Читать книгу A Companion to American Poetry - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Tamara HarveyGeorge Mason University

Arme, arme, Soldado’s arme, Horse, Horse, speed to your Horses,

Gentle-women, make head, they vent their plot in Verses;

They write of Monarchies, a most seditious word,

It signifies Oppression, Tyranny, and Sword:

March amain to London, they’l rise, for there they flock,

But stay a while, they seldome rise till ten a clock.

R.Q. (Bradstreet, 1650, n.p.)

The humor in R.Q.’s prefatory poem to Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse (1650) is neither original nor subtle, which may explain why it was the only prefatory poem to be dropped from Several Poems (1678).¹ And yet its representation of both monarchy and literary gentle-women epitomizes the broad trends in scholarship on the poem R.Q. would seem to have in mind, Bradstreet’s “The Four Monarchies.” Bradstreet renders Sir Walter Ralegh’s² five volume The Historie of the World in over 3500 lines of iambic pentameter couplets. According to Gillian Wright, Bradstreet’s poem is a “politic history,” a subgenre of early modern verse history that uses condensation and an epigrammatic style to render its subject (p. 85). At times this yields pithy epitomes of long, scholarly discourse, though just as frequently the effort to turn Ralegh’s prose into poetry leads to confusing inversions and other infelicities. Modern readers, it is fair to say, don’t love this poem. To make sense of it, scholars have read it as a reflection of extratextual concerns that resonate more readily with modern interests, situating Bradstreet politically within transatlantic Puritan concerns during the English Civil War and literarily as a woman writer who must work against broad characterizations of women’s abilities and nature. How the poem fails and how it treats failure is a frequent focus of these approaches. Bradstreet herself attributed faults in the poem to her gender and personal circumstances: “To fill the world with terrour and with woe,/My tyred brain leavs to some better pen,/This task befits not women like to men” (1678, p. 185).³ In this poem, written during the English Civil War and published in the year following the beheading of Charles I, Bradstreet also repeatedly demonstrates that “Royalty no good conditions brings” (1678, p. 172), but falters in concluding the poem in ways that may be attributed to her unwillingness to imagine political solutions that fully reject monarchy.⁴

In this chapter, I argue that attention to the concept of worldmaking and its attendant failures provides useful grounds for comparing women writers across time. I expand on recent readings of Bradstreet’s longest and most neglected poem, “The Four Monarchies,” and then consider The Virtues of Society (1799), one of three long history poems written by Sarah Wentworth Morton during the early US republic. My goal is to suggest that understanding the ways these poets engage the intellectual project of imagining and theorizing the world at moments of significant global transformation provides insights into their work individually as well as providing a framework for examining the work of other early women writers. In each case I focus on the poet’s representation of a heroic woman situated in world-historical space, Semiramis and Lady Harriet Ackland, respectively, in order to explore their engagement with historical genres, learned debates, and depictions of exceptional women.

Though both personal and political approaches to literature are relevant and revelatory, they often sidestep the manifest purpose of a poem such as Bradstreet’s—to tell the history of the world. Recent attention to worldmaking and a rapidly changing global imaginary during the early modern period provides a more robust framework for reading Bradstreet’s ambitious attempt at a universal history. Ayesha Ramachandran describes early modern “worldmaking” as “the methods by which early modern thinkers sought to imagine, shape, revise, control, and articulate the dimensions of the world,” synthesizing fragments into a comprehensive whole (pp. 6–7). Understanding Bradstreet’s poem as a form of worldmaking helps us better appreciate her literary ambition. It also helps us account for her evident failures in this poem without attributing them solely to her gender and personal circumstances or the responses of New England Puritans to the English Civil War. “[T]he great secret of the early modern system-makers,” Ramachandran explains, is that “worldmaking is possible, even necessary, because of the insurmountable gap between our fragmentary apprehension of the phenomenal world and our desire for complete knowledge of it” (p. 10). Early modern worldmaking frequently drew on metaphors of the body to imagine the world (Ramachandran 2015, p. 23 ff.). Bradstreet’s apology that “my Monarchies their legs do lack” (1678, p. 191) is as much a gesture toward the worldmaking design of the poem as it is a confession that it, like all such projects, fell short of that design.

While shared marginalization, female embodiment, and the experience of being writers whose authority is automatically doubted are understandable grounds for comparing women across time, history poems are seldom subjects for this kind of comparison. Perhaps this is because they seem too impersonal for comparisons of embodied experience while also emerging from specific historical contexts that get in the way of comparative analysis based on genre and political engagement. By attending to the worldmaking design of these poems, I build on scholarship on women’s engagement of politics in poetry and their self-consciously ambitious attempts to represent global space and world history. Wright observes with regard to Bradstreet’s “Monarchies,” “What matters in the ‘I’ of politic history is not the biographical baggage which he or she (overtly at least) brings to the task, but rather the qualities of discrimination, political judgement and apt expression which are manifest in the narrative” (p. 88). Insofar as it is possible, I focus here on qualities of discrimination and design rather than on their personal circumstances to compare these writers. One challenge, of course, is that their approaches to history differ in important ways. Bradstreet’s worldmaking is a form of universal history that was a generation old when she was writing the poems that make up The Tenth Muse, while Morton’s neoclassicism draws on the epic and her more complete knowledge of the globe, centering America and, eventually, the United States, geopolitically in ways that Bradstreet and her peers could not yet have imagined. Still, we gain some important insights that allow us to deal more substantially with the content of these poems by attending to the poets’ own ambitious representation of world history, the scholarly gestures of these works that are important components of their literary and intellectual ambition, and how exactly these poets imagined the globe. Acknowledging and appreciating the grand design in women’s history poems as well as the inevitable flaws in those designs can help us move away from attributing faults and expressions of failure to the rhetorical exigencies placed on women writers as well as their insecurities and limited educational opportunities.