Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Poems, Volume 7 ed. by Michael C. Cohen and Alexandra Socarides

Abstract

Reviewed by: Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Poems, Volume 7 ed. by Michael C. Cohen and Alexandra Socarides Kristina Garvin (bio) Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Poems, Volume 7 edited by michael c. cohen and alexandra socarides Bucknell University Press, 2020 354 pp. Given the central role poetry played in Charles Brockden Brown's career, it's striking how infrequently it surfaces in critical discussions of his work. As editors Michael C. Cohen and Alexandra Socarides detail in this collection, poetry was the genre to which Brown turned most often. More than the novels for which he became famous or the periodical editing that occupied the last decade of his life, verse was his constant, abiding mainstay, and a vital (if often overlooked) thread that ran through the entirety of his career. By consolidating this body of work, the seventh volume of The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown provides a critical and contextual glimpse into both Brown's oeuvre and a literary culture that prized verse as much as it did other genres. Engaging and comprehensive, this volume systematically compiles the poems that Brown produced throughout his lifetime, giving special attention to their relationship to the corresponding social, literary, and political life of the early Republic. As Gordon Sayre has observed, poetry was uniquely accessible and ubiquitous in the eighteenth century—part and parcel of everyday discourse—and Brown's engagements with the genre reflect his sense of its versatility. As Cohen and Socarides underscore in their historical essay, Brown's poems were written and published throughout his life and often in collaboration with other authors. Most famously, his anonymous contributions to the Federalist Gazette of the United States, composed as poetic correspondence with Elihu Hubbard Smith and Joseph [End Page 983] Bringhurst Jr., still constitute the "longest and most prolific poetic correspondence in American literary history" (Cohen and Socarides 262). Brown also used verse in more private communication with female friends—poems he later republished in his own periodicals. One of these poems, the substantial "Devotion: An Epistle" (209–42), composed for Deborah Ferris in 1794 and then repurposed for his future wife, Elizabeth Linn, in 1801, appeared in Brown's own American Register in 1808. Indeed, most noteworthy about this volume is how it spotlights Brown's high regard for the genre while taking great care not to overstate his poetic ambitions (or to attribute to him poems he probably did not write). Like most men of letters at the time, Brown began writing poetry in the Augustan mode—that familiar vehicle for "celebrating virtuous industry and self-sufficiency [while] deploring a contemporary decline into effeminate dependency and corruption" (Cohen and Socarides 273). One of his earliest efforts, "The Rising Glory of America," follows Philip Freneau's 1771 poem in style and substance, and his first published poems, "A Peter Pindarical Performance" and "Introduction to a Heroi-Comic Poem on the Loo," veer little from the mock-epic conventions of contemporary satire. Nevertheless, as Cohen and Socarides point out, it would be as shortsighted to dismiss Brown's poems as merely derivative. In particular, Brown provides us with a vital case study of poetry's social and affective dimensions, wherein "acts of reading, reciting, discussing, transcribing, or exchanging poems mattered as much as any poem's content, let alone whatever renown it might attain through publication" (277–78). By taking us through how Brown used poetry in semiprivate correspondence, in public newspapers, and in his novels (the editors include poems from Wieland and Ormond in this volume), Cohen and Socarides clarify the peculiar tensions between print and sociability. For instance, his long-running poetic correspondence in the Gazette—framed as sonnets and odes exchanged among friends—blur the lines between private exchange and public communication, marking "an interesting swerve from the pragmatics of coterie circulation" while "expand[ing] the potential audience beyond the friendly circles of a polite coterie" (281). These poetic exchanges maintain "a kind of privacy through their use of pseudonyms and their depiction of the reflexivity that characterized coterie verse" (281). This brand of intimacy, played out in public view, allows us a glimpse into the distinctive interpersonal poetics that permeated early...