In Washington, D.C., Congress passed the Comstock Laws, named for anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, which made it a federal crime to send through the mail any obscene, lewd, or lascivious material, including information about contraception and anatomy. The laws were so broadly written that they were used to suppress literary works, medical texts, and personal correspondence. Comstock boasted that he had destroyed 160 tons of literature and arrested thousands of people under the laws.

The Comstock Laws had a devastating impact on American literary publishing, directly affecting poets and writers whose works were seized or suppressed. The laws provoked defiant literary responses, influencing the birth control activism poetry of Margaret Sanger's era and the modernist poets who saw Comstockery as emblematic of American puritanism. Ezra Pound, H.D., and other modernists referenced the Comstock legacy when pushing against censorship, and the laws' long shadow influenced confessional poets who challenged sexual taboos in verse.