The Politics of Poetry: The Democratic Review and the Gallows Verse of William Wordsworth and John Greenleaf Whittier

In March 1842, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review published a sixteen-page attack on William Wordsworth's most recent publication, Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death, a sequence that argued for the preservation of capital punishment in England as a necessity to social order. While critics on both sides of the Atlantic expressed disappointment that Wordsworth would have defended the gallows and saw his advocacy of the death penalty as a betrayal of the populist values that many had associated with his earlier work, the response to these poems by the Democratic Review was particularly outraged. Editor John O'Sullivan, the author of the review, expressed "a little surprise and no little pain" that Wordsworth "should have lent the aid of his genius and his moral influence to promote this unholy purpose" and then continues: "To behold [Wordsworth] take down the sacred lyre, and attune its chords to the harsh creaking of the scaffold and the clanking of the victim's chains, seems almost a profanation and a sacrilege—as though a harp of heaven were transported from its proper sphere and its congenial themes, to be struck by some impious hand to the foul and hideous harmonies of hell."¹ O'Sullivan's reaction to these sonnets did not depart greatly from the typical response displayed by contemporary readers in both England and America or even from that displayed by Wordsworth scholars in the twentieth century.² However, this review was only the beginning of the Review's negative response to this work. Over the course of the next two years, the Review would publish a series of pieces critical of Wordsworth, in what amounted to a campaign to vilify him as a failed poet and as an enemy of popular interest.

In this article, I consider the Democratic Review's sustained attack on Wordsworth in two contexts: first, the debate about abolishing capital punishment that was occurring in New York (where the Review was published), and, second, the Review's effort to encourage the creation and publication of literary work that advocated populist politics and reforms, including such initiatives as attempting to ban the death penalty. Based on this consideration, I argue that the vitriol expressed by the Review toward Wordsworth is not essentially about Wordsworth at all but instead is merely a facet of the Review's larger argument about the social and political obligations of poetry. That is, Wordsworth becomes a device for the Review to escalate its claims that literature should advocate social causes of importance to the common man and to inspire a body of American literature that would become engaged in the reforms the periodical supported. In the early 1840s, the Review saw it as especially important to convince American writers that an opposition to the death penalty must be among the political values of any democratic poet. After an introduction setting up the context of the Review's campaign, the following essay is composed of two sections. The first explores how the Review uses Wordsworth as a negative example, the antithesis of everything that writers—specifically poets—in a democratic America should aspire to be, because of the positions he holds on capital punishment, among numerous other shortcomings. The second section explores the Review's corresponding project of celebrating writers who achieve its democratic standards for literature by focusing specifically on the journal's treatment of John Greenleaf Whittier, who is presented as a model for American writers, based on his attitude toward the death penalty as well as his larger democratic commitments.

Given the traditional view of the political commitments of the Democratic Review, offered to us by critics and historians like Perry Miller, John Stafford, and Edward Widmer, its response to the conservative, anti-reform stance of Wordsworth's sonnets is not surprising. Linked to the Young America movement that promoted a native literature that was different both formally and ideologically from European—specifically English—literature, the magazine was known for its "high-quality articles by authors with Democratic leanings, deep sympathy with...