe’s 23 December lecture suggest that Poe synthesized material from his earlier “Mr. Griswold and the Poets” review and the later review published in the Saturday Museum. Though the records of these lectures are partial and incomplete, they suggest Poe’s serious intent to authorize the history of “The Poets and Poetry of America” on his terms. What is more, it suggests an alternate mode in which Griswold’s idea for projecting a history for American poetry that was transformed and circulated by other writers and forms.

“American Poetry” lecture, Egyptian Saloon at the Odd Fellows’ Hall, Baltimore, Maryland (Poe Log 449-451); 12 March 1844: “American Poetry” lecture at the Academy Hall of the Mechanics’ Institute in Reading, Pennsylvania; 28 February 1845: “The Poets and Poetry of America” lecture, the Society Library, New York City (Poe Log 506-508). 67 Poe Log, 440 and 443. 68 Ibid. Judge Conrad was a local Philadelphia poet who published in 1852 Aylmere, or the Bondman of Kent and Other Poems. 176

Chapter 3: Whitman, the Saturday Press, and the Distressed Print History

of the Whitman Poem

Section 1—Before Walt: Puffing, The New-York Saturday Press, and the

Circulation of Symbolic Capital1

From its earliest issues in 1858, Henry Clapp, Jr., built the reputation of the New-York Saturday Press around an ostensibly iconoclastic “No Puffing” policy. At midcentury, puffing, or the promotion of books by editors and critics under the guise of independent criticism and review, was thought to be an intractable problem for American publishing. As Lara Langer Cohen explains, “puffery [had] developed into the literary critical norm” in the U.S. by the late 1830s, and it had come “to encompass a wide array of ingenious arrangements to promote the

1 This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section describes the late-antebellum legacy of the Saturday Press in relation to the practice of puffing. The second section focuses on the Saturday Press’ promotion of Whitman and Leaves of Grass (1860), as well as its production of the Whitman Poem as a recognizable, autonomous, and reproducible genre of poetry. Whitman scholarship has long recognized the importance of the Saturday Press, its editor, Henry Clapp, Jr., and the collective of writers and artists that gathered at Pfaff’s tavern to Whitman’s production of the third edition of Leaves of Grass in the spring of 1860. This first section attempts to describe the Saturday Press’ interest in the circulation of symbolic capital in ways that extend beyond the case of Whitman. The first section’s discussion of the Saturday Press and the meaning ascribed to puffs in the context of literary, newsprint weeklies and the wider commercial publishing industry doubles, then, as the foreground for understanding the Press’ production of Whitman and the emergence of the Whitman Poem throughout 1860. The first section was published as “On Puffing: The Saturday Press and the Circulation of Symbolic Capital” in Whitman among the Bohemians, edited by Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2014), 53-74. 177

fortunes of various literary cliques, including paid reviews, self-reviews, and exchanges of favors.”2 It was against such “cliques,” “sects,” “parties,” and “isms,” as well as “publishers,” “booksellers,” “authors,” and

“advertisers,” that Clapp directed his Saturday Press in an attempt to topple “the whole system of Puffing.”3

The performative aspects of Clapp’s position against puffing rang hollow for one reader, however, who, in a notice written for the Boston

Saturday Evening Gazette about the Saturday Press’ debut issues, responded incredulously to the Press’ “threats of independence” and “self- conceit,” as well as the weekly’s implied rejection of commercial interests put forward in its anti-puffing campaign, suggesting that from all this bluster “one might presume that the editors [of the Saturday Press] . . . come to their place of business in balloons.”4 And yet, Clapp’s posture was at least partially the point, because the Saturday Press reprinted and extended the Gazette’s joke about its material conditions of production, confirming for the Press’ readers the “Eastern splendor” and “Oriental magnificence” of the editors’ “Fifth Avenue” residences, the balloons “built of the finest Indian silk and inflated with the rarest American gas” for transporting them from home to work, and the wages paid in “diamonds”

2 Lara Langer Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 33. 3 “Characteristics of The New York Saturday Press,” The New-York Saturday Press, December 11, 1858. Hereafter designated, “SP.” 4 “The Palace and Princes of the Press,” SP, November 27, 1858, reproduces the portion of the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette’s notice quoted above. 178

to the paper’s “magnificently” remunerated staff.5 Evident in this satirical exchange is the understanding that an obvious divide separated the symbolic aspirations of a paper on the make from its actual material conditions: but, as this essay will argue, puffing demonstrated the complex nexus between the symbolic and the material, exemplifying for midcentury readers the curious means by which fictions of print capitalism, despite being recognizable as fictions, shaped the literary culture of the day.

While it was easy enough to decry the practice of puffing for the way it undermined criticism’s claim to disinterestedness, not to mention literature’s implicit claims to be above the crass machinations of the marketplace, it was decidedly more difficult for antebellum print culture to imagine or explain the emergence and circulation of literary distinction without invoking puffing and self-promotion as the primary mechanisms behind a book or paper’s perceived merit and financial success. As a mechanism, puffing inspired the idea that symbolic capital, the essence of a puff, could be “inflated with the rarest American gas,” circulated, and made to pay “magnificently” once it was converted to hard, economic capital.6 According to this way of thinking, puffing stood within a mystified nexus, where literary value intersected with commercial value, and it suggested a means for managing the vagaries of literary reception and distinction. For all the clamor that Clapp raised around the nefarious

5 Ibid. In Poe’s writings the balloon became an apt figure for a print culture bloated by puffs, countering the idealized, Habermasian image of print as a public sphere constructed through rational debate. See Cohen, Fabrication, 56-64. 6 Ibid. 179

practice of puffing, he, too, wanted to see the Saturday Press’ symbolic capital converted into dollars if not “diamonds,” and the Saturday Press’ satirical take upon its material conditions of production brought home the idea that literary autonomy and distinction were related to, if not dependent upon, the material transcendence that “The Palace and Princes of the Press” figured as opulent wealth.

If the notice from the Boston Gazette thought it ridiculous that a paper like the Saturday Press would presume to exist in a world beyond commercial interests, Whitman scholarship has documented a more obvious objection to Clapp’s professions against puffing. Clapp mounted, after all, in December of 1859, a year-long publicity campaign on behalf of

Whitman and his publishers and in the process made the Press financially dependent upon Thayer & Eldridge’s publishing house.7 But this contradiction was only one of many circumscribed by the practice of puffing. Indeed, puffing, as practiced and imagined by the Saturday Press, encapsulated a wider, contradictory set of ideas about how literary value related to economic value and how literature functioned as a commodity.

The story of puffing in the Saturday Press is not simply, then, a narrative of Whitman’s promotion, but rather a set of conflicted exchanges that wrestled with the possibility of autonomy in the literary marketplace and underscored the stakes of symbolic capital production in late-antebellum

New York.

7 For more on this publicity campaign, see Amanda Gailey, “Walt Whitman and the King of Bohemia: The Poet in the Saturday Press,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (2008): 143-166. 180

II. Puffs, Bohemian Twaddle, and a Case for Symbolic Capital

As the Saturday Press was preparing to fold (for the first time) in

November of 1860, it reprinted three proleptic eulogies first published in other papers. Among them, the New York Sunday Courier wrote of the

Press’ staunch refusal to puff and its impending closure:

This is pure and undefiled Quixotism. . . . To put down the puffing

business is about as sensible an undertaking as to attempt to put

down crying babies. If the Saturday Press had gone into the puffing

business, it would not be at the point of giving up the ghost. But its

appeal for assistance is pretty good evidence that it has seen the

error of its ways, and is now doing a little gentle puffing on its own

account.8

And from a decidedly more cynical vantage, the Sunday Atlas offered the following:

Before a paper can be worth anything for the insertions of “puffs,” it

must attain some circulation. . . . All the world does not admire bad

imitations of the French journalists and feuilletonists; nor

appreciate continual puffs of Walt Whitman’s dirty “Leaves of

Grass;” nor make a steady pabulum of the lucubrations of the

Bohemians of Literature. [….W]hen the epitaph of the Saturday

Press comes to be written, it will have no reference to the “lack of

8 [From the New York Sunday Courier], “A Failure to Be Regretted,” SP, November, 17, 1860. 181

money for advertising,” nor yet to the perverted taste of the public,

which will pay for advertising in its own way, in papers of

circulation and influence. That epitaph will read: “Died of too much

Bohemian twaddle.”9

Beginning with an editorial in its third issue, the Saturday Press had staked its reputation upon the idea that it would “never adopt the policy of indiscriminate praise” known as puffing, and it would likewise not be swayed by the warnings from publishing houses that “unless we adopt the puffing system, to which they have all got accustomed (as some people get accustomed to swill milk), we shall not get their advertisements.”10

Moreover, the Press’ editor, Henry Clapp, Jr., maintained that refusing the practice of “indiscriminate praise” was the only way for the art and literary weekly’s criticism to have any credibility and that the Press would, therefore, pursue independence in its opinions whatever the cost. As the comments from the Sunday Courier and Sunday Atlas attest, however,

Clapp’s editorial and promotional practices did not differ so distinctly from the market-driven publishing practices he criticized.

Five issues later, for instance, in the publishing notice printed in the top left-hand corner of the first page, the Press declared itself--in the familiar, hyperbolic tone of a puff--to be an “Independent Journal of the

Times,” with five principle characteristics and two clear puffs about its audience and contents:

9 “Alas! Poor ‘Saturday Press,’” SP, November, 17, 1860. 10 [Henry Clapp, Jr., Editorial Comments], “To Whom It May Concern,” SP, November 6, 1858. 182

Characteristics of The New York Saturday Press.

I. The Saturday Press is, in every respect, AN INDEPENDENT

JOURNAL, connected with no party or sect, and tainted with no kind of “ism.”

II. The Saturday Press is irrevocably opposed to the whole system of

Puffing, and never allows its reading columns to be used for the purpose of serving any private ends.

III. The Saturday Press is not the organ of any Bookseller,

Publisher, Theatre Manager, or other Advertiser; nor of any clique of Authors or Artists; nor of any other persons except its avowed

Editors.

IV. The Saturday Press is the only journal in the country which gives a COMPLETE LIST OF NEW BOOKS, or anything like a

COMPLETE LIST OF BOOKS IN PRESS.

V. The Saturday Press is the only journal in the country which furnishes a COMPLETE SUMMARY OF LITERARY

INTELLIGENCE.

VI. The Saturday Press circulates exclusively among thinking and intelligent persons, and is, therefore, the Best Advertising Medium in the Country for all persons who wish to reach that portion of the community.

VII. For these and other reasons the Publishers feel justified in saying, that for all intelligent and cultivated gentlemen and ladies,

183

there is no more interesting or valuable journal in the country than

THE NEW YORK SATURDAY PRESS.11

Functioning as part self-review, part editorial policy, and part advertisement, these characteristics were reprinted in the same prominent location for the next twenty-one consecutive issues.12

The contradictory means by which Clapp stridently declared the

Saturday Press to be “independent” and above the practice of puffing are crucial to understanding the Press’ legacy in its day and our own. In much the same way that Christine Stansell has argued, following Jerrold Seigel’s work on the bohemians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, that

“Bohemia …was not the thing apart its contemporaries believed it to be, but rather an imaginative enactment …of inchoate tensions between bourgeois life and artistic aspiration,” I would argue that the Press’ stance against puffing was not an absolutist or wholly antagonistic literary- critical position against the market.13 Instead, the Press used the problem of puffing to mark its distinction within the market, as much as against it.

Thus, the Press’ characteristic tendency to puff its independence, staged most strikingly in the “Characteristics” quoted above, should not be

11 “Characteristics of The New York Saturday Press,” SP, December 11, 1858. 12 The final reprint of this notice appeared in SP, May 7, 1859. 13 Christine Stansell, “Whitman at Pfaff’s: Commercial Culture, Literary Life and New York Bohemia at Mid-Century,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 10.3 (1993), 110. See also Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 (1986; repr., Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 5-13; and Joanna Levin, Bohemia in America, 1858-1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), introduction. 184

dismissed as mere humbug or evidence of the Press’ baldly transparent hypocrisy. Rather, we should view its anti-puffing pose as a performance committed to both imagining a literary-critical paper that could exist beyond the market and, at times, satirizing the sanctimonious disavowals of real market conditions that came along with occupying such a stance.14

As the Sunday Courier and Sunday Atlas suggest, there were plenty of contradictions to be found in the Press’ representations of itself and its relation to the practice of puffing. The most obvious contradiction was that the Press did in fact puff, a point roundly made by both papers. The

Sunday Courier concedes, however, the endemic nature of puffing to the

New York literary marketplace and subsequently reads the Press’ submission to such a practice as inevitable and excusable in its “gentle[r]” form.15 The Sunday Atlas delves a bit deeper into the Press’ contradictory self-image and insists that the Press has confused its literary pretensions with actual market value. Accordingly, it writes that the Press’ failure has more to do with its content than with its amply promoted virtue of refusing to puff.16

As fitting as this criticism might have been, the Atlas’ critique was driven by a larger question left unresolved in the antebellum literary marketplace and one made more pressing by the flagrant practice of puffing: How did literary value relate to market value? In the attempt to declare its own value, the Press imagined that it could override market

14 See, e.g., “The Palace and Princes of the Press,” SP, November 27, 1858. 15 “A Failure to Be Regretted,” SP, November, 17, 1860. 16 “Alas! Poor ‘Saturday Press,’” SP, November, 17, 1860. 185

value, and the Atlas was right to dismiss this as a posture that could only appear to make the market disappear. But in making its counter position, the Atlas insisted that literary value was synonymous with market value, since the presence of one confirmed the other, and thereby failed to advance any nuanced understanding of the relationship between the two.

That said, the Atlas’ critique underscored an important distinction between actual circulation and the representations of prospective circulation found in advertisements, notices, solicitations, and puffs for papers and books alike. As the writer for the Atlas implies, puffing and advertising could hardly guarantee a rise in actual circulation for the

Press, though the concerted efforts of a group of like-minded, solicitous editors could present readers and future advertisers with the semblance of a successfully circulating paper or book.

Working within the French context, Pierre Bourdieu has argued that a series of similar disputes over artistic ideals and disavowals of real market conditions within the bohemian revolutions of nineteenth-century

Paris proved crucial to the autonominization of its literary field as well as the emergence of a cultural avant-garde. According to Bourdieu, bohemian artists attempted to turn economic value on its head through a symbolic revolution, but in the process, they created an “infernal mechanism” that threatened to undermine the very claims to distinction and autonomy they had sought for themselves within a restricted literary field of their own making. As Bourdieu writes, the moment that artists argue most stridently

186

“that a ‘work of art … is beyond appraisal, has no commercial value, cannot be paid for,’ that it is without price, that is to say, foreign to the ordinary logic of the ordinary economy, they discover that it is effectively without commercial value, that it has no market.”17 The Atlas’ easy dismissal of the

Saturday Press’ legacy as so much “Bohemian twaddle” suggests an already cynical understanding of the “infernal mechanism” that Bourdieu would later describe in the twentieth century: according to the Atlas, then, the Press’ commercial failures were entirely predictable, a function of writing to an all-too-narrow audience, and its public demonstrations of the

“necessity of …[the paper’s]… virtue” with respect to puffing were transparently feeble attempts to put a sanctimonious sheen on an otherwise unremarkable failure to anticipate market tastes.18

But when we put the fact of the Press’ financial failings aside for a moment and extend to Clapp and the Press Bourdieu’s analysis of the symbolic gains achieved by Parisian bohemians through the overturning of market logic, another explanation of the Press’ legacy comes into view.

Bourdieu’s idea that capital takes a number of forms (economic, social, cultural, and symbolic) is helpful because understanding that capital moves through flexible and sometimes competing forms clarifies Clapp’s motivation for taking on the puffing system and promoting so heavily the

Press’ critical independence, whatever the immediate financial costs might

17 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 81 (Bourdieu’s emphasis). 18 Ibid. 187

have been from potentially rebuffed advertisers. When viewed as an investment in symbolic capital, Clapp’s aggressive campaign to define the

Press in opposition to market protocols takes on a more strategic and less

“quixotic” appearance. From this vantage, it becomes clear that Clapp’s

“Characteristics” of the Press do not attempt to rewrite the logic of literary value needing to take on some form of market value so much as they attempt to redefine that market in restricted and prestigious terms, as a weekly that “circulates exclusively among thinking and intelligent persons,” for instance.

We can see that Clapp’s investment in symbolic capital “paid off” to the extent that William Dean Howells, as a young, aspiring writer from

Ohio, perceived the Saturday Press to be (in 1860) on par with the

Atlantic, a magazine with significantly more economic, social, and cultural capital standing behind it. As Howells wrote forty years later in his

Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900) of the Press:

[T]hat paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was

clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It

attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and

feared. . . . It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well

for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic,

and for the time there was no other literary comparison.19

As Howells indicates, the Saturday Press was an embodiment of the New

19 William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance: A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship (1900; repr., New York: Harper and Brothers Publishing, 1911), 70. 188

York publishing scene, and it was in this locale that symbolic capital was more easily appropriated and, at times, fabricated through aggressive acts of self-promotion and puffing. In contradistinction to Boston’s print culture, which had developed a reputation for staid, elite publications vetted by long-standing cultural institutions and families, New York publishing was markedly more commercial and volatile.20 Moreover, its literary culture was more dynamic and open to the interventions of an upstart like Clapp. By describing the Press’ bid for legitimacy as a contest of “teeth,” a process of making “itself felt and feared,” Howells intimates that representations of symbolic capital were contestable and ephemeral performances. But in retrospectively decrying the “literary shams” perpetuated by the Press, a reference, perhaps, to Clapp’s hypocrisy in puffing the Press and Whitman (among other peccadilloes like failing to pay its writers), Howells plays at a similar sort of game of legitimating and, in this case, denying symbolic capital while overlooking the difference that historical perspective makes within such contests. Writing in 1900,

Howells knew that the Press had failed in the literary coup it announced throughout 1859 and 1860, but it is important to recognize that the Press’ original puffs and self-promotions were prospective texts that imagined a future circulation that was still, theoretically, possible. Once that future was known to be foreclosed, as it was when Howells wrote his “personal

20 Levin, Bohemia, 66. Stansell makes a similar point when she writes that in Clapp’s New York (as opposed to in Boston) the “rules of writerly entrepreneurship” were “predicated on manipulating money and publicity rather than social connections and patronage” (“Whitman at Pfaff’s,” 122). 189

retrospect” about the Press, it became difficult to see its puffs or self- promotions as anything other than “literary shams.”21 Clapp’s simultaneous critique and embrace of puffing helps recover a midcentury contest over legitimacy and prestige, the outcome of which was, in this moment at least, far from certain.

The absence of a consolidated cultural elite in New York provided

Clapp with two things: it enabled him to access the literary field with relative ease, and perhaps more importantly, it helped Clapp define what was missing within the city’s periodical culture, thereby providing him with a niche market for his publication. Although Clapp never defined the

Press as an elite publication, per se, and mocked the elite posturing of others whenever he could, he nevertheless saw the Press’ central task in prestigious terms: to create and curate the literary taste and intelligence that Clapp thought the city (and its readers) needed and deserved.22 And

21 Compare, for instance, Howells’ unequivocal paean to the publishers Ticknor and Fields, “Their imprint was a warrant of quality to the reader, and of immortality to the author” with Richard Brodhead’s argument that “Fields’s real accomplishment [was] less that he saw how to market literature than that he established ‘literature’ as a market category.” As Brodhead elaborates, Fields ensured that his book lists would be recognized as “literature” by announcing their “elevated qualit[ies]” through periodicals and extensive networks of editors, writers, and friends, like Griswold, who puffed to his bidding. Viewed in this light, Clapp’s execution of “literary shams” appear in step with Fields’ operations, though the legitimacy of Fields’ imprint as well as the Atlantic Monthly, which he assumed ownership of in 1859, was decidedly more stable than Clapp’s Saturday Press. See Howells, Literary Friends, 16; and Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 55. 22 Clapp’s ambitions for the Press as a journal of record, as well as his disdain for the flood of “flash,” “trash,” and inconsequential literature that circulated in staggering proportions thanks to the popularity of other 190

yet, in attempting such a task, Clapp and the Press became entangled in the seeming contradiction of producing an elite taste for (and within) the mass market.

While Clapp and the Press’ contributors were very much engaged in the processes of distinction and consecration we have come to associate with elite cultural production, twentieth-century scholars like Bourdieu have had trouble accepting the legitimacy of the journalistic medium to such a task because of its appeals to a mass-audience and its ties to the commercial world, which often made for an unstable and porous border between commercial writing and literary writing.23 According to Bourdieu, nineteenth-century journalism existed in a world that was structurally at odds with “serious” criticism and writing. He describes nineteenth-century

Parisian journalists, no matter how bohemian, as an intellectual and literary proletariat caught within an industrialized field of literary production that they could not change from within.24

Stansell takes a similar position with the bohemians who gathered at Pfaff’s tavern and served as the primary contributors to the Press. While she makes the important point that “bohemia was inextricable from the cultural marketplace,” she reverses this position when it comes to the

literary weeklies like Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger, are evident in his editorial comments. See SP, January 8, 1859. 23 For more on the porousness of this border and newspaper culture in nineteenth-century France, see Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter- Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), chapter 2. 24 Bourdieu, Rules, 53. 191

literary marketplace and insists upon a hard distinction between commercial, “hack” work and the “serious” work of “artists,” a distinction that is decidedly twentieth-century in its perspective and one that misrepresents the actual conditions of literary production and consumption in antebellum New York.25 Instead, it is important to see that the contemporary producers and consumers of this periodical culture could not and did not distinguish so easily between “popular” and

“literary” forms, between “hack” and “serious” work, and that these later distinctions were made possible by symbolic contests waged within the periodicals themselves.26

Periodicals were central to literary production and consumption in this moment, and as Stansell writes, periodicals “mixed poetry, short stories and essays with sketches and news” with little differentiation in terms of format.27 Stansell takes this to mean that the medium “allowed hack writers, unconnected to the powerful institutions of literary taste and approbation, to begin to conceive of themselves as artists,” but such a position overstates the exclusiveness, elusiveness, and coherence of

“literariness” in antebellum New York, as well as the division of labor that separated the manual, “hack” work of journalism from the “serious,”

25 Stansell, “Whitman at Pfaff’s,” 114-15. See also, Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), chapter 1. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 192

creative work of “writing.”28 Her characterizations of literary labor and value nonetheless mark an important “elision” of the numerous and, as

Cohen reminds us, often-ignored “processes that bring literature into being”--from “the material processes …[of] paper-making, typesetting, printing, [and] sewing” to the “ambiguously literary activities [of] editing,” reading, reciting, performing, and even the selling of periodicals and books.29 Indeed, while scholars have long used the writing of singular authors to define the literary field, Clapp’s Saturday Press took a different view and underscored the field-shaping power of secondary modes of literary production—editing, compiling, reviewing, advertising, and puffing, among other tasks—that were often strategically ambiguous literary activities and that held sway over the consumption as well as the production of literature. The collaborative and commercial aspects of these activities have often been grounds for the lack of importance granted to them within literary histories of this period, but as Clapp knew well, those characteristics made them all the more powerful in shaping New York’s late-antebellum literary field.

III. Puffing amidst the Print Explosion

By midcentury, New York publishing had well eclipsed that of

Boston and Philadelphia, both in terms of the number and variety of publications issued as well as the circulation those publications received.

28 Ibid. See Levin, Bohemia in America, 67-68 for a related critique of the significance Stansell accords to the “gatherings at Pfaff’s.” 29 Cohen, Fabrication, 12. 193

In fact, by 1860 New York was the nation’s largest industrial center and publishing its leading industry.30 The material conditions of print in New

York were heavily oriented towards the mass-market, but the city’s diverse and expanding population also supported a substantial range of periodicals that helped “create” and stabilize various “subcultures” organized around “social, political, racial, and linguistic difference.”31 And while the often salacious content of New York’s daily newspapers prompted an easy critique of the mechanisms and tastes of market-driven publishing, their highly publicized circulation numbers and boasts about their advertising revenue also shifted the ambitions and expectations of smaller, niche publications like the Saturday Press. The unprecedented explosion of commercial print in New York encouraged wild fantasies about print and its market potential that became oddly normative in this period and that help to explain the strange mix of fatalism and optimism that suffused both the practice of puffing and its condemnation—even amongst the most cynical of publishing insiders who wrote for the

Saturday Press.

Clapp’s November 3, 1860, editorial, “Card,” epitomized this conflicted view on puffing and advertising when he opined: “Our greatest difficulty, all along, has been the lack of means to advertise the paper properly; if we could have done this, it would ere now—judging from what

30 David Dowling, Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Marketplace (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 18. 31 David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 128. 194

we have accomplished without advertising—have been a triumphant success.”32 Clapp attributed the paper’s failing to a lack of capital; he had begun the paper with “less than $1000,” and that small sum prevented him from advertising the journal.33 Clapp’s dogged optimism, in the midst of clear financial failure, speaks in part to his on-going bid to secure a wealthy backer for the Press.34 In August of 1860, Whitman’s publisher,

Thayer & Eldridge, had arranged to assume ownership of the Saturday

Press (at Clapp’s request and with Clapp remaining as its editor) on

September 1, but the firm had rising debts and stagnant sales throughout the summer and fall, forcing Thayer & Eldridge to abandon this deal.35

Thus, by November Clapp was in search of another “person of means” to save the paper and provide the burst of capital that would, in his mind, secure its financial success.36 While the fate of the Press looked dire indeed, Clapp’s statements also point to an unshaken belief in the literary marketplace’s responsiveness to a well-timed infusion of capital and advertising. Such a belief is visible in Clapp’s optimistic view that should the “character of the Saturday Press” become known to a larger readership, it would necessarily turn into “a large and paying business,” and in the fatalistic view that “if we would only change the character of the

32 “Card,” SP, November 3, 1860. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ted Genoways, Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet during the Lost Years of 1860-1862 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 74. On December 5, Thayer & Eldridge informed Whitman that the firm was bankrupt. 36 “Card,” SP, November 3, 1860. 195

Saturday Press, and, in imitation of our contemporaries, go into the puffing business at so much a line, we might make it pay at once.”37 As

Clapp and many of his contemporaries imagined, puffing presented another means for turning the economic value of literature on its head.

According to this view, puffing ensured that demand, or readership, would follow supply, rather than the other way round, and without regard to quality. Proleptic in its desire, puffing presented readers with the appearance of a book or paper’s successful and prodigious reception before the fact.

Earlier that year in a letter to Whitman, Clapp wrote more explicitly of this understanding of the literary marketplace:

[Leaves of Grass] is bound to sell, if money enough is spent

circulating the Reprints and advertising it generally. It is a

fundamental principle in political economy that everything

succeeds if money enough is spent on it. If I could spend five

hundred dollars in one week on the Saturday Press I would make

five thousand dollars by the operation. Ditto you with the L. of G.

[….] [J]ust now I am in a state of despair even in respect to getting

out another issue of the S.P. and all for want of a paltry two or three

hundred dollars which would take the thing to a paying point, and

make it worth ten thousand dollars as a transferable piece of

37 Ibid. 196

property.38

The idea that the literary marketplace would respond necessarily and in an instant to the influx of capital and advertising was a central conceit behind both the practice and the condemnation of puffing. This way of thinking about print’s market potential grew out of a general recognition of the antebellum print explosion as well as the particular, well-publicized cases of overnight print sensations.39

One such well-publicized case was Robert Bonner’s New York

Ledger.40 By 1855 Bonner had remade the dry-goods mercantile sheet into a literary weekly, the subscriptions of which famously jumped from under

3000 upon acquisition to 100,000 by the end of 1855 and 180,000 by the end of 1856.41 By 1855, Bonner had paired highly visible advertisements of the paper’s exclusive content with an equally well-publicized campaign to collect the celebrity and leading authors of the day. Bonner’s promotional strategies staged what appeared to be the instantaneous conversion of the

38 Henry Clapp, Jr., “Letter to Walt Whitman,” May 14, 1860, The Walt Whitman Archive, 2:375. Letter first transcribed in Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Volume 2 (New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1915), 375. 39 Ezra Greenspan notes this general trend when he writes that the 1850 census reported the “average circulation of periodicals” to be “7500” copies--a figure that “would have made the success of any periodical of the preceding generation”--while in 1850 “magazines at the upper end of the circulation gamut, such as Godey’s, Graham’s, and Harper’s, were selling ten or more times as many copies and reaching the largest journalistic market in the world.” See Greenspan, Walt Whitman and the American Reader (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 24. 40 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850-1865 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), 356. 41 Susan Belasco Smith, introduction to Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time, by Fanny Fern (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), xvii. 197

symbolic and cultural capital represented by exclusive publications and celebrity authorship into the economic capital of soaring issue and subscription sales, and likewise, he demonstrated that the formula could be made to work in the opposite direction: the extravagant display and application of economic capital appeared to produce and secure symbolic capital as well when he publicized, for instance, the enormous and unprecedented sums of money he paid to Fanny Fern ($100 a column),

Henry Ward Beecher ($30,000 advance for his novel Norwood), Horace

Greeley ($10,000 for his Recollections series), Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow ($3000 for the poem “The Hanging of the Crane”), Alfred

Lloyd Tennyson ($5000 for the poem “England and America in 1872”), and Edward Everett ($10,000 donation to Everett’s Mt. Vernon

Association in exchange for a series of letters).42 While Clapp and the

Press ridiculed the Ledger’s poor taste in literature and Bonner’s crass commercial tactics, Bonner’s example nonetheless encouraged wild fantasies about print’s market potential and the equally pervasive idea that market demand responded as much to representations of the supply of literature (in the form of puffs, notices, and advertisements) as to the actual experience of reading that supply. Indeed, Clapp’s interest in the symbolic capital to be gained from promoting the Press’s anti-puffing

42 Figures found in David Dowling, The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), chapter 3. The publisher Harper and Brothers had a similarly spectacular debut for their in-house Harper’s Monthly Magazine, which began in 1850 and secured “fifty thousand subscribers within its first half year.” See Greenspan, Walt Whitman, 34. 198

policy, its discerning criticism and exclusive readership, and its comprehensive reporting on book and periodical publications, as well as his expectation that the Press’s distinction would eventually pay out significant sums of money mirrored Bonner’s priorities with the Ledger at the same time that Clapp bemoaned Bonner’s influence upon the literary field.

Clapp promoted the Press as a necessary intervention in a literary market that was saturated with books and periodicals, but that had no reliable means of discernment. And yet, the very material conditions that helped Clapp claim this distinction for the Press were also the conditions in which the puffing system could thrive. Daniel Fineman has argued, more generally, that the high volume of objects produced by industrial capitalism forced individuals into a “specular relation” with most of the objects they consumed; in other words, these objects were “consumed as representations” and “according to their nominal qualities.”43 Thus, at the same time that critics like Clapp were increasingly empowered by readers who could not possibly keep up with the quantity of books and periodicals in circulation and relied upon them for accurate representations of their

“nominal qualities,” editors and publishers who puffed were likewise empowered when the print explosion further complicated the accountability and authenticity of predominantly anonymous reviews and notices. And while the line separating genuine criticism from puffery was

43 Daniel Fineman, “The Parodic and Production: Criticism and Labor,” Minnesota Review 18 (1982): 76. 199

not nearly as distinct as Clapp made it out to be in the Saturday Press, the scandal that Clapp drew around puffing provided the Press with a performative fiction that lent the paper distinction and purpose within a competitive marketplace.

The actual practice of puffing was more complicated and often less mendacious than the Press depicted it to be. In addition to the material conditions mentioned above, puffing grew out of a gift economy, whereby editorial favors were exchanged as a means of doing polite business, and the newspaper exchange list system, which encouraged editors to read, share, review, reprint, and promote material printed in other papers since periodicals were exempted from postage charges in the U.S. mail system.

As Leon Jackson explains, “Exchange networks… had a tendency to generate alliances and networks of likeminded editors.”44 These networks of likeminded editors were ideally suited to the task of puffing and often grew into mutual admiration societies. One of Clapp’s earliest editorials marked the slight trepidation he felt in refusing to reciprocate the praise other journals had given the Saturday Press in its debut:

[W]e trust we shall not be accused either of ingratitude or of

jealousy, when we say, as we do most distinctly, that praise from

papers which are equally ready to laud the first vulgar and flashy

journal that comes along, is not an honor which we at all covet.

Furthermore, nothing is more humiliating than to receive favors

which one cannot reciprocate; and we may as well announce, once

44 Jackson, Business of Letters, 123. 200

for all, that we shall never adopt the policy of indiscriminate

praise.45

The Press’ earliest declarations of independence were meant to excuse the paper from the textual and social relationships that might have otherwise led to “a potentially endless cycle of mutual indebtedness” and interfered with the autonomy of its criticism.46 Thus, while puffing was yet a social practice with objectives and rewards that extended beyond the initial exchange of money in the literary marketplace, the Saturday Press chose to emphasize the technological and market-driven aspects of the practice in order to aggressively set the terms of its relations with other editors and papers. In other words, and as Whitman’s treatment in the Press makes clear, the paper’s “no Puffing” policy was actually an expedient way to control what and how it puffed rather than an abstemious rejection of the practice.

IV. Puffing in the Press: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia, Book-Making Systems,

and Whitman

Beginning with its third issue, the Saturday Press built its case against puffing by consistently excoriating the New American

Cyclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge (1857-1866), a multi-volume encyclopedia edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana

45 “To Whom It May Concern,” SP, November 6, 1858. 46 Jackson, Business of Letters, 125. 201

and recently published by D. Appleton & Company in New York.47

According to the Press, this encyclopedia was widely judged, “on both sides of the Atlantic, to be a miserable failure,” and yet, because of the veneration accorded to the Appleton publishing house and its editors, the puffs for the volumes (and the advertisements of their increasing sales) threatened to drown out the necessary criticism of them.48

As a general practice, puffing collapsed the difference between advertising and criticism, but the Cyclopaedia’s continued success despite having its faults “laboriously set before the public” appeared to make that criticism irrelevant.49 The New American Cyclopaedia was a special case in the Press’ view because the incredible sales it achieved through the puffing system—as well as the material conditions of writing the text itself—ran roughshod over the critical labor and scholarship that the Press valued so highly. Thus, in the pages of the Press the Cyclopaedia came to represent an abomination within the secondary order of literary production.

The Press traced the encyclopedia’s numerous errors and self- contradictions to the below-market wages that Appletons’ publishing

47 Dana and Ripley were Harvard-educated, Brook Farm Transcendentalists transplanted to New York and working, at this time, as editor and literary critic, respectively, of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Perry Miller reports that the Cyclopaedia “sold into the millions, earning Ripley over $100,000.” See Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956), 341; and [Henry Clapp, Jr., Editorial Comments], “To Whom It May Concern,” SP, November 6, 1858. 48 “Literary Pay,” SP, November 13, 1858. 49 Ibid. 202

house paid its writers. In “Literary Pay,” the Press announced that

Harper’s Magazine paid ten to twenty “dollars a page” for “light contributions,” while “for the carefully digested and laboriously condensed articles which a national Cyclopaedia demands from its contributors,” the publishers of the Cyclopaedia paid “two dollars a page!”50 “Two dollars a page,” the writer continued, “are offered for scholarship, power of combination, condensation of information from a hundred sources, and the mechanical labor of putting the materials into literary form!”51 For this writer, “mechanical labor” is in no way antithetical to “literary form.”

Instead, the writer implies that “hack” work is a function primarily of

“hack” pay, and that “literariness” is a quality that any print genre, medium, or worker might aspire to and achieve. And while the charge of puffing was most often invoked on behalf of deserving artists (in the abstract) who failed to secure a wide readership, not for lack of merit but for lack of social connections with the editors who mattered, the Press’ extended coverage of the Cyclopaedia controversy took a different tack and underscored its greater interest in the way puffing compromised periodical culture and criticism as a collective enterprise. The Press felt there was more at stake in its intervention against puffing than rescuing individual artists from obscurity or deflating the reputations of undeserving writers and their works that had been puffed up by friends and publishing houses; instead, the Press attempted to refine the literary

50 Ibid (emphasis in original). 51 Ibid. 203

field by first refining the periodical culture that gave literary culture its shape and made literature recognizable as such.52

In a hoax piece entitled “The Japanese Book System,” which doubled as a satire of encyclopedia-making, the Saturday Press imagined a crisis not just of systematic and mechanized book production, but a crisis of consumption as well. The piece reported that in Japan “there is but one publishing house,” and that this lone house had developed a system of book-making—distinct from book-writing—that recombined the text and type of a primary text in order to produce a series of secondary texts that doubled as primary, authoritative, and autonomous texts themselves.53

The reporter likened the process to a chemical recombination of atoms, offering the example that setting one text, hypothetically described as “The

History of Modern Philosophy” and primarily concerned with the subjects

“History, Modern, and Philosophy,” would, in turn, produce “four books” from “these three elements.”54 The books would differ “entirely in character as the components differ in arrangement,” as we can see from the four titles produced in this example:

1. The History of Modern Philosophy.

2. The Philosophy of Modern History.

52 For more on the exemplary relations shared between Ticknor and Fields’ literary publishing house and the periodical press, see William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870: The Papers of William Charvat, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 168-189; and Brodhead, School of Hawthorne, 48-58. 53 “The Japanese Book System,” SP, February 12, 1859. 54 Ibid. 204

3. The Modern History of Philosophy.

4. The Modern Philosophy of History.55

The writer continued to explain that “When the work contains many elements, the number of combinations, and hence the number of works, is enormous. It is true that many of them seem nonsensical; but so firm is the faith of the people in the unerring certainty of the principle, that they reject none. The incomprehensible they regard as prophetic, and hence sacred, and not to be understood until the events unfold. . . . So if any work should contradict their preconceived opinions, they never contend, but submit as to an oracle.”56

While this hoax betrays an obvious anxiety about a mechanized system of production that replaces the genius of an author with the genius of a system, it also imagines a book-making system that has excised the shaping force of writers, critics, and compilers upon the consumption practices of readers. Such a literary field would have no use for the selection and consecration of texts provided by an institution like the

Saturday Press because “the people” “submit” directly to these texts as if they were “an oracle.” In a similar way, publishing house puffs attempted to collapse the difference between literary value and commercial value, and in this dystopian vision that was “The Japanese Book System,” the

Saturday Press imagined a world wherein whatever the system or the publishing house could produce, no matter how nonsensical, would be

55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 205

read, valued, and consecrated as literature. For the Press, the scandal of

“The Japanese Book System” was forged not only in the loss of authentic moments of inspired and autonomous literary production, the loss of an author and an aura, but also in the loss of the secondary agents and institutions that would otherwise give shape to that literary field.

By article’s end “The Japanese Book System” reveals itself to be a satire aimed at the dubious production and circulation practices of the

New American Cyclopaedia. In attempting to be both hoax and satire,

“The Japanese Book System” was able to extend the Press’ critique of the

Cyclopaedia scandal and puffing as a general practice, while also pointing to the hyperbolic aspects of that critique. The satirical reading of “The

Japanese Book System” called into question the ideological underpinnings of the puff that were, however inadvertently, preserved in the Press’ criticism of the practice: namely, that readers were compliant masses open to the direction of critics and publishing houses, and likewise, that print markets were easily manipulated, responding, in an instant, to the flow of money and advertising. As the writer of this piece explicitly notes, “The

Japanese Book System” and puffing, more generally, imagined (and relied upon the idea of) an incredibly “docil[e]” reading public that hardly aligned with the Press’ characterization of its public in other contexts as an intelligent and discerning collection of readers.57 But if the Press’ faith in its readers’ intelligence (not to mention the experience of its contributors as skeptical readers themselves) threw doubt upon the presumed

57 Ibid. 206

gullibility and easy compliance of readers put forward in puffs, Clapp and the Press, nonetheless, found it harder to dismiss the intoxicating possibility that puffing would produce an inevitable and enviable success in the market.

This conflicted desire to both critique and enjoy the supposed benefits of puffing found its greatest extension in the Press’ treatment of

Whitman throughout 1860. By Amanda Gailey’s count, the Press printed

“no fewer than seventy-two Whitman-related items” (notices, reviews, advertisements, parodies, and reprints from other papers) throughout that year, and while Gailey and Genoways have advanced our understanding about what this promotion meant for Whitman’s reception, I want to offer a reading of what that promotion meant for Clapp and the Press.58

If Clapp staked the Press’ reputation upon its anti-puffing policy, how are we to understand the apparent contradiction between this policy and the Press’ puffing of Whitman? One explanation would be that the

Press reserved the right to puff whom it pleased. Clapp prized authentic opinions in the Press’ editorials and once joked that the Press’ editorial

“we” would signify not “men in general, including the speaker,” as Webster defined it, but rather “the speaker alone excluding men in general.”59

Clapp later defended what he thought to be Juliette Beach’s “unfavorable view” of Leaves of Grass along these lines, writing, “It always gives us pleasure to print every variety of opinion upon such subjects, especially

58 See Gailey, “Walt Whitman,” 143-48; and Genoways, Walt Whitman, 44. 59 “Editorial,” SP, October 23, 1858. 207

when . . . the careful reader can have no doubt as to the writer’s meaning.”60 These comments open up the possibility of a “gentle[r],” more sincere form of puffing that supported a variety of opinions and the individuals who wrote them in contradistinction to the repetitive message of a publisher’s puff distributed through multiple papers.61

For Whitman scholars, the fact that the Saturday Press’ puffs for

Whitman co-existed alongside negative reviews of Leaves of Grass has exemplified the principle that all press was good press for the likes of

Whitman and Clapp. A longer view of the Saturday Press’ anti-puffing campaign suggests, however, that a more complex understanding of the contradiction was available to readers of the Press. Much like the

“Japanese Book System,” which presented readers with two contradictory modes of reading at once (a report that asked to be read as hoax and satire), the Press’ puffing of Whitman performed a similar contradiction.

On one hand, Clapp’s puffing of Whitman reflected the very kind of cronyism and “clique”-ishness that his “Characteristics of the Saturday

Press” explicitly rejected.62 Similarly, Clapp’s financial dealings with

Thayer & Eldridge’s publishing house mirrored the relations between other publishing houses and periodicals, and likewise blurred the line

60 “Notes of the Week,” SP, June 2, 1860; see also, Genoways, Walt Whitman, 48-50. 61 “A Failure to Be Regretted,” SP, November, 17, 1860. 62 “Characteristics of The New York Saturday Press,” SP, December 11, 1858. 208

between criticism and advertising.63 But on the other hand, the Press’ outspoken rejection of the practice made its puffing of Whitman performative and self-reflexive in ways that common puffs were not.

Take, for instance, the failed reading of Whitman performed by

Umos within the paper’s Washington correspondence section, which carried forward the manufactured controversy that followed the 1859

Christmas-Eve publication of Whitman’s “A Child’s Reminiscence.”64 Here

Umos echoed the conclusions of the Cincinnati reviewer in declaring that he had not “poetry enough to understand Walt’s Yawp,” but he also connected the automatic, inauthentic writing imagined in “The Japanese

Book System” to Whitman’s poem when he suggested “that Whitman

[had] found a lot of dictionary-pi going off at auction, bought it for a song, employed a Chinese typesetter from the Bible House to set it up in lines of unequal length, and then sold it to you [, Clapp,] as an original Poem.”65

Umos’ editorial about another failed reading of Whitman further satirized the reader—in this case, himself—who “didn’t get” Whitman, but his performance also questioned the notion of a docile, compliant reading

63 The strategic blurring of this line is evident in the notices that Whitman wrote and submitted to Brooklyn and New York newspapers regarding the Christmas Eve publication of “A Child’s Reminiscence” in the Saturday Press. See Gailey, “Walt Whitman,” 145-47; and Genoways, Walt Whitman, 19-20. 64 See Virginia Jackson, “Whitman’s Publics,” in Before Modernism: The Invention of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2018). 65 Umos, “Waifs from Washington VI: The Setting of a Jewel,” subsection: “Walt Whitman’s Yawp,” SP, January 14, 1860. Adding to the irony of this text, Clapp could very well have been Umos in this instance, since he and Robert W. Pearsall shared the pseudonym. 209

public, which, as I have noted, was a crucial part of midcentury thinking about puffing. Like the Cincinnati reviewer before him, Umos resisted the presumed force of the Saturday Press’ endorsement of Whitman, and thereby represented, in part, the general unruliness of the antebellum reading public that would have been dubious of a concerted puffing campaign.

However strategic Clapp’s intentions might have been with the

Saturday Press’ promotion of Whitman, the print campaign that actually transpired was hardly as calculating or devious in its effects as the Press’ criticism of puffing might have led its readers to expect.66 Far from determining a uniform reception for the third edition of Leaves of Grass, the Press’ puffing of Whitman produced and reproduced a range of responses to Whitman that proliferated outwards in multiple directions and troubled the notion that puffing yielded reliable, predictable results.

Rather, in puffing Whitman, the Saturday Press played at and played with representations of Whitman’s reception. At the same time that positive reviews of Whitman were in line with those of traditional puffs, there was also an emergent sense that periodical readers were savvy to editorial hype and had the ability to spot and resist the feedback loops created by puffs.

Umos' critique (and its placement in the Saturday Press) reveals the Press trying to encourage and represent that kind of savvy reader while also hoping to score a windfall in popular readership.

These distinctions from the common practices of puffing did not

66 See Genoways, Walt Whitman, 42-78. 210

save the Press from charges of hypocrisy, but they did provide the paper with a means of drawing more attention to the context of its circulation and further extending its claims to distinction within a competitive periodical marketplace. Its Whitman puffs remained idiosyncratic as well, both for the simple fact that no other paper could have been accused of wanting to puff Whitman and for the more interesting forms this puffing assumed within the pages of the Press. In this way, Clapp’s puffing of

Whitman did not explicitly compromise the Press’ independence, but rather asserted the its editorial prerogative to champion what and whom it pleased.

Section 2—After Walt. Whitman: The Saturday Press Parodies and the

Making of the Whitman Poem

The Press’ treatment of puffing—and the attendant vagaries of literary reception and profit—have consequences for the current critical narrative surrounding the production of the 1856 and 1860 editions of

Leaves of Grass. If, as this narrative suggests, these editions demonstrate

Whitman’s evolving response to the inadequate reception of his poetry, we must recognize, first, that Whitman’s sense of failure was predicated upon the hyperbolic market potential ascribed to books in puffs, and, second, that Whitman himself not only embraced the culture of puffing and reprinting but also integrated these practices into his own poetic project.

As Meredith McGill has argued (with respect to the 1856 edition of Leaves

211

of Grass), Whitman’s poetic and promotional strategies increasingly reinforced one another: he developed “techniques for extending his poetic voice, using poetic and publishing strategies that draw our attention elsewhere for an account of origins, cultivate a range of possible responses, and allow a voice we will come to recognize as Whitman’s to emerge in their very midst.”67 For McGill, the 1856 edition signaled this fusion of poetic and publishing ambition, in part, by internalizing the reviews of the

1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in a striking appendix Whitman titled

“Leaves-Droppings,” which mixed unsolicited, or authentic, critical reviews with Whitman’s anonymously published self-reviews. In 1860, the

Leaves-Droppings project was reprinted as a pamphlet by Whitman’s publishers Thayer and Eldridge titled “Leaves of Grass Imprints,” and its contents were extended to include reviews of all three editions of Leaves of

Grass.68 Moreover, throughout 1860, Whitman, Clapp, and the Saturday

Press extended this promotional-poetic strategy in numerous ways. And yet, despite these elaborate practices and efforts, Whitman later idealized his understanding of reception as a direct exchange between the poet and

“the people,” speaking with Horace Traubel in 1889, while disparaging the indirect means that, by default, introduced him to the reading public: “[the people] have no way of getting acquainted with me: I get to them through

67 See Meredith McGill, “Walt Whitman and the Poetics of Reprinting,” in Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 37-58. 68 Leaves of Grass Imprints (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860). For a review of this pamphlet of reviews, see Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass Imprints,” Brooklyn City News, 10 October 1860: 2. 212

the falsifying interpretations of the newspapers: through slander, even: which is not getting to them at all.”69

David Reynolds’ cultural biography Walt Whitman’s America

(1995) brings this compromised and oft-distorted context of 1850s publishing into sharp focus. However, Reynolds also chooses to reproduce the logic of Whitman’s disavowals from 1889 in his account of the reception of the early editions of Leaves of Grass, and in this way,

Reynolds’ biography becomes exemplary of the myth, still prevalent in

Whitman studies, that control over a text’s genre—and to some extent, control over a text’s reception—rests largely in the hands of the artist. In particular, Reynolds’ chapter “‘The Murderous Delays’: In Search of an

Audience” proposes that the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass suffered such a limited and uneven reception that nothing less than “Whitman’s whole theory of poetry” was threatened. According to Reynolds, “THE

ANSWERER HAD SPOKEN. He had said his welcome would be universal.

It was not. Therein lay a terrible problem.” 70 Dramatic rhetoric aside,

Reynolds’ narrative is paradigmatic of a trend in Whitman studies that reads Whitman’s early reception as inherently problematic. Part of that problem stems from the fact that Whitman’s texts would not find the

“copious thousands” of readers he imagined (and which Reynolds likely

69 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, volume 3, 467. Accessed via The Walt Whitman Archive, edited by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, http://www.whitmanarchive.org. 70 David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 339, emphasis in the original. 213

has in mind) until the twentieth century.71 But another part of the problem—and the one that has implications beyond the case of Whitman or the legacy of the Saturday Press—has to do with the logic that directly links problems of reception to problems of genre and problems of genre to problems that a writer, or later readers as stand-ins, can fix. This logic, I am arguing, is one that Whitman and Clapp read out of the logic of puffs, but it is also a logic that has continued to cloud twentieth- and twenty- first-century understandings of the mechanics of literary promotion and reception.

This is not to say that Whitman scholars have ignored these early receptions of Whitman. Recently, in fact, critics have paid increasing attention to the ambivalent and sometimes surprising reception Whitman experienced with the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Jay Grossman importantly reappraised these early reactions in Reconstituting the

American Renaissance (2003), and he underscored how these early readings, Emerson’s among them, missed Whitman’s fundamental point: that he was writing poetry. Thus, in what has now become a familiar narrative thanks to Grossman’s reappraisal, when Whitman constructed the 1856 edition, he added the word “Poem” to every entry in the table of contents in a move intended to clear up any generic confusion and to secure the reception of Leaves of Grass as poetry. And yet even though this narrative attends quite well to the generic slippage that accompanied

71 The phrase comes from an anonymously published self-review written by Whitman for The New-York Saturday Press, which I discuss below. See [Walt Whitman], “All about a Mocking-Bird,” SP 7 January 1860. 214

Whitman’s early reception, it errs in over-emphasizing and over- simplifying Whitman’s agency in solving the problem of his own reception.

Reynolds’ chapter title “The Murderous Delays,” provides an interesting origin for this mistake: the phrase comes from Walt Whitman himself, or at least from an entry in Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden wherein Whitman rehearses his disappointing reception, his status as “non grata” among the literary elite, and his regret that he didn’t go directly to “the people” by “going out and around and reading [his] poems” and instead suffered “the terrible delays—the murderous delays” of “get[ting] to them” through indirect means.72 (467). Thus, we can see that the crisis Reynolds reconstructs around Whitman’s reception recapitulates Whitman’s personal crisis over his limited reception, and likewise, Reynolds extends throughout his narrative the idea that

Whitman himself endorses in this scene, that Whitman had the agency to effect his own reception, if only he had reached out to “the people” more directly.

The history of Whitman’s reception in 1860 and the crucial terms of indeterminacy and wonder that saturated accounts of Whitman and his poetry in this year counter what Whitman in 1889 would have us believe about the mechanisms of reception and authorial agency. As I will soon make clear, these newspaper accounts, even when they are “false” and

“slanderous,” prove foundational to Whitman’s later reception as a genre unto himself.

72 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, volume 3, 467. 215

In a 2007 PMLA essay entitled “Database as Genre: The Epic

Transformation of Archives,” Ed Folsom, co-founder and co-editor of The

Walt Whitman Archive, argues that database technology can finally accommodate Whitman’s capacious, “universal” sense of genre.73

Folsom’s essay implies that The Walt Whitman Archive online secures a reception for Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass that earlier limits of genre and material print circulation prevented. But Folsom’s triumphant narrative recapitulates the logic implicit in Reynolds’ narrative: namely, that Whitman’s early reception was inherently problematic.

Folsom suggests that Whitman’s “ongoing battle with genre” provided a lasting generic disconnect between readers or “consumers,” as he calls them, who didn’t “know what they were buying,” and Whitman, who kept tinkering with the genre(s) of Leaves of Grass even after emphatically declaring it poetry in the second edition.74 Folsom cites a notebook entry from the 1850s wherein Whitman defined genre as

“peculiar to that person, period or place—not universal” (1572, citing

Whitman’s Daybooks 672), and he posits that, counter to this imported

French term and its taxonomic sense that could only lead to exclusion,

“division and discrimination,” Whitman imagined a “universal” sense of genre that would perfectly fit his poetic practice that, likewise, “move[d] from a particular person, period, or place toward an absorptive embrace of

73 Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” PMLA 122.5 (2007), 1572. 74 Ibid. 216

all people, periods, and places.”75 But in this conceptual move that intends to replace out-dated and exclusive categories of genre with the seemingly infinite inclusiveness of database as genre, Folsom grounds his thinking in

Whitman’s “peculiar” definition of genre and his “peculiar” practice of poetry. There’s a circularity to this logic that points importantly, and paradigmatically, to a lasting but unacknowledged legacy of Whitman’s early reception: that his Leaves of Grass are sui generis and, moreover, that Whitman is sui generis.

Such a residual logic—or the belief that Whitman and his poems are sui generis—is, no doubt, strange and unexpected in an essay that goes to great lengths to point to the cultural discourses and forms that Whitman’s poetry clearly imitates. Folsom, for instance, describes the 1855 poems as

“long, cascading lines, [filled with] mixed diction, and endless catalogs of the commonplace,” which read “like some cross between journalism, oratory, and the Bible,” and Reynolds’ cultural biography, likewise, offers an extensive and nuanced description of the cultural figures, practices, and forms upon which Whitman drew for his poetical experiments. So how can we account for the perpetuation of the sui generis myth when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary?

In the pages that remain, I argue that Whitman’s reception as sui generis has a definitive, traceable history, that it began as a fiction encouraged by Whitman when he promoted his first and second editions of Leaves of Grass, and that this fiction was later amplified by newspaper

75 Ibid. 217

and journal contributors, Clapp and the Saturday Press writers foremost among them, who strategically produced Whitman and his poems as

“wonders” in the months preceding and following the publication of the third edition of the Leaves of Grass. In December of 1859, The New York

Saturday Press, made Whitman its literary cause célèbre, and throughout

1860 it published on his behalf numerous Whitman poems, Whitman parodies, advertisements and notices for Leaves of Grass, as well as satirical and laudatory reviews of Whitman and his work. Through these publishing practices and materials, the Saturday Press consolidated

Whitman’s reception around issues of genre that, by design, were meant to appear impossible to resolve. In other words, the so-called problem of

Whitman’s early reception and Whitman’s so-called battle with genre began as critical and strategic fictions, borrowed in part from the promotion of mid-century curiosities, and intended to keep readers guessing about the antecedents and meanings of Whitman and his poems.

Another important legacy of this Whitman-centric activity in the Saturday

Press is that it trained readers to recognize the Whitman poem as poetry even when these poems bore little resemblance to the genres and versification patterns of poetry these nineteenth-century readers were used to reading.

II. Reviewing Whitman in 1860

According to an anonymous review published in 1860 for the

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London Leader (and reprinted one month later in the Saturday Press),

American critics have a “tendency …to create wonders where in the natural course of things, no wonder, or a very small wonder, exists.”76 The review details Whitman’s reception history and attempts to disrupt what it sees as the intentional mystification of Whitman’s “long foreground” by his critics.

In making Walt Whitman’s critics its subject, this review offers a rare perspective on the secondary labor that shaped Whitman’s reception.

Likewise, this review’s attention to the production of wonder has as much to say to our twentieth- and twenty-first-century receptions of Whitman as it does to the reception of Whitman from 1855 to 1860.

This review underscores what it calls the “intentional wrong- headedness” of Whitman’s critics, who fail to see what Emerson famously did, that Whitman “‘must have had a long foreground somewhere.’” In the hands of these reviewers, Walt Whitman, the actual poet, is taken uncritically to be the “self-educated …rough” projected by the poem “Walt

Whitman.”77 According to the London reviewer, these critics refuse to see the distinction between “the individual writer” and the “subjective-hero supposed to be writing,” “because it [does] not answer their purpose to see it.” Such an argument highlights two details that often go unremarked in

Whitman studies: first, that Whitman’s pose as a poet without foreground, or one “owing nothing to instruction,” was a highly constructed (and

76 “Walt Whitman and His Critics,” The Leader and Saturday Analyst, 30 June 1860, 614-15, reprinted in The New York Saturday Press, 28 July 1860, 2. 77 In later editions of Leaves of Grass, this poem assumes its more familiar title, “Song of Myself.” 219

somewhat obvious) fiction, and second, that critics assisted Whitman, in no small part, in the supposition and maintenance of these mysterious origins. Moreover, the construct of a Whitman without foreground has an even more important corollary (and lasting legacy) in the idea that his poems are sui generis. Indeed, much secondary labor was spent keeping the generic foreground of Whitman’s poems a mystery, and the indeterminate generic status of his poems played a crucial role in determining and defining Whitman’s reception in 1860.

Thus, in what could be viewed as a counter-narrative to Whitman’s normative critical reception in 1860, this London review provides what it deems to be a demystified and pragmatic account of Whitman’s actual foreground. According to this review, Whitman writes dithyrambs steeped in the transcendental, universalist philosophy of Kant and Fichte (as interpreted by Emerson), and thus, “Walt Whitman represents the

Kosmical Man—he is the Adamus of the 19th century—not an Individual, but mankind”; moreover, Whitman’s hybrid poetic forms have their precedent in Martin Farquhar Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy (1846) and

Samuel Warren’s The Lily and the Bee: An Apologue of the Crystal Palace

(1851); and finally, the effect of reading Whitman becomes “a rhapsody, somewhat Oriental in appearance, prose in form, but rhythmical in its effect on the ear, producing a disjointed impression, such as might be produced by a bold prose-translation of Klopstock's famous odes, which would then present so many unconnected assertions, expressed in

220

extravagant diction.”78 What is most interesting about this review is not the demystified reception it wishes Whitman’s poetry had received, but instead that it demonstrates that a much different reception of Whitman was possible in 1860, and that it most often failed to happen for reasons this reviewer aligns with the interests and material conditions of American reviewers and their journals, magazines, and daily papers.

The fact that this reviewer was able to recognize and describe a specific foreground for Whitman and his poems—however we might quibble with the particulars of that foreground—helps underscore the large amount of labor that went into consistently obfuscating that possibility and keeping Whitman’s foreground mysterious and the generic status of his poems indeterminate. This London review brings a heightened focus to the commercially-driven publishing practice of puffing, which was, of course, a subject dear to Clapp and the Saturday

Press, as well. From the perspective of this London periodical, which sounds similar to the Saturday Press’ remonstrations of Appleton’s

Cylocopaedia, Whitman’s

…American puffers, in the disguise of critics, charge the author with

irreligion and indecency; and these charges are unblushingly

reprinted by his publishers, among the critical recommendations of

his performances, as if thereby they would attract a numerous class

of prurient readers. All this is undoubtedly an unworthy trade-trick,

to be thoroughly denounced, condemned, and punished. […]

78 “Walt Whitman and His Critics,” SP, 2. 221

Notwithstanding all its drawbacks, we have little hesitation in

saying that they [Whitman’s publishers] will probably succeed [in

selling a million copies of “Leaves”],—on the principle, perhaps, of

the quack, who calculated there were many more fools than wise

men in the world. No matter, if the fools are all made wise, by the

perusal of these "Leaves." They may be; it is not utterly impossible;

but we doubt it.79

For this London reviewer, the publishing context shaping Whitman’s reception is one best read through the conventions of the hoax, which encourage subtle deceptions and acts of misdirection to be mistaken for sincere criticism. It is no small thing, then, that the huckster maxim

“There’s a sucker born every minute” is rendered here in the calculation that “there [are] many more fools than wise men in the world.” Despite the inflated rhetoric that suggests a million readers will be proven fools by

Whitman and his publishers, I want to take seriously the suggestion that

Whitman’s reception was largely consolidated and managed by his reviewers and promoters throughout 1860, and that the style of their promotion had much in common with the style ascribed to Leaves of

Grass by this London reviewer: “calculated rather to puzzle than to please.”

III. Ever Emergent Again: Walt Whitman in the Saturday Press

The reviewer for the London Leader describes a normative

79 Ibid. 222

reception of Whitman that is broadly manufactured by his “American reviewers,” but what the reviewer took to be a widely disseminated practice actually had a more localized source. From the issue of December

24, 1859, through December 15, 1860, The New York Saturday Press and its editor, Henry Clapp Jr., cultivated and consolidated Whitman’s reception by writing or reprinting over twenty reviews, eleven Whitman poems, and ten Whitman parodies or homage poems. Although Whitman’s debut in this literary weekly began, officially, with the publication of “A

Child’s Reminiscence,” 80 he had, by this time, already joined the coterie of artists, writers, and actors who met regularly at Pfaff’s tavern—a bohemian-styled café and reading salon located in midtown Manhattan on the corner of Broadway and Bleecker Street.81 Dubbed the “King of

Bohemia,” Clapp officiated over this motley and raucous group, and in many ways the Saturday Press functioned as the written record of the lively performances and talk that first aired at the bar’s long table. Nearly all of the contributors to Clapp’s paper were active members of this coterie, and likewise, frequent patrons of Pfaff’s tavern. Thus, it is amidst this decidedly social and definitively local Manhattan context that

Whitman emerged as a literary cause célèbre in the months preceding and following publication of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

80 This poem was later revised and published as “A Word Out of the Sea” in Leaves of Grass (1860, 1867) and in subsequent editions as “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” 81 Pfaff’s was located between two of the most significant cultural institutions and gathering places of the American mid-century: Astor Place Opera House (one-half mile to the north-east) and Barnum’s American Museum (about a mile south-west on Broadway in lower Manhattan). 223

Although the Saturday Press alluded to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as early as November, 1858, and joked about his presumed celebrity in

October of 1859, the publication of “A Child’s Reminiscence” in the

Christmas Eve edition of the Saturday Press marked the beginning of a concerted, year-long publicity campaign waged on Whitman’s behalf.82

Literary historians and Whitman biographers have noted the crucial role that Clapp and the Saturday Press played in making 1860 a banner year for Whitman. Thanks to the celebrity he gained within the pages of the

Saturday Press, Whitman was able to secure a reputable, Boston-based publisher for the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, as well as publication of poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times. But while this familiar career narrative rightly emphasizes the promotional boon effected by the Saturday Press, it errs in offering an all too simple understanding of the stakes of these promotional practices. More important than merely extending the readership of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or Clapp’s financially beleaguered Saturday Press, for that matter, the “literary dustup” staged by the Press changed how readers encountered Whitman.83

The Saturday Press guaranteed to its readers that when they read

Whitman, they were reading poetry—no matter what it looked like, sounded like, or said.

82 For the first mentions of Whitman to appear in the Saturday Press, see: Spriggs, "An Evening with Myself," SP, 6 November 1858: 2-3; [anonymous,] “Literary Notes,” SP, 1 October 1859, page 2: “The report that Walt Whitman has abandoned the stage is unfounded.” 83 I borrow the phrase from Ted Genoways. See Walt Whitman and the Civil War (2009), 22. 224

At first glance, Whitman’s official debut in the Saturday Press appears understated. His poem is printed on the first page in the Press’ typical format and Poet’s Corner location for poetry. The poem’s thirty-five stanzas take up two full columns of the six-column broadsheet, and

Whitman’s name follows the end of the poem. The second page, however, introduces a practice without precedent in the Saturday Press. Amidst the

“New Books” list and advertisements for visiting cards, overcoats, pianos, portraits of celebrities, and super glue, a notice is printed. Entitled “Walt

Whitman’s Poem” and appearing just below Clapp’s insignia as editor, this notice provides a highly qualified and slippery introduction to what it calls

Whitman’s “warble” or “song”:

Our readers may, if they choose, consider as our Christmas or New

Year's present to them, the curious warble, by Walt Whitman, of "A

Child's Reminiscence," on our First Page. Like the "Leaves of

Grass," the purport of this wild and plaintive song, well-enveloped,

and eluding definition, is positive and unquestionable, like the

effect of music.

The piece will bear reading many times--perhaps, indeed, only

comes forth, as from recesses, by many repetitions.84

84 Walt Whitman, “Walt Whitman’s Poem,” SP, 24 December 1859. Ted Genoways has located the manuscript for this Saturday Press notice within the Whitman collections of the New York Public Library. He notes that it is written in Whitman’s hand and that it shares phrases with the notices printed in the other papers (Genoways 19 and 181, note 29). The Vault at Pfaff’s archive currently attributes this piece to Clapp. Obviously, this archive was written before Genoways’ findings were published, but it shows that the placement of this notice below Clapp’s insignia was 225

What is highly unusual about this notice, beyond the fact that no other poem printed in the Saturday Press received such paratextual support, is the way that it blends advertising copy with reading instructions. Ted

Genoways has discovered that Whitman paid to have publication notices for this poem’s appearance in the Saturday Press printed in various other

New York newspapers.85 But this Saturday Press notice is more ambitious than the typical newspaper puff. This notice intends to do more than sell this poem to a wider audience, for it attempts to change, fundamentally, how readers encountered Whitman’s poetry.

Whitman’s Saturday Press notice provocatively opens questions about the genre and meaning of this poem, but instead of answering these questions, it suggests, rather mystically, that an answer might emerge with repeated readings. For Whitman’s contemporaries, the fact that this notice refuses to define the genre of the “piece,” referring to it variously as a

“warble” and a “song,” but not as an “ode” or “dithyramb” as the London reviewer might suggest, would effectively frame Whitman’s

“Reminiscence” as a puzzle, making it very “curious,” indeed. Moreover, this notice suggests that the familiar surface delights of genre, stanzaic and line structure, meter, and rhyme that typically structured the reading experience of poems be thrown out in favor of an amorphous and vague

convincing as an authorizing strategy. 85 Genoways reports that “Whitman placed ads in the New York Times, New York Evening Post, New York Tribune, Brooklyn Eagle, Brooklyn City News, and Brooklyn Daily Times” (181, note 27). 226

effect that is somehow “like” that of “music.”86

It is important to recognize how audacious and brash this suggestion would appear to contemporary readers of the Saturday Press.

After all, it contends that mid-nineteenth-century readers steeped in diverse cultures of poetry would, nonetheless, find themselves ill equipped when reading Whitman’s poem. On the other hand, it is just as important to see the humor implicit in such a revolutionary and egotistical claim.

Indeed, for all of its apparent earnestness, Whitman’s notice betrays the stock characteristics of a literary hoax. Printed below Clapp’s insignia,

Whitman’s notice appears to be written by Clapp and thereby leads readers away from a potentially dubious authority on Whitman (that is,

Whitman himself) and offers instead the culturally sanctioned authority of

Clapp’s position as editor of the Saturday Press.87 Disguising the actual

86 Virginia Jackson’s chapter, “Whitman’s Publics,” makes a number of important interventions regarding Whitman’s debut within the pages of the Saturday Press, including her central point that later “critics have preferred to collapse” the “genres and multiple publics that made up what we now call the work of Walt Whitman” into “the notion that Poetry is a genre that transcends the material conditions of its performance or circulation, or, to put it differently, transcends the stipulative functions of genre in any given social situation” (manuscript pages 27-28). My arguments about the Saturday Press’ production of the Whitman poem as a sui generis curiosity extend from Jackson’s interest in the historical project of retracing “the metadiscursive hybridization of different forms of nineteenth-century mediated address oriented to radically different publics” through which “Whitman’s ‘lyric utterances’ took shape.” (28) See Virginia Jackson, Before Modernism: The Invention of Nineteenth- Century American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2018). 87 Meredith McGill has outlined a similar “distancing” strategy of authority at work within the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, but viewing this strategy as it is employed in 1859-1860 in the context of the Saturday Press and amplified by agents other than Whitman allows us to see a more 227

origins and authorship of a text was, of course, the crucial gambit of the most famous literary and cultural hoaxes perpetrated through the periodical presses of nineteenth-century America.88 In addition to this,

Whitman’s notice shares a number of other characteristics commonly employed in the promotion of a particular kind of hoax popular throughout mid-century America, the curiosity. At mid-century, P.T.

Barnum was the exemplary exhibitor and promoter of the curiosity.89 And much like the famed advertisements P.T. Barnum devised for his touring curiosities and museum,90 Whitman’s notice is manifestly slippery and

broadly diffused and ephemeral phenomenon, occurring outside of Whitman’s text(s) and beyond his individual agency. See McGill, “Walt Whitman and the Poetics of Reprinting,” 42. 88 Some of the most famous examples include Richard A. Locke’s “Great Moon Hoax” (1835); Poe’s “Hans Pfaall—A Tale” (Southern Literary Messenger, 1835) later published as “Lunar Discoveries, Extraordinary Aerial Voyage by Baron Hans Pfaall” (1835), and Barnum’s Joice Heth hoax (1835-36) among many others. 89 Until a fire destroyed it in 1865, Barnum’s American Museum stood in close proximity to Pfaff’s tavern. In the pages of the Saturday Press, Barnum served as the ready-made comparison whenever the spectre of fraud, imposture, hoaxing, or humbugging appeared within its literary or cultural purview. 90 Barnum’s 1843 advertisement for the exhibition of the Fejee Mermaid appeals to the discretion of his audience, while drawing great attention to the contentious and mysterious qualities of the animal remains. The ad asks the audience to decide whether the mermaid is real or an “artificial production,” because scientists are divided on the issue: “Engaged for a short time the animal (regarding which there has been so much dispute in the scientific world) called the FEEJEE MERMAID! positively asserted by its owner to have been taken alive [in] the Feejee Islands, and implicitly believed by many scientific persons, while it is pronounced by other scientific persons to be an artificial production, and its natural existence claimed to be an utter impossibility. The manager can only say that it [h]as such appearance of reality as any fish lying [in] the stalls of our fish markets—but [who] is to decide when doctors disagree. At all events whether this production is the work of nature or art it is decidedly the most stupendous curiosity ever submitted to the public for inspection. If it 228

elusive in regard to what Clapp’s presumed authority is actually saying about “the piece.” Although the notice pretends to make a “positive and unquestionable” claim for Whitman’s productions, it simultaneously undercuts the certainty of these claims with qualifiers and a description that “eludes definition.” Likewise, its placement below Clapp’s signature implies that the poem and Whitman’s larger Leaves of Grass project hold the endorsement of the Saturday Press. And yet, the notice defers ultimate authority to the readers, who “may, if they choose, consider as our Christmas or New Year's present to them, the curious warble, by Walt

Whitman….” The notice is, therefore, humorously vague and contradictory, but insistent that readers engage the piece and find their own resolution to the “curious” problems presented by Walt Whitman’s poem.

Whitman’s notice, then, makes use of a rhetorical strategy common to the antebellum period and its various cultures of exhibition and entertainment, but decidedly uncommon within the period’s various cultures of poetry.91 This strategy positions readers between a curiously

is artificial the senses [of] sight and touch are useless for art has rendered them totally ineffectual—if it is natural then all concur in declaring it the greatest Curiosity in the World (qtd in Cook 84, P.T. Barnum’s letter to Moses Kimball, September 4, 1843. Boston Athenaeum). 91 As uncommon as it might have been to read poems within the context of the curiosity, it was actually a fairly consistent practice among Whitman’s earliest readers and reviewers: 8 of the 23 extant reviews of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass invoked the curiosity as a genre or made an explicit comparison to Barnum in order to describe Whitman’s poems; 1 out of 4 followed suit in the reviews of the 1856 edition, and 7 out of 29 did so in reviews of the 1860 edition. As late as October of 1860, Whitman himself encouraged this practice in his review of the “Leaves of Grass 229

indeterminate object, or a text in this case (Whitman’s “curious warble,”

“A Child’s Reminiscence”) and a cultural authority like the Saturday

Press, provoking readers to decide what the cultural authority cannot. This strategy is remarkably similar to those practiced and explained by Barnum in his autobiography, The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1855), and could be considered as an echo of Barnum’s famous provocation,

“Who is to decide when doctors disagree?”.92 But I invoke Barnum with more to say than Whitman stole a page from Barnum’s book when he wrote promotional copy for his poems. The practices of Barnum (with respect to the curiosity) and those of the Saturday Press (with respect to

Imprints,” a pamphlet published earlier that summer by Thayer and Eldridge to promote the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman writes, for example, that “The history of that composition [Leaves of Grass], so far, is curious. It has already had three births, or successive issues.” And that “The truth about the poem and its author is, that they both of them confound and contradict several of the most cherished of the old and hitherto accepted canons upon the right manner and matter of men and books—and cannot be judged thereby;—but aim to establish new canons, and can only be judged by them. Just the same as America itself does and can only be judged.” See Walt Whitman. "Leaves of Grass Imprints." Brooklyn City News (10 October 1860): 2. 92 One review of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass reads the debate surrounding Whitman’s text in exactly this way: “Better dressed than we ever expected to see him, Walt Whitman again makes his bow, but with purpose unabated to ‘sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.’ The sensations of the roofs under this process are, as may be imagined, various and strong. ‘Some said that it thundered, others that an angel spoke.’ The Christian Examiner, with the unctuous air of one who has just read without blinking the accounts of Joseph and Potiphar, Judah and Tamar, pronounces it ‘impious and obscene.’ Mr. Emerson sends word, ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career.’ When doctors, etc. Well, we have gone to the book itself for a decision.” The writer’s extremely brief reference (“When doctors, etc.”) indicates a thorough cultural saturation of this rhetorical technique, as well as Barnum’s slogan for it. See Moncure D. Conway, “[Review of Leaves of Grass 1860],” The Dial 1 (August 1860): 517-19. 230

Whitman) are better thought of as coeval phenomena, markers of and participants in a broad cultural shift in reading practices mediated primarily through the cheap print of periodicals. Barnum’s exhibition and promotional practices, because he highlighted them in a tell-all bestseller, are a bit more revealing than those of the Saturday Press and Whitman, and the comparison sheds light on the publishing practices that the

Saturday Press and Whitman failed to disclose or explain. That said,

Barnum, Whitman, and the Saturday Press engaged self-reflexively and playfully with this shift in reading practices; likewise, all three tried to profit from the shifting expectations that came along with the rising interest in the question of how to read as well as the increasing stakes involved in apprehending the “new.”

As the social historian Neil Harris explains in his foundational study Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (1973), Barnum’s promotions and exhibitions played to and helped further define a widely diffused cultural desire to learn how something worked, be that a new piece of machinery, a whaling adventure, a trip across the Atlantic in a balloon, or a chess- playing automaton.93 Viewing the Saturday Press ’ practices alongside

93 Harris importantly links the celebrated hoaxes and deceptions of the 1840s and 1850s with the more widely diffused cultural practices of self- education and self-improvement. He explains this period’s proliferation of how-to manuals, lecture tours, almanacs, and novels filled with minute and esoteric details as an expression of Jacksonian optimism: “At a time when the advantages of a common school education were being extolled by reformers, when the common sense of the average citizen was proposed as a guarantee for the republic’s future, many avid democrats assumed that any problem could be expressed clearly, concisely, and comprehensibly enough for the ordinary man to resolve it” (Harris 74-75). Harris’ history 231

those of Barnum, however, allows us to put a finer edge on the broad historical shift Harris describes, especially as it concerns the functional work of genre within this mid-century moment. The practices of the

Saturday Press allow us to see a more specific and decidedly local shift in literary reading practices. Moreover, the particular and local practices of reading imagined and presided over by the Saturday Press had important consequences for reading poetry as well as for reading genres of poetry.94

As readers and viewers came to increasingly question how to read,

Barnum’s curiosities threw into doubt the presumed stability of generic categories all together: his hybrid curiosities, the Feejee mermaid (1843), the woolly horse (1849), and the “What Is It?” exhibit (1860), among many others, explicitly troubled the notion that genres, or species in these particular cases, were stable and distinct categories; in addition, the

“nondescript” aspects of these same curiosities targeted and parodied the certainty and rationality that the scientific genres of the exhibit, fossil, and specimen clearly assumed. And yet, Barnum’s promotions and curiosities productively juxtaposes the rise of mechanical and industrial fabrications with the coeval phenomenon of cultural fabrications as deceptions: “Barnum’s audiences found the encounter with potential frauds exciting. It was a form of intellectual exercise, stimulating even when literal truth could not be determined. Machinery was beginning to accustom the public not merely to the belief in the continual appearance of new marvels but to a jargon that concentrated on methods of operation, on aspects of mechanical organization and construction, on horsepower, gears, pulleys, and safety valves” (Harris 75). 94 Although the reading practices encouraged by the Saturday Press should be viewed as emergent practices in 1859-60, they are, nonetheless, importantly related to the lyricized practices of reading poetry that would become dominant and normative in the latter half of the twentieth century. See Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005). 232

were highly self-reflexive productions themselves, and as such, they put on display the various (social and textual) materials that determined one’s generic experience of the curiosity in Barnum’s hands. As James Cook notes, “While some viewers simply debated the authenticity of Barnum’s curiosities, others discussed how they were being manipulated by the debate, treating the showman’s promotional tricks as a second, equally fascinating topic of moral and economic evaluation” (Cook 274, note 56,

Cook’s emphasis).

Cheap, periodical print played a crucial, if often transparent or neglected, role in shaping not only a viewer’s experience of Barnum’s curiosities but also the viewer’s later recognition of that experience’s constructed-ness. Cheap, periodical print made possible, in other words, the self-reflexivity of Barnum’s promotions and curiosities. In his book,

Barnum attributes this lesson in the utility of print, in part, to the celebrated German showman and inventor Johann Maelzel (best known for exhibiting the chess-playing automaton throughout Europe and

America in the early decades of the nineteenth century), who complements

Barnum’s promotion of Joice Heth when he says, “I see that you understand the value of the press, and that is a great thing. Nothing helps the showmans like the types and the ink” (Barnum 156). As pithy as this anecdote might appear to be, Barnum’s book is consumed with extrapolating that seemingly simple lesson, demonstrating again and again how necessary his work in “types and ink” proved to be in the staging and

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the promotion of his curiosities and shows. More to the point, Barnum’s

Life collected and paraphrased the diffuse secondary materials—the various pamphlets, advertisements, posters, newspaper debates and controversies—that structured his audience’s reception of these objects and people as curiosities, revealing in the process how many variables contributed to his audience’s sense and experience of the genre, as well as reclaiming this valuable print-work as his own.

Viewed in the aggregate, Barnum’s collected paratexts make a compelling argument for the primary importance of secondary materials in determining how a genre is recognized. Of course, as Barnum’s examples of hoaxes and curiosities aptly demonstrate, the power of these secondary materials is often strategically and necessarily hidden—ergo, the practice of disguising and protecting the actual origins and authors of these materials. But in his book, Barnum meticulously reconstructs these publishing practices and materials, exhibiting them with the pride a more celebrated author might take in the publication of his collected works.

Indeed for Barnum, who bought his curiosities from other exhibitors rather than devising or fabricating them himself, the invention, circulation, and reception of his paratexts proved more important than the invention of the objects themselves.

Two weeks after the Saturday Press published Whitman’s “A

Child’s Reminiscence,” the Saturday Press reprinted an unsigned review from the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, which lambasts Whitman for

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“perpetrat[ing] another ‘poem’” (SP 7 January 1860: 1).95 From its first sentence, the review takes exception to what it characterizes as a kind of generic malfeasance perpetrated by Whitman and an innocently complicit

Saturday Press. It refuses the generic tags suggested by Whitman’s notice, arguing that this “so-called ‘poem’” cannot be a “curious warble” for while it “may be” “curious,” a “warble it is not, in any sense of that mellifluous word.” The review suggests instead that Whitman’s “so-called ‘poem’” be read in the vein of the “nonsense” genre because Whitman’s

“performance” is filled with “a vast amount of irreclaimable drivel and inexplicable nonsense,” “lines of stupid and meaningless twaddle.”96

Though this review makes every appearance of rejecting the reading practices initiated by Whitman’s notice, the review reiterates and reproduces them when it declares:

We have searched this "poem" through with a serious and

deliberate endeavor to find out the reason of its being written; to

discover some clue to the mystery of so vast an expenditure of

words. But we honestly confess our utter inability to solve the

problem. It is destitute of all the elements which are commonly

desiderated in poetical composition; it has neither rhythm nor

95 Kenneth Price's Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews cites this review as appearing in the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, 28 December 1859, p. 2.,a mere four days after Whitman’s poem appeared in the Saturday Press. This and subsequent quotations are taken from the Saturday Press’ reprint of this review. See Saturday Press, 7 January 1860, 1. 96 For more on this reference to the nonsense genre, see Virginia Jackson’s “Whitman’s Publics.” 235

melody, rhyme nor reason, metre nor sense. We do solemnly assert,

that there is not to be discovered, throughout the whole

performance, so much as the glimmering ghost of an idea. (SP 7

January 1860: 1)

In this passage the reviewer performs the very response made familiar by

Barnum’s promotional practices and further invoked by Whitman’s notice.

The reviewer complains that Whitman’s trespass “into the columns” of the

Saturday Press represents an unprecedented failure on the Press’ part to serve as “the arbiter elegantiarum of dramatic and poetic taste” for its reading public. With the cultural authority of the Saturday Press thus compromised, the reviewer (and the larger Saturday Press reading public he attempts to stand in for) must confront “the mystery” of Whitman’s “so- called ‘poem,’” though the “‘poem’” has “neither rhythm nor melody, rhyme nor reason, metre nor sense,” none of the “elements,” in other words, “commonly desiderated in poetical composition.” Moreover, within

Whitman’s “vast …expenditure of words,” this reviewer finds no meaning, no familiar generic occasion or “reason” for “its being written.”

The reviewer extends the question of genre and definition first broached by Whitman’s notice to include not only his poems but also

Whitman, himself. The reviewer characterizes Whitman as the marginally- human embodiment of Whitman’s own “amorphous productions”:

“…[B]orn and bred in an obscurity from which it were well that he never had emerged,” Whitman “has studied to exaggerate his deformities…. He

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has undertaken to be an artist, without learning the first principles of art, and has presumed to put forth ‘poems,’ without possessing a spark of poetic faculty. He affects swagger and independence, and blurts out his vulgar impertinence under a full assurance of ‘originality.’” This reviewer reads Whitman and his poems as reciprocal, mutually-defining formations: in describing the poem(s), the reviewer describes the man

(and vice versa). Thus, while characterizing Whitman’s poems as

“amorphous productions,” this reviewer shows Whitman to be a bestial hybrid himself—an “unclean cub of the wilderness” with “vulgar and profane hoofs”—newly emerged from his “native mud,” “the Brooklyn marshes.” The reviewer imagines an interesting (and racialized) scene of genre formation (or a mal-formation, perhaps) within the primordial soup and “native mud” of “the Brooklyn marshes,” and in the process, the reviewer outlines a reading strategy that, according to the anonymous

London Leader review detailed above, eventually becomes the normative critical practice of reading Whitman’s poems in 1860, which is to say by reading Whitman’s poems through the mediating force of Whitman himself.

Prior to reprinting this review, the Saturday Press took occasional interest in Cincinnati as representative of the amusing state of art in “the provinces”: in these instances, Cincinnati, or the “Porkopolis,” serves as backwater foil to the urban sophistication of the Saturday Press, its circle

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of writers and readers, and its interests.97 The Cincinnati reviewer’s complete failure to find any modicum of poetry or meaning within

Whitman’s “so-called ‘poem’” aligns quite well with the Saturday Press’ general depiction of Cincinnati’s dearth of taste and culture, making this reviewer a dubious cultural authority, at best, if not laughably out of step with the state of art in Manhattan. Finally, the review concludes by saying that “as [Whitman] has no precedent and no rival, so we venture to hope that he will never have an imitator.”

With the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge that in the months to come the Saturday Press published or reprinted ten Whitman parodies and homage poems, this hope against imitation and further circulation appears too prescient to be coincidental. Indeed, for this reason and others, Virginia Jackson has suggested that we read this “Cincinnati” review as a text planted by Clapp, and that Whitman and Clapp were most likely its authors. As Jackson explains, the rationale for this attribution follows from an overwhelming string of coincidences: the editor of the

Cincinnati Commercial was a friend of Clapp’s, “a week was barely enough time for that paper to have traveled to New York to be reprinted,” and

Clapp’s interest in literary hoaxes and scandals was evident “before and

97 See, for instance, Quelqu'un [Winter, William], "Dramatic Feuilleton," SP, 26 March 1859: 2; and Personne [Wilkins, Edward G.P.], “Dramatic Feuilleton,” SP, 9 April 1859: 2, 30 April 1859:2, and 10 September 1859: 2. First quotation taken from Quelqu’un (26 March 1859: 2); second quotation taken from Personne (30 April 1859: 2). According to the 1860 U.S. Census, Cincinnati was the seventh largest city in the nation, making it the largest city on the edge of the Western frontier (pop. 161,044, compared to the 805,658 people living in New York City, 562,529 in Philadelphia, 266,661 in Brooklyn, and 168,675 in New Orleans). 238

long after the printing of ‘Out of the Cradle.’” 98 Thus, the “Cincinnati” review’s disavowal of this Whitman “poem” aptly demonstrates the logic and mechanisms through which Clapp, Whitman, and the Saturday Press hoped to perpetuate and secure Whitman’s reception as a poet without

“precedent.”

IV. “After Walt Whitman”: The Whitman Parodies of 1860

Following the controversy created through the printed and reprinted readings of Whitman’s “A Child’s Reminiscence,” the Saturday

Press published Whitman’s “You and Me and Today” on January 14.99 In

98 A month before printing Whitman’s “A Child’s Reminiscence,” for instance, Clapp printed a hoax poem by the Philadelphia writer Charles Desmarais Gardette, under the pseudonym “Saerasmid” and titled “The Fire-Fiend.” This poem claimed to be an early manuscript draft of Poe’s “The Raven” discovered and transcribed by Saerasmid. Despite an editorial comment that marked the poem as a hoax in its initial printing in the Saturday Press, “The Fire Fiend” was taken to be an authentic Poe poem by readers and editors alike, and as Eliza Richards notes, it was attributed to Poe as late as 1901 (217). For more on Gardette, his relation to Whitman, and this Poe-inspired hoax, see Jackson, “Whitman’s Publics,” Before Modernism; Eliza Richards, “Outsourcing ‘The Raven’: Retroactive Origins.” Victorian Poetry 43.2 (2005): 205-221; George Peirce Clark, “‘Saerasmid,’ an Early Promoter of Walt Whitman,” American Literature 27.2 (1955): 259-262; and Charles Desmarais Gardette, The Whole Truth in the Question of the “Fire-Fiend,” (Philadelphia, 1864).

99 This poem becomes “Chants Democratic. 7.” in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. Alongside “You and Me and Today,” the SP printed another humorous mis-reading of Whitman’s “A Child’s Reminiscence” in an editorial from “Umos,” as well as a defense of the poem from Ada Clare. Umos’s parting joke places Whitman’s poem squarely in the realm of literary frauds and hoaxes. Ada Clare writes of a similar kind of poetic fraud in her "Thoughts and Things" column of the same issue, but she 239

the next issue, the Press printed a parody of Whitman’s poem entitled,

“Yours and Mine, and Any-Day, A Yawp after Walt Whitman,” by

“Saerasmid,” the pseudonym of the Philadelphia-based writer Charles

Desmarais Gardette. Similarly, in the weeks that followed, portions of

Whitman’s Calamus series were printed in the Saturday Press as

“Poemet” (28 January 1860), “Poemet” (4 February 1860), and “Leaves”

(11 February 1860), with parodies and homage poems printed soon after that echoed Whitman’s publications in a call and response pattern.100 On

February 11, for instance, the Press printed “‘Poemet.’—(After Walt

Whitman) With Parentheses, Analytical, Aesthetical, Philosophical, and

Explanatory” by Saerasmid. An homage poem appeared in the Press on

March 17 from Saerasmid in Philadelphia: “Autopatheia. Dedicated to

Walt Whitman.” Following the publication of Leaves of Grass in June, additional Whitman parodies were printed in the New York weeklies

Vanity Fair and Albion, as well as in the Philadelphia City-Item and the

New Orleans Delta. The Saturday Press reprinted these parodies and comes to an opposite conclusion: "I hear [William] Winter's 'Song of the Ruined Man' much eulogized. I cannot admire it. With the text he begins with, a practiced versifier might go on rhyming until the seas were dry. All you have to do is to conjure up all the things that one should not laugh at, and then laugh at them, and there's your poem. On the contrary,” she continues, “Walt Whitman's 'Child's Reminiscence' could only have been written by a poet, and versifying would not help it. I love the poem." Clare opposes a versifier to a poet, and canabalizes William Winter's poem, which appeared immediately above the Cincinnati Commercial review "Walt Whitman's New Poem” in the previous issue. See Umos, “Walt Whitman’s Yawp,” SP, “Waifs From Washington” segment, 14 January 1860, 2; and Ada Clare, “Thoughts and Things,” SP 14 January 1860. 100 “Poemet” (28 January 1860) becomes Calamus. 17., “Poemet” (4 February 1860) becomes Calamus. 40., and “Leaves” (11 February 1860) becomes Calamus. 21. in the 1860 edition. 240

numerous Whitman reviews soon after their initial publication in other venues, and thus perpetuated and consolidated the representations of

Whitman’s circulation and reception within and outside of its pages.

The parodies reprinted from other papers were more cutting in their imitation of Whitman’s poetics and style than those produced by

Gardette for the Saturday Press. The typical barb within these parodies aimed to expose the utterly mundane subject matter that Whitman’s bluster and profusion of detail hoped to obfuscate in their versions of his poems. The parody "The Song of Dandelions. After Walt Whitman” by one

“Babbag Thabab” in the Philadelphia City Item panned Whitman for being all exposition and no artistry:

I am going to write something gorgeous,

And you will believe every word I say,

Because I write what I have seen and heard and smelt.

I go out in the garden where the cats sing.

I turn up a tub, and sit on its bottom....watching a dandelion

I smell shad fish frying...the smell enters my nostrils

I inhale the savory odor and cherish it as carnal frangipani…101

The notion that a Whitman poem awakens the senses (and the sensational) is another common theme within the Whitman parodies of

1860.

101 Babbag Thabab, “The Song of Dandelions. After Walt Whitman. [From the Philadelphia ‘City Item’],” SP, 9 June 1860. 241

One of the more clever parodies actually debuted as the genuine article. Reprinted as part of a review essay on Leaves of Grass in the New

York Albion of 26 May 1860, the anonymously penned "[I happify myself]" challenged readers to find the following selections within their own copies of Leaves of Grass. This send up of the 1860 poem “Walt Whitman”

(which will become “Song of Myself” in later editions of Leaves of Grass) delightfully qualifies Whitman’s claims, making them in an instant mundane and insipid. “I happify myself. / I am considerable of a man. I am some. You /also are some. We all are considerable, all are some” rewrite the original Whitman lines from “I celebrate myself” to “I am large—

I contain multitudes.”102 Lara Cohen’s work on fraudulence in the era of literary nationalism is suggestive for how these parodies might have been read in the pages of the Saturday Press, which as we know was clearly interested in fueling speculation about Whitman’s possibly fraudulent pretentions to “perpetuate” poems, as the “Cincinnati” reviewer or “Umos” might have put it. For Cohen, “fraudulence holds out the possibility of authenticity, a binary opposition that replaces undeterminable claims of literary worth with the promise of clear-cut distinction.”103 If the Albion produced a fraudulent Whitman poem for its readers (and eventually for the readers of the Saturday Press) to uncover in the midst of its review of

Leaves of Grass, then it could also be said that this fraudulent Whitman poem and the Whitman parodies in general were further cementing,

102 “[I happify myself],” SP, 2 June 1860: 4. 103 Cohen, Fabrication of American Literature, 16. 242

however reluctantly in some cases, the idea of the authentic Whitman poem. 104 Indeed, Cohen’s provocative reversal of Walter Benjamin’s thesis about the relation between an artwork’s aura and its representation through mechanical means of reproduction is illuminating in this context.

As Cohen argues, “authenticity may not be the casualty of modernity—‘that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction’—so much as an invention of it. In other words, originality is a second-order phenomenon, which requires the idea of the copy to exist. It is the conceivability of the derivative that is the pre-requisite for imagining and privileging the authentic.”105 Viewed in this light, the pattern inaugurated in the Saturday

Press of echoing Whitman’s poems with derivative parodies facilitated both the invention and the recognition of Whitman’s originality and authenticity.

Gardette reported a similar idea in relation to the “originality” of

Poe’s “The Raven” in his 1864 tell-all pamphlet that explained the “Fire-

Fiend” hoax that had been inadvertently perpetrated by the Saturday

Press. For Gardette, Poe’s achievement in “The Raven” is by no means

104 The Albion closes its review of Leaves of Grass with the spectre of fraud and falsehood: “As to those 'Leaves of Grass,' nine-tenths of them are covered with words that have no more meaning, coherency, or perceptible purpose than columns in a spelling book; while the indecency—an indecency not born of purience, but of the absolute refusal to recognize such a distinction as decent and indecent—is monstrous beyond precedent, and were it not before our eyes, beyond belief. Yet for the one-tenth that we have excepted we shall keep the book, and read it, not without a strange interest in the man who could draw such a slender thread of truth and purity through such a confused mass of folly, feculence, and falsehood.” “[I happify myself],” SP, 2 June 1860. 105 Cohen, Fabrication of American Literature, 16, quoting Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 243

insularly protected from duplication by Poe’s “genius” or his “originality” as a poet. On the contrary, he theorizes that Poe’s “very peculiarity made such imitation facile; and that, generally, the more marked and singular the style of a writer, the easier it was to produce a literary counterfeit of his productions.”

While these Whitman parodies served the Saturday Press and

Whitman with a conveniently diffused set of circulating, recognizable, and reproducible representations of his originality, the parody form also indexes a theoretical saturation point in a culture when the outlines and idiosyncrasies of a genre are still slightly amorphous yet poised to crystalize into the recognizable patterns that the parodies will, eventually, solidify. In Whitman’s case, it is important to recognize that Clapp and the

Saturday Press accelerated that process, or, in keeping with the logic of the puffs, represented a future moment and degree of Whitman’s circulation as if it had already happened. In this way, parodies, like puffs, enfold a temporality of reception that is both real and imagined, as well as fixed and fleeting.

The satirical, New York weekly Vanity Fair, whose contributors mingled at Pfaff’s with the writers of the Saturday Press, and were in some cases regular contributors to the Saturday Press, produced a

Whitman parody that is particularly arresting for the way that it manifests various, competing temporalities of Whitman’s reception. Titled “Counter-

Jumps. A Poemettina. –After Walt Whitman.” and published with an

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illustration depicting a Calamus plant framing a caricature of Whitman about to encase, with his over-sized hat, the diminutive visage of a man seated on the ground before him. A hand-drawn, phallic root of the

Calamus plant doubles as the seminal “I” that begins the parody’s opening line: “I AM the Counter-jumper, weak and effeminate. / I love to loaf and lie about dry-goods. / I loaf and invite the Buyer. / I am the essence of retail. The sum and result of small profits and quick returns.” While some late-nineteenth- and most twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers might want to read this parody as aligning a queer Whitman and his

Calamus poems with the counter-jumpers, the dry-goods clerks who were singled out and ridiculed for their work that was thought to cross lines of class, gender, and propriety, as well as being an affront to the virtues of manual labor, the opposite formulation is, in fact, more likely and more troubling. Zachary Turpin’s 2016 discovery that Whitman authored an advice column called “Manly Health and Training” for the New York Atlas, published in thirteen installments throughout 1858 under the pseudonym

“Mose Velsor,” gives us one explanation for why the parody’s author, Fitz-

James O’Brien, might have thought Whitman served as an unquestionably masculine antidote to the sexual vagaries of the “Counter-jumper.”106

106 O’Brien and Vanity Fair published numerous articles and cartoons about their invented urban type, the “Counter-Jumper” in 1860. For instance, in an earlier, sensational and Barnum-esque essay titled, “Genus, Homo: Species, Counter-Jumperii,” O’Brien categorized the “Counter- jumper” as being totally without “sex”: “It is neither male nor female, though its manners are more feminine than masculine, for which reason, probably, it is a much greater favorite with the ladies than with us….” Another article in Vanity Fair carried forward O’Brien’s nasty little 245

Clearly too, however, this parody and caricature stand as a betrayal—or a woeful misreading—of Whitman’s queerness in 1860, as well as a betrayal of the proto-queerness of these male shop-workers categorized and excoriated as being “Counter-jumpers.” And yet, in its messiness and its meanness, this caricature and parody reveal that Whitman was still an amorphous figure in this moment, with the significance of the Calamus series less than fully recognized.

caricature in this way: “These wretched effeminate, mostly uneducated, creatures, smirking and smiling all day long across a counter; […] these muscle-less, slim-shouldered, flat-chested bipeds are at the bottom of one of the greatest social evils of the present time.” 246

Figure 1: Edward F. (Ned) Mullen’s caricature and Fitz-James O’Brien’s parody of Whitman in Vanity Fair (17 March 1860) (Courtesy of Rare 247

Books Division, Library of Congress)107

In another sense, however, Whitman and the poem this parody riffs upon, “Walt Whitman,” are entirely beside the point of the “Counter-

Jumps.” To put this thought another way, Whitman and his poem are merely the currency by which O’Brien hopes to resuscitate a now- overplayed satire. From this vantage and within this highly localized scene of New York literary newsprint, Whitman and his sensational poetry resemble what we might want to call a meme, wherein the content and the meaning of that content are wholly and often irreverently subordinate to the context of the meme’s consumption.108 Jonathan Elmer has written about this feature at work within the cultural logic of the hoax, a logic that

Elmer reads out of the hoaxes and scandals of Barnum and Poe. As Elmer writes, “The object [of a scandal or hoax] disappears into what it has merely occasioned: the ‘product eventually coincides with publicity’ itself,

107 Ruth L. Bohan identifies Mullen as the illustrator and O’Brien as the parodist. She identifies the seated figure as O’Brien, suggesting that “[i]n the act of silencing O’Brien, Whitman asserts his independence from the negative implications of the counter-jumper theme, aligning himself instead with the ‘aromatic’ blades of the calamus plant, whose leafy spears form a gentle arc above his head” See Bohan, “Whitman and the ‘Picture- Makers’” in Whitman Among the Bohemians, ed. Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 136-38. 108 In a recent essay on academic memes, Jordan Stein argues that part of what's interesting about the internet memes “Feminist Ryan Gosling” and “Adorno Cats” is the dislocation of context they perform, and that the rough dislocations and juxtapositions highlight the current context of the circulation of these ideas (through reddit, 4chan, specialized online forums, facebook, etc.). Memes, then, are really about participation in and experience with the medium itself; the objects of the meme--Adorno, Gosling--are just the form. See Jordan Stein, “Silly Theory,” Avidly: A Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, 20 November 2012 (http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2012/11/20/silly-theory/). 248

as Adorno and Horkheimer put it. One can see the way in which a narcissistically inclined public, such as Barnum was able to attract, could come to love itself in the form of publicity. [….] We could say that publicity is the name for the self-reflexive eroticization of mass culture.”109 In this way, and however accidentally, O’Brien’s rendering of the 1860 poem

“Walt Whitman” as “I loaf and invite the Buyer. / I am the essence of retail. The sum and result of small profits and quick returns” produces the fundamental insight that Whitman’s pursuit of the eroticized potential of mass print and mass culture was, at times, a narcissistic and myopic venture that could as easily make Whitman a victim of its enchantments, as opposed to its hero.

“I am the essence of retail” also brings us back to the cultural logics of the puff and the hoax, which Whitman and the Saturday Press clearly embraced throughout 1860. David Simpson’s 1990 essay “Destiny Made

Manifest: The Styles of Whitman’s Poetry” contributes to a long-standing, dissident strain within Whitman criticism that views Whitman’s refusal to recognize meaningful differences as a critical failing of his poetry and person. For Simpson, “Whitman’s capacity to remain totally unaware of any difference between self and other marks him out as the voice of manifest destiny, and of the most confident period of national

109 Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 189-90. 249

enthusiasm.”110 Whitman’s whiggish confidence in the future circulation of

Leaves of Grass and his sense that a future destiny of literary distinction could be made manifest were theories put forward and reiterated by the practice of puffing and parodying Whitman in the Saturday Press, suggesting another way in which Whitman, as Simpson writes, was a willing participant “in the most extreme formulations of the liberal- capitalist ideology.”111 When Whitman responds to the “Cincinnati” reviewer’s criticism of “A Child’s Reminiscence,” he writes that “The market needs to-day to be supplied—the great West especially—with copious thousands of copies.”112 The destiny made manifest in this calling forward the sales of Leaves of Grass is part of Whitman’s characteristic imagining of literary distribution, what Matt Cohen has recently described as “Whitman’s Drift,” but it is also an echo of the literary and newsprint culture from which he emerged, and a direct echo of an advertisement for the Appleton’s Cyclopaedia, the book that the Saturday Press framed its puffing controversy around. 113 In this advertisement, printed and

110 David Simpson, “Destiny Made Manifest: The Styles of Whitman’s Poetry” in Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 192. 111 Ibid., 188. 112 [Walt Whitman], “All about a Mocking-Bird,” SP, 7 January 1860. In 1860 Cincinnati was the book publishing capital of the west. See Walter Sutton, The Western Book Trade: Cincinnati as a Nineteenth-Century Publishing and Book Trade Center (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1961). 113 As Cohen explains his project, “Whitman’s Drift rides on the tension between drift as a poetical mediation of circulation or distribution (drifting) and a more concrete book historical measurement of the movement of books and other inscribed media (drifted).” Matt Cohen, 250

excoriated by the Saturday Press, the publisher claims:

Although but a limited field has as yet been canvassed for

subscribers, the Publisher[s] of the New American Cyclopaedia are

required to print 12,000 copies of each volume, to supply the

existing demand. Even at the rate at which subscribers’ names are

now coming in, the work will soon have attained a circulation of at

least 30,000—an enormous success for a work of such magnitude

and cost, and one which establishes it prominently in the category

of famous literary successes. Without the addition of one subscriber

to the present list (12,000), it will thus be seen that the American

public are cheerfully paying SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND

DOLLARS for a great National Cyclopaedia—a fact which speaks

eloquently for intellectual progress in the United States, and which

becomes the more striking when we reflect that the work is but one-

third completed, and not one-fourth of the country canvassed.114

As this advertisement suggests, book sales numbers were as notoriously contrived as the puffs designed to secure their prodigiously successful reception.115

Whitman’s Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2017), 12-13. 114 “Appletons’ New American Cyclopaedia.”, [Advertisement for Volume 5 of the Cyclopaedia], SP, 26 March 1859. 115 Additionally, Matt Cohen notes that book sales numbers were unreliable in the nineteenth century (as they continue to be in our day), because of a “signature” practice of the publishing industry that “allowed booksellers to return books that did not sell in a timely way,” and thus “a sale was not always final.” According to Cohen, publishers employed this strategy “to amplify claims for sales numbers on a book’s release, to gain 251

V. Fabricating Walt: Out of “the Old, Ever-Modern One, the Homer”

In the anonymously published rebuttal to the Cincinnati reviewer’s rejection of “A Child’s Reminiscence,” Whitman describes the reception of previous editions of “Leaves” as ever-extending ripples in a pond:

Those former issues, published by the author himself in little

pittance-editions, on trial, have just dropped the book enough to

ripple the inner first-circles of literary agitation, in immediate

contact with it. The outer, vast, extending, and ever-wider-

extending circles, of the general supply, perusal, and discussion of

such a work, have still to come. The market needs to-day to be

supplied—the great West especially—with copious thousands of

copies.

Indeed, "LEAVES OF GRASS" has not yet been really published at

all. Walt Whitman, for his own purposes, slowly trying his hand at

the edifice, the structure he has undertaken, has lazily loafed on,

letting each part have time to set—evidently building not so much

with reference to any part itself, considered alone, but more with

reference to the ensemble,—always bearing in mind the

combination of the whole, to fully justify the parts when finished.

(SP 7 January 1860: 3).

In this image, the secondary labor and materials that manufacture a

places on best-seller lists,” among other objectives. See Cohen, Whitman’s Drift, 13. 252

particular reception for the “Leaves” as natural, unstudied, sui generis, or without precedent become as transparent as water, an illegible, naturalized medium. Whitman’s ripples epitomize, then, an elaborate disavowal of the concrete, material practices that enable the circulation and diffusion of his abstract, idealized poetics.

Whitman extends his disavowal to include not just the secondary agents and materials that determine and enable his circulation and reception but also the wider trans-Atlantic literary culture whose influence encroaches upon and threatens the growth potential of a pure American poetics. Whitman charges:

You, bold American! and ye future two hundred millions of bold

Americans, can surely never live, for instance, entirely satisfied and

grow to your full stature, on what the importations hither of foreign

bards, dead or alive, provide—nor on what is echoing here the letter

and the spirit of the foreign bards. No, bold American! not even on

what is provided, printed from Shakespeare or Milton—not even of

the Hebrew canticles—certainly not of Pope, Byron, or

Wordsworth—nor of any German or French singer, nor any

foreigner at all. (SP 7 January 1860: 3)

Whitman’s disavowal attempts to clear a space for an American poetry that is uncorrupted by foreign precedent, and though his sentiment accords quite well with other mid-century calls for a distinct American literature, this sentiment also takes on a dubious quality within the context of the

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Saturday Press that later literary histories have failed to register.

Indeed, in the passage that follows, also taken from Whitman’s anonymous response to the Cincinnati reviewer’s rejection of his poem “A

Child’s Reminiscence,” Whitman cites for his beginning—and for the beginning of all American poetry—the example of Homer, which, at mid- century and within this literary weekly in particular, was known to be a convenient fiction:

We are to accept those and every other literary and poetic thing

from beyond the seas, thankfully, as studies, exercises. We go

back—we pause long with the old, ever-modern one, the Homer, the

only chanting mouth that approaches our case near enough to raise

a vibration, an echo. We then listen with accumulated eagerness for

those mouths that can make the vaults of America ring here today—

those who will not only touch our case, but embody it and all that

belongs to it—sing it with varied and powerful idioms, and in the

modern spirit, at least as capable, as loud and proud as the best

spirit that has ever preceded us. (SP 7 January 1860: 3)

As James Porter notes in his essay “Homer: The Very Idea” (2002),

“Giambattista Vico first articulated the view…[in 1730]… that Homer was not a person but an idea (un’ idea) created by the Greeks (though believed in by them)” (64). The Saturday Press endorsed a similar take on Homer in an essay published about a year before Whitman’s “All about a

254

Mocking-Bird.”116

But what might it mean that Whitman imagined an American literary tradition founded on the model of such an obvious fiction? And what would it have meant for those who read and recognized this fiction in the Saturday Press? Porter’s essay is helpful on this account. As he explains, Homer’s reception (from antiquity to the present day) has consistently functioned through a “logic of disavowal” that makes possible

“the persistent classicism of Homer, despite every tug of pressure in the opposite direction”; “the construction and sustaining of Homer’s ever- imaginary identity”; and “the sheer allure and inaccessibility of Homer and, what proves inseparable from this, the sheer fascination of watching how the story of Homer’s reception continually engages those who contribute to its making.”117 If, as Porter speculates, false ideas can “at times …be [even] more compelling than the truth,” then Whitman’s

Homer serves a functional purpose that aligns quite well with the rhetorical strategies outlined above in this and the other Saturday Press materials, as well as in the promotion and exhibition of Barnum’s curiosities, however incorrigible. Porter further explains this functional

116 This essay, “The Three Great Epic Poets,” describes Homer as a convenient fiction: “Of the three great epic poets, Homer, the first and grandest, is but a mere algebraic symbol for a mind, or combination of minds, that existed on our planet at some period, long, long ago. This is all we positively know concerning him. Some say he never existed, but that the grand symmetrical epic of “Iliad” was the disconnected composition of a score of ancient rhapsodists. Such overturning of beliefs deemed sacred does modern speculation make!” See J.C., “The Three Great Epic Poets,” SP, 12 February 1859: 1. 117 James I. Porter, “Homer: The Very Idea,” Arion 10.2 (Fall 2002), 58. 255

purpose by citing Hitchcock as a twentieth-century theorist and practitioner of the logic of disavowal, which Porter sees as equivalent to the logic of Hitchcock’s “MacGuffin.” For Hitchcock, narrative filmmaking requires what he dubs a “MacGuffin”—a catalyst, of sorts, that propels the narrative forward and is the object around which the characters interact.

As Porter notes, “[a]ccording to Hitchcock, the MacGuffin can be ignored as soon as it has served its purpose, but it rarely does this, and instead it tends to become the object of endless fascination, despite its being ‘empty, nonexistent, and absurd.’”118 Porter continues to explain that though the

MacGuffin is “an impossible, nonexistent object,” it nonetheless causes real effects.119

And yet, it hardly needs saying that this founding scene for

American poetics is highly problematic for twenty-first-century readers, particularly because it represents a literary culture and practice that we struggle to recognize or accommodate. Indeed, as the “MacGuffiin” helps us to understand, we do not really have language for the game Whitman and the Saturday Press are intent upon playing. And while we must take seriously the effects of their game, we can no longer take the game itself or the terms or the ideals expressed so seriously that we miss again the irreverence and playfulness that that was clearly available to readers of

118 Ibid., 84, note 21. 119 Ibid., 65. Slavoj Zizek provides a Lacanian explanation for the MacGuffin in his The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). See his discussion of the known-rumor of a toilet paper shortage that nevertheless causes an actual toilet paper shortage within a socialist community, pp. 184-186. 256

Whitman and the Saturday Press in 1859-60.

What is so disorienting about returning to this moment of a fabricating and fabricated Whitman is that the imperative to found and realize a distinctly national poetic tradition appears at once familiar— because it mouths so closely the literary history made earnest by critics such as F.O. Matthiessen and Roy Harvey Pearce—and foreign—because it is so clearly oriented toward an audience that would have received these proclamations as dubious and yet somehow still desirable despite—or, more surprisingly, because of—their obvious fictionality.

The distance that separates readers of this material in 1859-60 from those who read it today indicates a major difference in the kinds of reading performed. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers come to this material trained in the academic discipline of critical reading, which aims, at a basic level, to demystify, to search for a nuanced sense of truth within ideologically saturated texts. And while critical reading practices were certainly available in 1859-60, the fact that these Whitman documents highlight their dubious qualities as something of a rationale to be read suggests a radically different alternative to critical reading. Max Cavitch uses the term “disinhibited reading” to describe how Anne Gilchrist read

Whitman’s poems in Britain in 1869 and promptly “called the …bluff of addressivity central to the poet’s own eroticism,” announcing in a letter

257

“her imminent move across the Atlantic to be near him.”120 Clearly- disclosed bluffs, hoaxes, and fictions call for “disinhibited,” playful readings, if they are to be read at all, and the proliferation of Saturday

Press documents that prominently feature these self-disclosing cues point to a wider literary culture that clearly reveled in the practice of disinhibited reading. What is more, the Saturday Press archive points to a wider practice of disinhibited publishing.

Another way to think about the distance and the difference separating the Saturday Press’ literary and reading culture from our own is to recognize that the two cultures exist on opposite sides of a complex authorization process. The disinhibited publishing practices of the

Saturday Press and the de-authorized context of mid-nineteenth-century periodical publishing, more generally, where anonymous and pseudonymous publication were the norm rather than the exception, differ entirely from the author-centric and authorized discipline of academic publishing from the nineteenth century to our own.

Whitman’s metonym for Homer (itself always already a metonym), the “chanting mouth,” aptly figures the loss that eventually came with abstracting nineteenth-century poetry culture from its periodical context in the literary histories of the twentieth century. And yet, Whitman cheekily refers to “the Homer” in a way that contradicts the dominant thinking that many Homers composed the Iliad and, by extension, that

120 Max Cavitch, “Audience Terminable and Interminable: Anne Gilchrist, Walt Whitman, and the Achievement of Disinhibited Reading,” Victorian Poetry 43.2 (2005), 249. 258

disavows the various Whitmen and women who were attempting to authorize “Whitman” and the “Whitman poem” in the pages of the

Saturday Press.121 In so doing Whitman expresses a crucial ambivalence that helps us recognize that for all the pleasure taken in these self-reflexive and experimental games of authorization developed through the cheap print of periodical publishing, the abstraction and idealization of an autonomous form of American poetry was more enchanting still, even though that enchantment eventually came to mean the extinction of this vibrant periodical poetry culture. Of course, in this moment, neither

Whitman nor the various Saturday Press contributors could know what it would mean to love the abstraction of literature and poetry more than the actual practice, but it is important to note that even at this vibrant highpoint in the history of American periodical poetry culture, the specter of its demise is legible in the fictions devised by some of its merriest champions. In other words, though the Saturday Press and Whitman variously celebrate and acknowledge the logic of the MacGuffin and all of its nonexistent absurdity at work within their productions, these writers also find themselves enchanted by the ideals the various MacGuffins shape themselves after, in addition to being motivated by the real effects and publishing momentum that precipitate out of staging a MacGuffin who signs his poems “Walt Whitman.”

121 I borrow the pun from Jay Grossman’s Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (2003). 259

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