Jonathan Plummer: Poet Laureate, Prophet of Dreams, and Professional Weird Guy

Subtitle: Fish peddler turned street poet who believed in the science of dreaming and claimed God was too busy with aliens to care about Earth.

“I Was Already So Insufferably Unfashionable”

Jonathan Plummer Jr. (1761-1819) was, by all historical accounts, a weird kid who grew up to be a weirder adult.

Born in Newbury, Massachusetts in 1761, he was the oldest of eight children. According to historian Roger W. Higgins, Plummer was “sickly through infancy and early childhood, mentally weak and easily imposed upon.”

As a teenager, he had a reputation for being “a strange and wayward boy with a flair for revival meetings.”

In his own words:

“My reading, traveling, and thirst for knowledge, too … began to operate to my disadvantage . . . to make me what they called an odd fellow — that is, different from the young fellows who were not readers . . . I was already so insufferably unfashionable as to begin to talk in young company of religion, virtue, poets, philosophers, lords, generals, statesmen, kings, battles, sieges, &c.”

Translation: He was a nerd in an era before nerd culture, reading books and talking about philosophy while everyone else wanted to drink and flirt.

His parents homeschooled him—but sent his other seven siblings to actual school. This slight bothered him until the end of his life.

He was also, apparently, not handsome:

“His feet were long and clumsy, his legs were thick, his chest broad and strong, his face was long, with a prominent nose, wide mouth, and thick lips.”

And he had chronic bad breath.

More on that later.

The Revolutionary War Deserter Who Accidentally Lived

At age 15, Plummer enlisted in the Continental militia during the Revolutionary War. He served at a garrison in Dorchester, Massachusetts for 90 days but saw no action.

His assessment of the experience: “At this business we made a pretty lazy appearance. Nothing in it fired us with ambition or captivated our fancy.”

In 1777, he tried to join a privateer ship called The Hero. According to Plummer, he signed on—then deserted the day before the ship left port.

The Hero was lost at sea in August 1777 with all hands.

Plummer’s desertion accidentally saved his life.

This is either divine intervention or just dumb luck, depending on whether you believe in prophetic dreams (which Plummer absolutely did).

The Fish Peddler Era

After abandoning military and maritime careers, Plummer became a street peddler in Newburyport’s Market Square.

He sold:

• Halibut
• Spectacles
• Scissors
• Thimbles
• Combs
• Needles
• Pins
• His own printed verses

He was unmercifully taunted.

People invited him to non-existent parties. They mocked him in the streets. They called him “ballad feller” and treated him as beneath their notice.

And then there was the bad breath problem. Could you imagine going down in the historical record for your breath?

In Plummer’s own words:

“They thought a ballad feller too mean to associate with, and often insulted me on account of my offensive breath, cruelly despisin me because I was unwell.”

One of his works, titled Plumer’s Declaration of War with the Fair Ladies of the Five Northern States, swore off young women entirely and argued instead for courting “vigorous and antiquated virgins.”

Translation: He gave up on dating women his own age and declared older women superior, possibly because they didn’t mock his breath.

Despite his literary talents, “he found little success in the romance department.”

This might be the kindest historical euphemism I’ve ever encountered.

Enter Lord Timothy Dexter

By the mid-1790s, Plummer caught the attention of Lord Timothy Dexter—Newburyport’s magnificently eccentric millionaire who’d made a fortune selling bed warmers to the Caribbean and coal to Newcastle.

Dexter recognized Plummer’s intelligence (or at least his usefulness) and offered to set him up as either a physician or a minister.

Plummer couldn’t decide between the two.

So he accepted the post of Poet Laureate instead.

The job paid a small stipend for several years and required little beyond reciting occasional odes to Dexter’s greatness:

“Lord Dexter is a man of fame;
Most celebrated is his name;
More precious far than gold that’s pure,
Lord Dexter shines forevermore.”

It was probably Dexter’s way of extending charity while preserving Plummer’s dignity.

Or it was just rich-guy patronage of the village oddball. Either way, it worked.

Plummer continued peddling his wares and verses from a basket in Market Square, now with the official title of “Poet Laureate to Lord Timothy Dexter.”

John Greenleaf Whittier, the famous poet, remembered Plummer’s visits to Whittier’s childhood hometown of Haverhill:

“Twice a year, usually in the spring and autumn, we were honored with a call from Jonathan Plummer, maker of verses, peddler and poet, physician and parson,—a Yankee troubadour,—first and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac, encircled, to my wondering young eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality.”

Plummer had achieved local legend status—the traveling poet-peddler who sold pins and prophecy from a basket.

The Science of Dreaming

Here’s where it gets interesting for those of us who practice consciousness technology:

Plummer believed in the science of dreaming.

He promoted this belief aggressively, even after people told him to his face that he was crazy.

In his own words:

“I often continued my discourse on dreams after people told me to my face, in plain words, that I was crazy.”

He didn’t stop. He just kept preaching about dreams as a valid source of knowledge.

This wasn’t mysticism for Plummer—it was science. He framed dreaming as a legitimate epistemological method, a way of accessing information unavailable to waking consciousness.

Sound familiar?

Imbas forosnai was a structured cognitive technology used by the Filidh—an altered-state method for extracting pattern, meaning, and insight through symbolic flashes, sensory narrowing, and land-mediated attention. Plummer wasn’t operating in that system, but his dream-science sits in the same cognitive neighborhood. It parallels other traditions that treat non-ordinary cognition as an information channel: Greek oneiromancy, Norse seiðr-trance, Inuit qaumaneq, Tibetan land-triggered revelation, and similar frameworks across global cultures. Different practices, different depths—but the same underlying scientific root: the mind accessing data outside its waking narrative logic.

Plummer was doing the same thing in 18th-century New England, calling it “science,” and getting mocked for it by people who couldn’t see the technology underneath the strangeness.

God is Too Busy With Aliens

Plummer also had another radical belief: millions of other planets were inhabited.

He argued that God was too busy dealing with alien life to care much about mere Earthlings.

This was the 1790s-1810s. The concept of extraterrestrial life was not mainstream.

Most Christian ministers at the time believed Earth was the center of God’s attention, humanity the pinnacle of creation.

Plummer said nope, we’re just one planet among millions, and God has bigger concerns.

When he tried to become a Congregationalist minister (branding himself the “lay bishop extraordinaire”), rural congregations were either underwhelmed or flat-out refused to hire him.

Probably because he kept telling them God didn’t care about them as much as they thought.

One exasperated Newburyport minister, upon receiving correspondence from Plummer, declared from the pulpit:

“O Lord, have mercy on this over-pompous brother, whose wordy rhetoric has just startled our ears; save us from cant, bombast, and all the wiles of the devil. Amen.”

Plummer’s theology was too weird even for ministers who believed in literal hell.

The Death

When Lord Dexter died in 1806, he left no money for Plummer in his will.

This didn’t stop Plummer from praising his former patron. He published two accounts of Dexter’s life, cementing Dexter’s legend (and his own role in it).

But bitterness eventually consumed him.

Plummer lived with several cousins. He took to self-harming and mutilated himself. He eventually died, apparently of self-starvation, in 1819 at age 58. His is another tragic, historic & timeless tale of unaddressed emotional distress.

The newspaper announced the death of “Mr. Jonathan Plummer, aged 58, Massachusetts poet laureate to their majesties the sovereign people.”

Despite his poverty and reputation as a strange, offensive-breathed ballad seller, Plummer left an estate of more than $1,500—a considerable sum for the time.

He left several wills, all revealing deep bitterness toward his family. One will directed:

“Should my father or any of either my brothers have hypocrisy to follow me in mourning, or to walk between my coffin and the other people who happen to attend my funeral…”

He didn’t want his family anywhere near his funeral.

The man who once preached divine mercy and extraterrestrial theology died alone, angry, and starving himself.

Why This Matters

Jonathan Plummer was a proto-nerd, proto-scientist, proto-mystic operating in an era that had no framework for what he was doing.

He believed:

• Dreams were a valid source of knowledge (consciousness technology)
• Millions of planets were inhabited (cosmic perspective centuries before SETI)
• God had bigger concerns than one small planet (theological humility)
• Reading, studying, and talking about ideas mattered more than fitting in (intellectual integrity)

He was mocked, isolated, insulted for his bad breath, rejected in romance, denied ministerial positions, and called crazy to his face.

And he kept going anyway.

He peddled his verses and his ideas from a basket in Market Square. He became Poet Laureate to a self-declared lord who staged his own funeral. He wrote accounts of Dexter’s life that ensured both their legends survived.

He died bitter and alone—but he died having said what he believed, practiced what he knew, and refused to shut up about dreams even when everyone told him he was insane.

The Dead Lucky Connection

I practice through tracing through intersections and reading the liminality between the lines in my waking life—a default sort of imbas state.

Plummer practiced through dreams—accessing knowledge unavailable to waking consciousness, framing it as science when everyone else called it madness.

Same technology. Different era. Same mockery.

The difference is I have a framework now. I can say “epigenetic inheritance” and “field theory” and “quantum observation” and people nod like it makes sense.

Plummer had no such language. He just had dreams, aliens, and the certainty that God was busy elsewhere.

So they called him crazy. And he kept talking anyway.

That’s the current I recognize—not madness, but the way New England flattens anyone who notices too much and won’t shut up about it. In my case, the “crazy” label was mostly a family invention, a convenient shorthand for “stop pointing out the pattern I don’t want to deal with.” Out in the wider world, I’ve always come across as exactly what I am: a straightforward, hyper-rational person with an unusual cognitive setup and a low tolerance for nonsense.

Not the success. Not the recognition. The refusal to shut up about what you know, even when everyone says you’re wrong.

Still, I know the broader dynamic is real. Plenty of people get written off for seeing clearly or speaking plainly. So if someone wants to slap the “crazy” sticker on anyone engaged in truth-seeking or pattern-tracking, the proper response is simple: name the deflection, shrug it off, and keep going. Let the weird stand on its own two feet.

Plummer died in 1819. Nearly 200 years later, we’re discovering he was right about dreams (REM processing, memory consolidation, pattern recognition). We’re right about extraterrestrial probability (Drake equation, exoplanet discoveries, astrobiology).

He was ahead of his time by two centuries.

And he spent those centuries being mocked for bad breath and weird ideas.

If that’s not a cautionary tale about being a knowledge-keeper in a culture that hates what it doesn’t understand, I don’t know what is.

Sources:

• “Insulted Me On Account Of My Offensive Breath: The Poet Laureate Jonathan Plummer Jr.” – Historical Nerdery
• “Yankee Troubadour Jonathan Plummer – The First Massachusetts Poet Laureate” – New England Historical Society
• The Memoirs of Jonathan Plummer, Jr. 1761-1819 by Roger Wolcott Higgins
• “Yankee Gypsies” by John Greenleaf Whittier
  Note: This text uses period terminology now considered harmful. It is cited here only for historical context due to the scarcity of primary sources.
• Boston 1775: “Considering Jonathan Plummer, Jr.”
• Heritage Auctions: Lord Timothy Dexter Archive

Related:

• Lord Timothy Dexter: Savant in “The Fool’s” Clothing

“I often continued my discourse on dreams after people told me to my face, in plain words, that I was crazy.”

—Jonathan Plummer Jr., on refusing to shut up about consciousness technology