Colin Wells

Hello, my name is Colin Wells and I teach English literature at St. Olaf College, where I specialize in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and early American literature in particular.

I became fascinated by early American poetry in graduate school at Rutgers University, where I encountered poems (mainly on politics and religion) that were so topical -- so full of references to people and events that have since been largely lost to history -- that they required considerable research simply to understand them. I became hooked on treating such poems as historical puzzles and sharing levels of significance that most scholars had simply overlooked.

This was part of the impetus behind my first book, _The Devil and Doctor Dwight_, which uncovers rich layers of religious, political and literary-historical significance in Timothy Dwight's long-misunderstood 1788 mock epic, _The Triumph of Infidelity_. In the book, I argue that this poem represents Dwight's American rewriting of Alexander Pope's "Dunciad," with the satire directed not at literary but political, philosophical and theological "dunces."

What I realized in researching _The Devil and Doctor Dwight_ was the extent to which public or political poetry in Revolutionary and Early Republican America tended to be engaged in the same kind of textual "warfare" as Dwight's poem. That is, I realized that an enormous amount of poetry was geared toward negating or subverting the ideological power of other printed texts -- speeches, proclamations or official directives, political treatises, newspaper articles. I set out to research the entire landscape of political verse in the half century between the Stamp Act and the end of the War of 1812. After years of locating, interpreting and researching the context of hundreds of political poems, mostly published in newspapers, magazines, and as broadsides or pamphlets, I wrote _Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic_.

In _Poetry Wars_ I recreate a literary-political atmosphere in which poets and balladeers responded to language invoked by political leaders, journalists, and each other, all in the name of determining the political course of the new nation. I also argue for the unique role of poetry in participating in the public sphere, projecting a level of performance and linguistic self-consciousness back onto printed texts that sought to embody or authorize political power.

Here are some blurbs from recent reviews of Poetry Wars:

"Wells forgrounds a body of writing not often given extended treatment … but one which, as he superbly demonstrates, played an influential role in shaping the cultural and political landscape of the nation's … early years." -- Early American Literature

"Colin Wells's study is by far the best mongraph on colonial American and early US verse."

-- Modern Language Quarterly

"Wells's great – and much needed – contribution to his literature is his focus on the role of poetry in forming, framing, and fracturing the politics and identity of a young United States."

-- Journal of American History