Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
Homely grease· saturated food, red men as bare and savage as ancient
Picts, folk stories of animals, ridicule of the Catholic colonists, or the
mockery of justice and ignorance of a local court-most are stock references
in southwestern humor. Varying degrees and forms of drunkenness,
of cheating, sanctimonious rogues (here the Quakers ), and of quack
doctors, also are easily recognized as later characteristics of backwoods
humor, and even here almost thoroughly Americanized. The poem ends as
the narrator boards a ship for Europe and bestows his curse of "those
Regions wast/where no Man's Faithful, nor a Woman chast."
The poem may owe something in point of view to forms of "The New
England Ballad" or "A West"Country Men's Voyage to New England,"
versions composed probably as early as the 1640s. This early dialect piece
depicts a narrator speaking his native brogue who is duped by cheats or
deceived by most of what he sees and concludes with swearing to leave the
cursed place and bid "farwell to those Fowlers and Fishers." In both poems
the persona is amazed at what he sees in the New World, though in the
ballad he is more obviously naive than in The Sot" Weed Factor, It has been
suggested, however, that there is a significant difference between the poems,
for the ballad is definitely anti· American or anticolonial. The Sot-Weed
Factor really, as noted above, is a satire on the satiric disenchantments directed
against promotion tracts. Cook's poem thus reflects a quality of later
American writing--our amusement and irritation at the cousins·backhome
misconceptions of US.72
If Cook did receive recognition as "Poet Laureate" of Maryland sometime
in the early 1720S or before, The Sot-Weed Factor may have been
an embarrassment. He was practicing law before 1722, as John Fox's poem
to Bordley tells us. He seems to have written a revised version of the poem,
with four drafts of a new preface, for a second edition, in the flyleaves of
a volume of Coke's Institutes, between 1720 and 1731. For in the latter
year the "Third Edition" was actually published in Annapolis. Edward H.
Cohen believes the date of the second edition may be further pinpointed,
though the details need not concern us here. The manuscript drafts seem
to appear in modified form in his S otweed Redivivus of 1730, though the
drafts in their original form were probably never published. At any rate,
there is a change of direction in the later 1731 "Third Edition" printed
version (Part II of The Maryland Muse) and in the 1730 Sotweed Redivivus:
Or The Planters Looking-Glass. Meanwhile he had published his
ELOGY on Thomas Bordley and the elegy on Nicholas Lowe, the latter
strongly ironic if not satiric.
The Sotweed Redivivus has a lively prose preface, and it contains an
early anti-Negro reference, rrWorse Villaines . .. then Forward's Newgate
Bands." The speaker is the earlier factor now grown old and settled in
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