Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic is a 2018 book by Colin Wells. The book examines the role of political poetry in American public life from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 through the War of 1812. Wells argues that verse functioned as a distinct cultural form through which poets on all sides of the era's political conflicts sought to contest the authority of official texts, shape public narratives, and claim to speak on behalf of the people. Poetic warfare developed from the anti-imperial versifications of the Revolutionary period through the partisan battles between Federalists and Republicans in the 1790s to the eventual decline of political verse in the early nineteenth century. The book is based on Wells's examination of hundreds of poems published in newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets.