Do you recognize our town in these words? A place …
Where liberal minds have happy sway attained,
By priests unshackled, as by crime unstained!
Where genius meets a rich and sure reward,
Where speculation never meets with fraud!
Where female virtue fears no hapless flaw,
For chastity is here secured by law;
Where narrow Prejudice is hunted down,
And Superstition drove from every town
Actually, neither did their author, one Samuel Woodworth.
He penned them back in 1809, in a poem called “New-Haven,” one of many in his Poems, Odes, Songs, And Other Metrical Effusions.
We effuse with him and get at the truth of what really happened to him in muddy, prejudiced, blue-law filled New Haven on the this episode of This Day In New Haven History.
You can listen to my dramatic reading and incisive deconstruction of Woodworth’s poem by clicking on the audio below .
Why use poetry to time-travel back to this day in our town’s history? Because, the axiom we are acting on this week as we broadcast live from the Local History Room of the New Haven Free Public Library, is that poetry, and literature, contain all the real news of human experience that we are likely to miss if we read only the headlines in the newspaper.
Woodworth also authored “The Old Oaken Bucket,” which became a famous barbershop quartet tune.
Not that Sam Woodworth, my new best imaginary historical friend, didn’t try to publish newspapers. He did. We discuss his Belles-Lettres Repository, a failed literary zine that he put out in our town. He was traveling from his native Boston to New York to make his fortune there as a printer/publisher and stopped in New Haven when he ran out of cash.
The literary compendium was to raise money to continue the journey. He was able to publish only some of the promised issues for his subscribers and, well, had to skip town. In New York he did better and offered to return the money some years later in reduced subscription price for the New York magazine that he was launching a few years later, in 1809.
Seeing New Haven as a place of transience while you make your career north and south of us. Very familiar.
What comes through between the lines of his dubious encomium, as I help interpret them, is a guy who had some pretty negative experiences in town. Since literature at the time had not found its native American voice, but was all about received English poetical forms mixing an extravagant praise with a little satirical edge to even the balance, we are fortunate that Sam Woodworth used that satire in a manner that opens the window a bit on life in New Haven at that early time.
To hear about the unpoetical but poetically described muddy streets, strict blue laws, disastrous condition of falling down wooden buildings and a long wharf under construction where you could turn an ankle if you walked there, click on this episode and those later this week for the company of Woodworth in early New Haven.