Data as Poetry in Cowper's Statistical "Effusions"

Abstract

Data as Poetry in Cowper's Statistical "Effusions" Molly Farrell In the winter spanning 1787 and 1788, fresh off the success of the influential long poem The Task, William Cowper began writing two series of short verses. One of these is a group of five explicitly abolitionist songs, completed within months of one another, including "The Negro's Complaint" and "Pity for the Poor Africans," which had extraordinarily robust afterlives in U. S. abolitionist periodicals.1 The other is a series of six short "Verses Subjoined to the Bill of Mortality of Northampton" that were also reprinted widely in the early nineteenth century U.S., but which have since that time been largely ignored. Eighteenth-century bills of mortality were annual broadside reports issued by parishes counting local burials, and Cowper's verses "subjoined" to the statistics—in other words, printed below them—engage in a complex dialogue with the abolitionist poems. The intertwining of these two series of poems challenges assumptions about the relationship between poetic creation and statistical data, and between aesthetic and numerical representation more generally. For over a century, poets, critics, and university administrators have defined statistics in opposition to the work of the humanities. This rending has become so effective in our discourse that since the early twentieth century calling something a "statistic" often means reducing it "impersonally" to "nothing more than a piece of data."2 Today we live in the era of big data, the routine manipulation of masses of information, and individuals are enumerated every day and everywhere by the state; its police; corporations; health insurers; and educational institutions. Ruha Benjamin compares living in "the age of big data" to growing up in an overpoliced Black neighborhood, where "many of us continue to be monitored and measured, but without the audible rumble of helicopters to which we can point."3 The use of data-driven tools can pose existential threats to the humanities by underwriting the search for ever-cheaper sources of academic labor; demanding evidence of the marketability of our academic work; or justifying the closure of presses and publishing houses. In response, humanist scholars claim to offer valuable interpretive complements to the study of statistics, or [End Page 1025] lobby to fund digital humanities hires that promise to apply the tools of computational analysis to critical scholarship. And yet these defensive moves leave intact a particular historical fiction that compiling data and writing poetry are fundamentally distinct endeavors. Poets themselves since the nineteenth century have cultivated this notion of their work as an alternative to relentless quantification, with Walt Whitman writing that at an astronomy lecture when "the figures, were ranged in columns before me," he "unaccountable" preferred to gaze "in perfect silence at the stars."4 In this century, Pulitzer prizewinning Vijay Seshadri finds inspiration not in a real but an "imaginary number" that offers "an impossibility that has its uses."5 Modernist poets solidified this poetic posture of flight from quantification by explicitly holding up census data and statistics for critical poetic scrutiny. As W. H. Auden eulogizes ironically, He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to beOne against whom there was no official complaint................................Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd.6 Poems like these both reflect and help define the humanities as the realm of that which is "absurdly" left out of statistics. In turn, they repeatedly teach readers to articulate the differences rather than find the similarities among the aims and strategies of these two realms of communication. At the same time a poetic posture of statistical retreat was gaining momentum, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American writer-statisticians like James McCune Smith, Martin Delaney, and W. E. B. DuBois produced work that dissolved boundaries between aesthetics, data, and activism.7 Deep engagement with quantification along these lines persists today in the movement that a group of activists and mathematicians called Data 4 Black Lives; COVID Black: A Task Force on Health and Data, directed by Kim Gallon, which develops digital humanities projects responding to pandemic racial health disparities; Safiya Umoja Noble's dissection of technological redlining in search engine algorithms; the "DataRescue" work supported by the Environmental Data...