Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic by Colin Wells (review)

I wonder whether readers will recall that in 2003, amid the frenzied runup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the White House became embroiled in a controversy with some poets. Led by the poet and publisher Sam Hamill (who died in April 2018), a group of authors invited by Laura Bush to participate in a symposium celebrating American poetry promised to use the proceedings as an opportunity to protest the government's warmongering, which resulted in the First Lady calling off the event. The "Poets Against the War Movement" subsequently prompted a surge of popular interest in the roles poems play during times of public crisis. If the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, elicited a discussion about poetry's power to console and repair damaged psyches (whether personal or national), the Iraq War provided an occasion to think about the relationship between poetry, foreign policy, war, and peace. As tends to be the case with such moments, these debates rediscovered that poems, poets, and poetry can serve competing rhetorical interests in partisan battles over affairs of state.

We learn the deeper history to this dynamic in Colin Wells's new book Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic. Covering a period between the Stamp Act Crisis and the Hartford Convention, Poetry Wars examines how "the intersection of poetic form and political discourse that developed in the print public sphere between 1765 and 1815" highlighted "one of the great political problems" of the era, namely "that of embodying power or authority in language or texts" (1–2). A "poetry war" forms around a process of "implicit or explicit attack and counterattack by poets vying for ideological victory" (7), and "poetry's power as a mode of enacting political change arises from the fact that, beyond merely describing or representing reality, poetry exists as a performative act" that seeks "to alter political reality through the specific mode of linguistic performativity" (8). The genres that interest Wells are mostly comic: parodies, satires, lampoons, burlesques, pasquinades, mock panegyrics, and mock epics; their primary rhetorical purposes are to de-legitimize and unmask the other side. For example, "versifications" of proclamations by Thomas Gage, which "translated" his prose into absurdist doggerel, undermined the legitimacy of the power from which he claimed to speak, while partisans of every stripe seized "the voice of the people" for themselves by exposing the conspiratorial machinations of their opponents.

Many different verse battles jockey for space in this book, and it is both a virtue and a problem that they begin to feel like the same battle repeated over and over again. On the one hand, it seems correct to view the conflicts of the 1770s, 1780s, 1790s, and 1800s as interconnected rather than discrete. But, on the other hand, whether the dispute pits Patriots against Loyalists, or supporters of the Constitution against its opponents, or Federalists against Republicans, or whether the fight is over the Jay Treaty, or the XYZ Affair, or Jefferson's Embargo, the mechanism of debate and invective is the same: a mirrored structure of back-and-forth exchanges playing out in the "print public sphere" or the "poetic public sphere" (234) or the "literary public sphere" (249) or even the "fictional public sphere" (122) schemed up by the Connecticut Wits to gull their anti-Federalist antagonists. The proliferation of modifiers indicates that the concept of the "public sphere" is both undertheorized and too easily abstracted from the rich specificity of detail Wells otherwise offers, as in the following sentence: "The symbolic drowning out of the Loyalist conception of loyalty represented more than simply a victory of one conspiracy narrative over another; it was also a triumph of the print public sphere as the ultimate arbiter of warring conspiracy verses" (109). But this abstraction and conceptual exhaustion is also partly Wells's point: By the time...