"The Sot-Weed Factor: Or, a Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr" is a satirical poem written by British-American poet Ebenezer Cooke, and first published in London in 1708.

Content

Written in

Hudibrastic Hudibrastic is a type of English verse named for Samuel Butler's ''Hudibras'', published in parts from 1663 to 1678.Cox, Michael, editor, ''The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature'', Oxford University Press, 2004, For the poem, Butler ...

couplets, the poem is, on its surface, a scathing Juvenalian satire of America and its colonists, and a

parody A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its sub ...

of the pamphlets that advertised colonization as easy and lucrative (38, 40). The persona comes to Maryland as a

tobacco Tobacco is the common name of several plants in the genus '' Nicotiana'' of the family Solanaceae, and the general term for any product prepared from the cured leaves of these plants. More than 70 species of tobacco are known, but the ...

merchant, or "sot-weed factor". He is shocked by the brutishness of Native Americans and English settlers alike, and he is swindled by an "ambodexter quack", or corrupt lawyer. He leaves the colony in disgust.

Reception

Some critics, notably Robert D. Arner, J. A. Lemay, G. A. Carey, and Sarah Ford, read the poem as a dual satire, targeting the closed-minded, embittered, failed colonist as much as it satirizes the colony. This dual satire, Ford argues, helped to promote a national identity, as "the colonists become insiders who perceive the humor in the factor's inability to adapt to life in America". Robert Micklus, too, sees the poem's humor as contributing to an aspect of American culture—namely, a tendency towards self-referential satire, later further developed by Alexander Hamilton and

Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin ( April 17, 1790) was an American polymath who was active as a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher. Encyclopædia Britannica, Wood, 2021 Among the leading inte ...

. What is significant about the poem, for Micklus, is not what Cooke says about either the colony or the English, but how Cooke goes about showing that his speaker "is a complete ass". In 1970, Edward H. Cohen stated that, " all of colonial American literature there is no problem so perplexing as that of the textual history of ''The Sot-weed Factor''.... 1731 ookepublished in Annapolis a tempered revision of the same poem ... identified, on its title page, as "The Third Edition." But what, then, has become of the ''second'' edition?" While Cohen points out that there are drafts of a preface for a second edition, this does not prove that such an edition was published.

Joe Nickell Joe Nickell (born December 1, 1944) is an American skeptic and investigator of the paranormal. Nickell is senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and writes regularly for their journal, ''Skeptical Inquirer''. He is also ...

has argued, based on similarities in the text and the published preface, that the second edition is actually the sequel, ''Sot-Weed Redivivus''. The poem inspired John Barth's 1960 novel, '' The Sot-Weed Factor''.

References

Works cited

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External links

''The Sot-Weed Factor''
at Project Gutenberg *
''Early Maryland Poetry'', ed. Bernard C. Steiner''The Sot-Weed Factor'', ed. Brantz Mayer
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sot-Weed Factor (poem), The English-language poems American poems