Figure 1. Title page, The Democratiad, 1795. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

      Whatever the manifold referentialism of The Democratiad might tell us about the political circumstances of 1795, then, it tells us at least as much about the system of assumptions and practices that governed the poetry wars of the early American republic. As suggested by the label “poem in retaliation,” Hopkins’s is a poetics based not on an ideal of individual poems as self-contained, discrete works, or as the distinct artistic property of particular authors. (Indeed, as has long been noted, most poets of the early republican period published their works anonymously or pseudonymously, and a great deal of the poetry of the time was produced collaboratively.) Rather, Hopkins conceived his poem as a single move within a larger discursive chain, and understood its creation as an act of creative transformation—most immediately, of another printed text, but more broadly, of political discourse as a whole as it was evolving during the founding period.⁶

      Befitting the atmosphere of political conflict that pervaded the early republican period, the most common manifestation of this tendency toward literary referentialism is, as the title of my book suggests, the “poetry war,” which formed around a dynamic of implicit or explicit attack and counterattack by poets vying for ideological victory. Yet this outward orientation from individual poem to broader discourse took other forms as well, including what was occasionally referred to at the time as a literary “vogue,” or fashion, in which several poets responded to a common political event or text by penning variations on a particular form, with each individual poem contributing to the significance of the literary trend as a whole. Accordingly, the project of analyzing this poetry requires a combination of interpretive strategies: first and foremost, it calls for close reading of individual poems, taking each work seriously as poetry (as opposed to mere content or message) by giving sufficient attention to formal elements, such as genre, allusion, symbolism, and tone. Nor is this simply a matter of attending to literary details for their own sake, for as I also emphasize throughout, literary form was itself a frequent and powerful means of communicating ideological content. At the same time, a close reading methodology must be supplemented by drawing on aspects of what has recently been called “distant reading”—attending to matters of publication and republication history, often with the aid of research databases unavailable to earlier generations of literary scholars, so as to grasp the importance of those moments when multiple poets or editors were engaging collectively with a political event or topic. Keeping in view this dual objective—of unpacking both the meaning of individual poems and the larger chains of literary or discursive expression—I organize the book’s chapters chiefly around episodes of literary-political convergence, in which a political event inspires a specific literary response that is, in turn, meant to influence public discourse and, by implication, subsequent political events.⁷

      Beyond attending to political poems as single utterances within a larger field of discursive formation, I also inquire into what happens when political discourse unfolds in the form of poetry. Is there, as one scholar has asked, a “specific form of political work undertaken by poetry which could not be undertaken by any other form of language use?” One answer to this question, offered by E. Warwick Slinn, is that 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: poetry, he writes, “may mimic social discourse, but … is also itself a cultural event which participates in cultural reality, reconstituting or reshaping that reality.” Whether or not any particular work of verse can be said to have succeeded in reconstituting political reality, this was certainly the objective for the vast majority of poems analyzed in this book.⁸

      More particularly, I argue that political poetry from the Revolutionary and early republican periods sought to alter political reality through the specific mode of linguistic performativity—that is, by way of performances that called special attention to issues of language. Such linguistic self-consciousness arose out of a collective recognition of what might be called the linguistic or textual aspect of the Revolution itself: for in addition to its obvious significance as an uprising or military conflict, the Revolution was a conflict that pitted competing textual claims to political authority against each other. As my first two chapters—“The Poetics of Resistance” and “War and Literary War”—illustrate, between the outbreak of the imperial crisis and the end of the Revolutionary War, colonial governors and military commanders issued dozens of proclamations—declaring martial law, ordering civilians to stay in their homes, and even forbidding the public from assenting to a rival set of quasi-official documents being circulated by the leaders of the resistance. (Such documents included the Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1767, the “Solemn League and Covenant” of 1774, and the popular declarations issued by local committees of correspondence, colonial assemblies, and the Continental Congress.) Amid this atmosphere of conflicting demands on the public’s assent, the first important literary vogue of the Revolution emerged—that of “versifying,” or reproducing in the form of burlesque verse, the language of the proclamation or other authoritative text.

      The political importance of versification in this context can hardly be overemphasized, for beyond merely enacting a symbolic performance, transforming political prose into poetry called attention to the versification’s status as language. As one literary critic recently remarked, poetry is a unique mode of expression because it foregrounds “language, in its material dimensions”; in contrast to prose, poetry puts on conscious display elements, such as sound, rhythm, and figurative language, which distinguish it from its function as content or discourse.⁹ At the same time, what political poets of the Revolution seem instinctively to have recognized is that when such linguistic and performative self-consciousness was brought to bear on an authoritative document, it had the paradoxical effect of projecting the same linguistic attention back onto the original text. A verse parody of an official proclamation could thus be used to highlight the degree to which the proclamation was itself a linguistic or rhetorical performance, and in doing so, invalidate its primary ideological objective of embodying power in language. Importantly, this implicit notion of poetry’s capacity to transform discourse endured after the Revolution, as poets of the early republic continued to compose verses that played upon language from speeches, newspaper essays, politically charged hymns or ballads, and of course, other poems.

      The other element that lent special power to poetry as a mode of discursive intervention was its corresponding emphasis on voice, for in addition to circulating in the form of printed texts, poems—and, importantly, songs—could also be performed publicly before small or large groups, including those organized around some political action. The ideological power of such performances may be understood in the context of past studies on the cultural importance of voice and orality as a mode of political communication during the period of American national formation. Such studies remind us that even amid the predominance of print, the spoken word—with its heightened tone, volume, and emotional impact—stood as both a model for political rhetoric in general and as a strategy of speaking back to textual forms of authority.¹⁰ This phenomenon is particularly evident with regard to the many political songs and ballads analyzed in this book, which provided occasions for a chorus of singers to at once enact and symbolize unison in a time of political division. Yet this quality also extended beyond songs alone to become a metaphor invoked throughout the period, as poets and balladeers claimed that their works represented none other than the voice of the people.

      The crucial precondition for the emergence of this interplay between poetic and political language was, of course, the print public