Now there was a man named Plummer, and he was numbered among the bards of Essex…. And he traveled from place to place, holding converse with the wayfaring man and stranger, gathering accounts of strange accidents that befell them by flood and fire; likewise of all great or singular men and women…. And, like the minstrels of old, he sat in the chimney corner and recited to an admiring audience the adventures he had heard or witnessed; and he wove them into ballads that circulated with great rapidity. And when he walked forth, the farmers rested upon their hoe-handles to listen to his marvelous tales, or to his astonishing fluency of song; and when he ended, loaded his bags and pockets with the ripe product of their fields; as Homer of old was rewarded by the Cossite dames, after singing his Iliad to their listening children, with a trencher of figs and a cup of mulled wine.53
This memorial placed Plummer even more firmly in an archaic register, as one “numbered among the bards,” “like the minstrels of old,” or “as Homer of old,” despite the fact that Plummer “visited the University … frequented the markets and fairs, attended camp-meetings and commencements, and had sojourned in every place of public resort.”54 As a figure of antiquity, moving among the spaces of contemporary life in America, Plummer seemed, for this author, to endanger national culture. The vagrant represented not only the irruption of the antique into the modern; his itinerancy also threatened to inculcate popular disregard for legitimate public culture. Because “the song and the ballad will be remembered while there are natural feelings, and a sensibility to simplicity of expression,” this memorial concluded, “Let us not therefore any longer leave the composition of songs and ballads, to the journeymen of the Pedlar. For lo! he no longer keepeth in a corner, but under the eye, and even under the license of the police; he spreadeth out his verses, and his tales, full of superstition, of horror, of immorality; thus corrupting the innocent youth, and confirming the abandoned.”55
The passage, with all its pointed irony, betrays significant worry about the prospect of an unrestrained, popular culture of “songs and ballads” that fails to remain “in a corner” but instead brings its tales “full of superstition, of horror, of immorality” out into the open. Like a slanderous broadside—the chief virtue of which, according to W. C. Ford, was its “quiet circulation, difficult to counter or trace to its source”—the kind of poetry Plummer embodied appeared to propagate itself easily and endlessly (he wove “ballads that circulated with great rapidity”), thereby imperiling social decorum and good taste (in a historical irony, Webster’s son John would later be the defendant in one of the most infamous and sensational murder trials of the nineteenth century, a crime straight out of a Plummer broadside).56 In the face of the local, decentralized, ephemeral, and vagrant features of this poetics, a more elite stance toward culture projected the language and emblems of an imagined antiquity onto writers like Plummer. This move defined local poetry as a residual formation, one that did not merit inclusion in any narrative of American literature. By placing such poetry, and the system of relations it engendered, under the domain of “the ballad,” interpreters arrogated to themselves the power to arbitrate literary history, because to locate such work under the name of “the ballad” was to define retroactively the values and meanings of the culture in which that poetry had mattered. The hybridity of ballads—always already antique, printed, and yet oral objects of elite interest yet folk forms as well, and, most important, ubiquitous yet fated imminently to disappear—ably represents the fictions of a conflicted literary history, because the figure of “the ballad” could incorporate the material that the literary defined as other than itself.57 The unlicensed circulation of poems under the sign of “the ballad” thus gives rise, at the turn of the century, to a more restrictive sense of the poet’s relation to public order, and the balladmonger helps to make manifest an incipient sense of literariness, as a second instance illustrates.
The Down-East Homer
Thomas Shaw is sometimes called (usually with tongue in cheek) Maine’s first poet.58 Shaw was born in 1753, near Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. When he was about ten years old, his family moved to the Maine territory (then part of the Massachusetts colony), where they helped establish a settlement project (Pearsontown, later renamed Standish) on the Saco River northwest of Portland. His father Ebenezer ran the settlement’s sawmill, and he built the second frame house in the area, where Thomas would live the rest of his life. Thomas served in the Revolutionary War, fighting in the siege of Boston, and sometime during his military service he began writing poems. He returned to Maine in the late 1770s, carried on the family’s farm and mill, held a number of minor offices in Standish, and died there in 1838. During his life, Shaw published around ten poems (that I have found), which were printed as broadsides, except for one published as an eight-page pamphlet. These poems focus on local tragedies (shipwrecks, executions, and accidental deaths) and national events (the Peace of Ghent; Lafayette’s visit in 1825), and they circulated widely, with at least one reprinted in New York City. Shaw’s print bibliography is, however, only a tiny fraction of his output: he wrote somewhere around two thousand poems, which he transcribed repeatedly, over many decades, in a series of voluminous manuscripts and homemade books. His reputation as a local balladmonger (the “Down-East Homer,” as an early twentieth-century historian called him) probably derived from both his published and unpublished work.
Although he has been accorded a minor place in the history of a minor region, his career has usually provided literary criticism a means to mark the difficulties that stood in the way of any aspiring poet in the early national period: “His verse was indeed ‘unlernt,’ lamentably bad, worthless today, except that it indicates the isolation of mind and poverty of vision that was inevitable in those days of material and political struggle.”59 Where it has been noted at all, the archive left by a poet like Shaw is treated as a forlorn hope, and an amused condescension has been the standard critical approach to it. However, Shaw’s manuscripts speak to the conditions of early nineteenth-century poetic culture with a different sort of eloquence: Shaw is interesting precisely because he was not a mute, inglorious Milton but was instead all too profuse and prolix. If his poems forestall a critical analysis predicated on the conditions of literariness abstracted from print textuality, their seemingly self-evident worthlessness is also anticipated throughout his writings, which meditate obsessively on the conditions of their own mediation. The interplay between media in his archive, and between media and his archive, offers a compelling opportunity to imagine the social being of poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Shaw described the region where he grew up as “the wilderness, where there was no schools nor meeting untill I was 15 years old. Now my parents lernt me, as well as the rest of his Children to read, and I never went to school a moment in my life.”60 Shaw’s ambivalent relation to literacy and print literature—he could read and write, yet regularly characterized himself as “an old foole / That never once did go to school”—serves as an organizing principle for both his massive poetic output and the marginal position of his poems in relation to the literary culture of his time and after.61 The ways in which the borders of the poetic were policed at the turn of the century was a regular topic in his writings. When he was thirty-two, Shaw wrote a warrant for his own arrest:
Whereas Thomas Shaw, of Pearsontown in the County of Cumberland & Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Poet, did, on the twenty seventh Day of March, Anno Domini, one thousand, seven hundred & Eighty five, maliciously and of malice propense, commit a most horrid, barbarous and inhuman murder, on the Bodies of the Muses—Guardians of the liberal Arts, These are to command you by virtue of a power to me granted, from the high Court of Apollo, to apprehend the Body of the said Thomas, & him safely keep, so that he be had before the said Court aforesaid, on or before the twenty first Day of May next.