The Sot-Weed Factor (poem)

Written in Hudibrastic couplets, the poem is, on its surface, a scathing Juvenalian satire of America and its colonists, and a parody of the pamphlets that advertised colonization as easy and lucrative (38, 40).

This dual satire, Ford argues, helped to promote a national identity, as "the colonists become insiders who perceive the humor in the factor's inability to adapt to life in America".

[2] Robert Micklus, too, sees the poem's humor as contributing to an aspect of American culture—namely, a tendency towards self-referential satire, later further developed by Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin.

[4] In 1970, Edward H. Cohen stated that, "[i]n all of colonial American literature there is no problem so perplexing as that of the textual history of The Sot-weed Factor.... [I]n 1731 [Cooke] published in Annapolis a tempered revision of the same poem ... identified, on its title page, as "The Third Edition."

Joe Nickell has argued, based on similarities in the text and the published preface, that the second edition is actually the sequel, Sot-Weed Redivivus.