The Citizen Poets of Boston: A Collection of Forgotten Poems, 1789–1820

By Paul Lewis

Welcome to Boston in the early years of the republic. Prepare to journey by stagecoach with a young man moving to the “bustling city”; stop by a tavern for food, drink, and conversation; eavesdrop on clerks and customers in a dry-goods shop; get stuck in what might have been Boston’s first traffic jam; and enjoy arch comments about spouses, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and poets. As Paul Lewis and his students at Boston College reveal, regional vernacular poetry—largely overlooked or deemed of little or no artistic value—provides access to the culture and daily life of the city. Selected from over 4,500 poems published during the early national period, the works presented here, mostly anonymous, will carry you back to Old Boston to hear the voices of its long-forgotten citizen poets. A rich collection of lost poetry that will beguile locals and visitors alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Release date: Apr 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781611689303

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

Boston, with its Environs. Map. Engraving by T. Conder, Sculpt. (London : s.n., 1788).

Massachusetts Historical Society

Messrs. Gilbert & Dean, IF you think the [enclosed poem], occasioned by reading . . . your 29th number, will answer for a Supplement, you perhaps will publish it, when you have nothing better. If it be not so fortunate as to excite a smile, it may shew some of your fair readers their own image.

— Headnote written by the poet and included with Here comes Miss LIGHTHEAD and her tasty sister, which appeared in the Boston Weekly Magazine on June 11, 1803

Whether I shall be, or not,

A poet up to Walter Scott;

Or whether I’ve right to hope

To write like Byron, Swift, or Pope; . . .

Admits no doubt—I’ll tell you why;

Because, forsooth, I ne’er shall try.

— Anonymous, "AN EPISTLE TO THE EDITOR," Ladies’ Port Folio, April 22, 1820

Everything published among us must have some value, . . . as affording insight into the spirit and temper of the times.

— Samuel Kettell, Preface, Specimens of American Poetry, 1829

In 1789 there were a few ways to get to Boston. You could arrive by ship or ferry. You could traverse the three-year-old bridge that ran from Charlestown to the North End. Or you could walk or ride over Boston Neck, the thin strip of land that linked the island-like city to the mainland of Massachusetts. Imagine that you have come this way, perhaps on horseback from the rural community of Roxbury, and that you are now trotting along the recently renamed Washington Street past farms and fields toward the spires of the Old South Meeting House and the Old North Church. Approaching the center of town, you smell sea salt from the harbor and cow dung from the Common. The further you go on the streets of Old Boston, the more entranced you are by the sights and sounds of everyday life: mechanics at work, clerks opening shops, men rushing on business, women shaking out mats and chasing chickens, children hurrying to school, carts and carriages bustling everywhere.

By recovering rarely or never reprinted poems published in Boston magazines during the early national period (1789–1820), this book bridges the gap between twenty-first-century readers and the post-Revolutionary city. The team that compiled it, composed of the editor and Boston College English majors, invites you to regard the poems we have exhumed, enjoyed, and selected as buckboard time machines. Because most of them were published anonymously by amateur or citizen poets, and because they tend to be unpretentious, informal, and even conversational, they can seem intimate, revealing, and alive. Divided into groups organized around particular subjects and arranged in chronological order, they allow us to eavesdrop on diners swapping stories at a late-eighteenth-century tavern, overhear a conversation between clerks and customers in a sewing shop, get stuck in a traffic jam in Charlestown, join a crowd of people rushing to see a fire, sit down at a Thanksgiving feast fifty-nine years before Thanksgiving became an official American holiday, watch Harvard students wait for the results of their examinations, try to solve a riddle that has gone unsolved for 217 years, share a parent’s concern about what life will bring a sleeping daughter, meet a young woman determined not to be dominated by a future husband, and enjoy arch comments about husbands, wives, sons, daughters, doctors, lawyers, politicians, ministers, and poets.

During the early national period, no fewer than 427 magazines were published in a country new enough to be referred to as these United States. Astonishingly, these often fledging periodicals included over 30,000 poems in their pages. In Boston alone—between 1789, when the Massachusetts Magazine began its seven-year run on old Newbury Street, and 1820, when the Ladies’ Port Folio began its five-month run on State Street—at least 59 magazines contained over 4,500 poems. The sheer volume of verse that appeared in the United States during these decades partially explains our focus on Boston magazines. It’s one thing to review more than 4,500 poems, quite another to review more than 30,000. Beyond this, concentrating on poems written for readers in and near a specific city responds to the geographically limited distribution of magazines in this period. As Frank Luther Mott, a historian of the American magazine, notes, publishing in these decades was for the most part local . . . supported by contributions of local coteries and by subscriptions drawn chiefly from within a radius of fifty miles. Projects like this need to have a local focus, to be driven, as this one was, by the desire to know more about the place where one lives, works, or studies. If teachers and students in other parts of the country—such as New York City and Philadelphia, where research may be particularly fruitful—undertake similar explorations, they will, we predict, make similarly delightful discoveries that they can then share, as we are doing now, with interested readers in their cities.¹

While the number of poems published during these years seems large, literary historians have noted and our electronic searches confirm that most of the verse printed in these magazines was reprinted from British periodicals and books. Lacking both financial and authorial capital, the editors of these fledging publications took advantage of the extremely limited domestic protection for authors and the absence of an international copyright to pirate works, often failing to identify the names of sources and writers. At the same time, these editors frequently invited submissions by their own readers, some of whom eagerly responded by submitting poems. Works by these mostly anonymous reader or citizen poets are heavily represented in each subject-based section of this anthology.²

As used here, the word citizen refers not to residents who enjoyed full rights and privileges but to residents in general, who, if they were so inclined, could attempt to participate in the give-and-take of Boston’s nascent literary culture. Members of groups denied equal treatment—including women, people of color, young adults, and people who didn’t own property—could submit poems for consideration. We know, for example, that two poets who published in Boston under their own names either during or just before this period—Phillis Wheatley (1753–84), an enslaved woman, and David Hitchcock (1773–?), a shoemaker—fit into one or more of these categories. Though most of the poets included here were undoubtedly European Americans, and though many were obviously well read, anonymous publication makes it impossible in most cases to determine their gender, race, and class. While this lack of certainty about authors can be frustrating, it can also create opportunities for imaginative reading as elements of style, voice, or theme provide intimations of