Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin

These are battle cries dressed in couplets. The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin gathers the fierce satirical verses that roared through British political life in 1797-1798, when the French Revolution's shockwaves had sent England's establishment into panic. Writers including George Canning and John Hookham Frere turned poetry into a weapon, unloading wit and ire against liberal politicians, Whig sympathizers with French radicalism, and anyone deemed a threat to crown and constitution. This is not gentle mockery; it is surgical political assault rendered in tight, gleaming verse. The poems pulse with the adrenaline of a civilization grappling with whether to tear itself apart. For readers who assume political satire is a modern invention, this collection offers a bracing correction: the genre has always been with us, and it has always been vicious, clever, and magnificently entertaining.