Poetry Wars. Colin Wells

      During the period of the American Revolution and the first decades of the early republic, dozens of poets—from the era’s most celebrated writers to its most obscure amateur versifiers and balladeers—engaged in a series of literary wars against political leaders, newspaper editors and journalists, and each other, all in the name of determining the political course of the new nation. For those in our own time who are accustomed to thinking of poetry as an elevated form, antithetical to the vulgar world of political attack and counterattack, the idea of poetry as a weapon of political or ideological warfare may seem counterintuitive. Yet poems and songs on political affairs were a ubiquitous part of eighteenth-century political culture, appearing as broadsides and pamphlets and in the pages of newspapers, whose numbers grew exponentially during the period. Poems commemorated and satirized the most momentous and the most trivial of political controversies, from the debate over the Constitution to the outcome of a fistfight between rival members of Congress. From the time of the Stamp Act crisis to the end of the first party system, poems resisted the directives of King George’s vice-regents in America; eulogized and demonized Washington and Adams, Hamilton and Jefferson; satirized the emerging political parties as dangerous factions that threatened the republic from within; and called for war or peace with Britain and France. My purpose in the following pages is to reconstruct this atmosphere of literary-political warfare as it unfolded against the backdrop of America’s early national formation.

      The poetry wars of the Revolution and early republic arose out of a unique intersection of poetic form and political discourse that developed in the print public sphere between 1765 and 1815. What I describe as poetic or literary warfare began in the years immediately prior to the Revolution as a strategy for highlighting one of the great political problems posed by the conflict: that of embodying power or authority in language or texts. Amid a struggle in which rival authoritative bodies issued directives to the people in the form of printed texts—proclamations by royal governors and military commanders or popular declarations by committees of correspondence, colonial assemblies, and the new Congress—poets sought to neutralize the ideological force of such authoritative documents by highlighting their linguistic or rhetorical elements. Spurred on by a sense that this strategy had been instrumental in aiding the Revolutionary War effort, poets of the early national period internalized a corresponding sense of political agency just as the earliest arguments were being advanced about the course