"Listen to the Voice of Reason"

"Happy should I be, were it possible to induce this deluded people to listen to the voice of reason; to abandon a set of me making them stilts to their own private ambition; to return to their former confidence in the King and his Parliament, and like the Romans when they threw off the yoke of the Decemvirs: -- 'Inde libertatis captare aurum, unde servitutem timendo Republicam in eum statum perduxere.'"

That's the last paragraph of Jonathan Lind's introduction to An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress (London: Printed for T. Cadell in the Strand; J. Walter, Charing Cross; and T. Sewell, near the Royal Exchange, 1776). In this volume, Lind attacks the various assertions and statements contained in the Declaration of Independence one article at a time.

The tone of the rebuttals tends to be on the sarcastic side, if not outright inflammatory. Take Lind's opening sally in his answer to Article 4 - the one about calling legislative bodies together in unusual, uncomfortable and distant places.

There is something so truly ridiculous in this Article that it is hardly possible to answer it with any becoming gravity. At first blush it looks as if inserted by an enemy, as if intended to throw an air of ridiculousness on the declaration in general.

The whole Answer is 132 pages long. In terms of spin control and swaying the populace it certainly wasn't as effective as the much shorter Declaration of Independence. Lind's final plea to make "whatever efforts may be necessary, to bring this ungrateful and rebellious people back to the allegiance they have...now so daringly renounced" doesn't quite have the same linguistic polish as the last line of the Declaration: "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

To read all of Lind's Answer, ask for McGregor 104.

Mommy's Angel

Philip Booth '48 was a mid-twentieth-century poet whose work was published regularly in such prominent places as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Poetry, among others. A native of Hanover, New Hampshire, Booth served in the USAF during World War II and then came to Dartmouth College, where he studied (albeit briefly) with Robert Frost. Upon graduation, Booth went to Columbia to earn a master's degree and then quickly returned to Dartmouth. After several years as an instructor of creative writing in the English department, he taught in turn at Bowdoin, Wellesley, and Syracuse, where he helped to found their Creative Writing program. During the course of his career, Booth won numerous prestigious fellowships, including ones from the Guggenheim and the NEA. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1983 and died in 2007.

In addition to his own poetic accomplishments, Booth was also a regular correspondent with other rising poets of his time, including Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Booth was the nephew of Plath's psychiatrist at Smith College and is first mentioned by Plath in her journal from 1958. At Rauner, we have a small cache of correspondence between Booth, Plath, and Hughes from the years 1960-61. Included is a rather cheery-looking Christmas card from December of 1960, in which Plath dotes upon her daughter, Frieda, barely eight months old at the time. Plath states that Frieda is "an angel to confound us atheists," while Hughes embarks upon a self-indulgent if tongue-in-cheek analysis of the card's cover image.

In a subsequent letter, dated March 29, 1961, Plath's description of her daughter is that of a "changeling" who is filling their nights with "teething yowls." She also mentions that she would give anything for a little money to pay for a nanny so that she could have some solid blocks of time in which to write. These apparently contradictory descriptions of motherly life will ring true for anyone who has children of their own. This small glimpse into Plath's experience as a mother makes her suicide less than two years later all the more poignant. In February of 1963, Plath would carefully seal off the door to where Frieda and her little brother slept before going to the kitchen, placing wet towels across the bottom of its door, and turning on the gas in the oven. By the time a nurse arrived several hours later to help her with the children, she was dead.

To read the Booth-Plath-Hughes correspondence at Rauner, ask for MS-426, Box 1, folder 12.