Description: The pen was as mighty as the musket during the American Revolution, as poets waged literary war against politicians, journalists, and each other. Drawing on hundreds of poems, Poetry Wars reconstructs the important public role of poetry in the early republic and examines the reciprocal relationship between political conflict and verse.
Review Quotes: "Poetry Wars offers an erudite and engaging account of the surprisingly instrumental role of verse in U.S. nation formation. Colin Wells gives us a sense of how bold, playful, and rhetorically incisive political poems could be. He has done literary history a great service by recovering a time when poetry was both a vital force in public life and a dynamic means of effecting political change."-- "Edward Cahill, Fordham University"