Rereading the Politics of Literature in the Early United States

The field of early American studies is replete with arguments about the central role literary texts played in defining the nation. Carrie Hyde’s Civic Longing and Colin Wells’s Poetry Wars make significant contributions to this well-trodden ground by addressing a literary genre and a concept—citizenship and poetry respectively—have both been too often overlooked. Although poetry was a dominant mode of literary expression during the revolution and early republic, there have been few extended studies of the genre in this period, and Poetry Wars provides a much-needed assessment not just of poetry’s prevalence in American print culture but also of its “capacity to intervene in the domain of real power” (55). Hyde’s incisive analysis likewise draws attention to the central role that literature played in defining citizenship in the early United States. Although our contemporary understandings of citizenship are rooted in fixed legal definitions, Civic Longing provides a groundbreaking “prehistory” that explores how citizenship was “an elastic site of political fantasy and debate” (7) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By examining the “definitional fluidity” and “extralegal origins” (7) of this concept, Civic Longing provides an exciting new framework for evaluating the political influence of literature in the antebellum nation. Taken together, Civic Longing and Poetry Wars offer a compelling reassessment of the politics of literary form and the literary forms of politics.

Spanning from the mid-1770s to the end of the War of 1812, Poetry Wars explores how poetry operated “as a weapon of political or ideological warfare” (1) by providing a medium to debate the source and expression of legitimate governing authority. For Wells, poetry was not simply a vehicle for political arguments; poetry actively shaped their terms and outcomes by offering citizens the opportunity to perform and challenge political language in the public sphere. By framing poetry as a form “of actual, rather than merely virtual, intervention” (13), Poetry Wars illuminates how it played a decisive role in the rejection of imperial authority, the drafting of the Constitution, the emergence of the two-party system, and the development of U.S. economic and foreign policies.

The range of poems that Wells examines is impressive, including the work of canonical figures such as Philip Freneau, John Trumbull, Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight, and Lemuel Hopkins, as well as many other equally important, though lesser known, poets. In each chapter, he closely examines the specific formal strategies poets used to intervene in national politics. For instance, he demonstrates the power of “versification” (9), a poetic technique revolutionary writers used to parody official statements issued by the crown. By juxtaposing popular versifications by Trumbull and Freneau that lampooned royal proclamations delivered by General Thomas Gage with a wide range of others from the 1770s, Wells demonstrates how such works neutralized imperial power by representing British authority as “‘mere’ language” (27) and relocating political authority to the voice of the people.

Wells’s analysis of the political influence of poetry during the late 1780s and 1790s is particularly eye-opening, as he traces how poetry wars contributed to the development of political parties. Wells identifies three discursive frameworks—the rhetoric of conspiracy, liberty, and vox populi—poets used to distinguish the positions of the Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and Democratic-Republicans. Although partisan poets drew on similar rhetoric, Wells convincingly argues that they employed distinct strategies of satire, songs, hoaxes, and historical allusions to proclaim themselves the vox populi and distinguish their positions from one another. In doing so, Wells makes an important contribution to recent efforts to explore the complex definitions of “the people” in the early United States, exemplified by the work of Jason Frank and Benjamin H. Irvin.¹ Wells also provides a fascinating analysis of poetry’s engagement with the rhetoric...