“The town, the town, good pit, has asses ears!”: Unstable audiences in Della Cruscan poetic conversation

Abstract

In his famously disparaging poetic retorts to the poetry of the British Della Cruscan movement, the Baviad and Mæviad, Tory satirist William Gifford made every effort to separate the readers of Della Cruscan poetry into two distinct audiences: Della Cruscan ‘writer-readers’ who read and actively responded to pieces written by other members of the coterie with poetry of their own, and the non-participating mass audience. According to Gifford, this latter audience—metonymized as ‘the Town’ in the Baviad—ignorantly follows the whims of fashion, absorbing Della Cruscan poetry, but never actually responding to it. Through an analysis of both Della Cruscan poetry and Gifford’s retorts, this paper aims to re-establish the links between these two kinds of audiences. I will argue that Gifford’s attempts to suppress these links stemmed from a deep-seated fear—fuelled by post-Revolutionary political instability—that the Della Cruscan coterie offered a platform whereby members of the mass reading audience could join their poetic conversations pseudonymously, and ultimately be granted a voice, regardless of their gender or political affiliations.

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