By Dylan Hostetter
Nearly 300 years before pop love tunes crowded February airwaves, Virginians penned acrostic love poetry. First published in the Virginia Gazette, they became known as “the lovers’ literary crusade of 1768.”
Acrostic poets use the first letter of each line to spell a hidden message—in these poems, it was the name of the lovelorn writers’ admired. The young women of Williamsburg were absorbed by allusions to Apollo and comparisons of their beauty to jonquils and roses.
Soon, these poems grew beyond simple wordplay into complex puzzles and riddles. Readers even formed the 18th-century equivalent of parasocial relationships with these wordsmith couples, eagerly scanning new issues for marriage announcements.
Sadly, the popularity of love acrostics faded with the mounting American Revolution. Newspapers returned to covering war and politics, and the last acrostic appeared in 1776.
This article originally appeared in the February 2025 issue.
