In literary axiology, there has always existed the debate whether the literary value of a text resides, on the one hand, in the vividness with which it portrays the historical and political context from which it emerges, or, on the other, in its formal and aesthetic features. Lionel Trilling, in The Liberal Imagination (1950), speaks of what he calls the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet. Indeed, the works that remain in our memory are those which do both, evoking a historical moment and also dazzling us with the beauty of their language and formal structure.

Colin Wells, in Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic, observes that political poetry in the period from 1765 to 1815 has for the most part gone unexamined by critics and scholars. He suggests that this may in part be due to the highly topical nature of the works in question, with references and names that are obscure to contemporary readers, adding that early scholars often dismissed early American poetry as a lesser sort of writing, “verse” rather than “poetry,” or characterized it as a feeble imitation of British writing of the period. Wells challenges this view, describing what he calls the “conscious referentialism” (4) of this poetry, in that its meaning arises “from its capacity to evoke and transform other linguistic forms, through allusion or parody or some other strategy of ‘speaking back’ to one or more targeted texts circulating in public” (5). Indeed, he points out, this poetics is not based on discrete works which were the property of a single author, but rather are part of a discursive chain characterized by collaboration, transformation, and often polemic.

Colin Wells thus proposes a two-pronged interpretive strategy. On the one hand, he calls for a close reading of individual poems as poems, analyzing their formal elements (genre, allusion, symbolism, and so forth). He suggests, however, that a close reading must be supplemented by what he calls a “distant reading” of elements such as publication and republication history (7). It thus logically follows that his book is organized around episodes of literary–political convergence, in which a political event generates a literary response, which in turn is meant to influence political discourse and the subsequent events arising from this encounter. This brings into relief the performative nature of poetry. Wells suggests that the power of poetry as a discursive intervention arises from two factors: first, that it foregrounds language and deflects attention back onto the original text; and second, that its ideological power arises from its emphasis on voice, speaking back to textual authority. The term “poetry wars,” then, is singularly apt to describe the emergence in the print culture of the period of heated ideological debates on issues related to the identity of the nascent republic. Wells acknowledges that the public sphere in late eighteenth-century America excluded many on the basis of gender, race, and social class. However, he makes the valuable point that many political poems were written by writers who explicitly acknowledged their identity as women, recent immigrants, mechanics, and soldiers. This is important, in that many poems lay claim to representing the voice of the public, as opposed to what is seen as the illegitimate voice of authority.

In what follows, Wells goes on to analyse important moments in these poetry wars. In the first chapter, he discusses poetry emerging from the years prior to the American Revolution, focussing on resistance to oppressive legislation such as the Stamp Act. The following chapter describes how Loyalist and Revolutionary poets tussled over issues of legitimacy in the War of Independence. In a chapter titled “Language and Liberty,” Wells looks, in a series of inspired close readings, at the ways in which poets weaponized formal elements such as tone and affect in order to increase the ideological impact of their texts. This tension between the political and the aesthetic, in Wells's opinion, would ultimately hasten the impact of political poetry, given the extraordinary proliferation of texts. The final chapter provides valuable insights into the poetry which emerged in the partisan rivalry between Federalists and Republicans in the early republic.

Throughout the book, Wells's argument flows smoothly from point to point, and his prose is admirably lucid and clear. His close readings bristle with valuable insights. Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic will become a fundamental reference for scholars researching the literary history of this period.