Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century

Imagined Antiquities

Jeff Strabone

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319952543
• eBook ISBN: 9783319952550
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This bookoffers a radical new theory of the role of poetry in the rise of cultural nationalism. With equal attention to England, Scotland, and Wales, the book takes an Archipelagic approach to the study of poetics, print media, and medievalism in the rise of British Romanticism. It tells the story of how poets and antiquarian editors in the British nations rediscovered forgotten archaic poetic texts and repurposed them as the foundation of a new concept of the nation, now imagined as a primarily cultural formation. It also draws on legal and ecclesiastical history in drawing a sharp contrast between early modern and Romantic antiquarianisms. Equally a work of literary criticism and history, the book offers provocative new theorizations of nationalism and Romanticism and new readings of major British poets, including Allan Ramsay, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

© The Author(s) 2018

Jeff StrabonePoetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth CenturyPalgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Printhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95255-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Beowulf or Brutus of Troy?

Jeff Strabone¹

(1)

Connecticut College, New London, CT, USA

Jeff Strabone

End Abstract

Nature and Homer were, he found, the same:

Convinc’d, amaz’d, he checks the bold Design,

And Rules as strict his labour’d Work confine,

As if the Stagyrite o’erlook’d each Line.

Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem;

To copy Nature is to copy Them.

—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, (1711)¹

There, in the eye

Of light , and in the face of day, the rites

Began. Upon the Stone of Covenant

The sheathed sword was laid, the Master then

Raised up his voice, and cried, Let them who seek

The high degree and sacred privilege

Of Bardic science, and of Cimbric lore,

Here to the Bards of Britain make their claim!

Thus having said, the Master bade the youths

Approach the place of peace, and merit there

The Bard’s most honourable name. At that,

Heirs and transmittors of the ancient light,

The youths advanced; they heard the Cimbric lore,

From earliest days preserved; they struck their harps,

And each in due succession raised the song.

—Robert Southey, Madoc, (1805)²

If there’s one thing poets have done since ancient times, it’s calling on the ancients. In the century between the two poems quoted above, British poets increasingly turned to a new set of ancients for inspiration. In Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism , the ancients were foreigners—Greek and Roman poets from the classical era. In Robert Southey’s Welsh epic Madoc, the ancients were indigenous medieval bards whose culture of song and ceremony marked the native origins of a national literature.

The belief that the literatures of the British nations—English, Scottish, and Welsh—all developed from native bardic traditions belongs to a narrative of literary history that emerged in the eighteenth century. This narrative provided a foundation for an essential element of modern nationalism: the construction of the nation as a community defined chiefly not by dynasty, religion, laws, political boundaries, or sovereignty but, rather, by a shared native culture of age-old historical duration. Remarkably, the archaic poetic texts which the modern British nations claim as their cultural foundations had been neglected, if not wholly forgotten, for centuries. Before they—recently—became the founding texts of the nation, they were almost entirely unknown.

The argument of this book is that archaic native poetry, newly discovered and printed in the eighteenth century, provided historiographical support for the construction of the modern nation in two ways: publications of medieval manuscript poetry introduced the nation’s readers to the texts which became—and which remain today—their national cultural foundations; while new poetry, by mimicking the archaic in form and content, forged new poetic continuities between the past and the present—even when the transmission of archaic texts had been discontinuous for centuries.

Contemporary theories of nationalism tell us that nations, although historically young, imagine themselves very old.³ The eighteenth century introduced new ways of writing poetry and of editing old poetry for print publication. These compositional and editorial innovations linked the modern British nations to antique poetic traditions newly imagined to be culturally continuous with their own. This study contributes to theories of nationalism in Europe by sharpening our recognition of the role that poetry—both old and new—played in its rise. It tells the story of how poets and antiquarian editors in eighteenth-century England, Scotland, and Wales provided a key element to the modern concept of the nation.⁴ The textual antiquarians reframed previously unknown medieval poetic manuscripts in print editions; the poets composed new, experimental poems that mimicked the old poems which were circulating in print for the first time. The rediscovery and repurposing of archaic poetic manuscripts—as the founding texts of the nation—formed a key part of the historical foundation on which the modern (European) idea of the nation rests.

The neo-retro formal features introduced in eighteenth-century poetry assert—at the level of form—a continuity with a long-lost, and largely imaginary, version of the nation’s past. Many of the cases in this study will be the poetic formal features—deliberately irregular or archaicized stanzas, metres, dictions, rhyme schemes—which asserted a restored link to an originary era in the nation’s distant past. The literary histories which today distinguish England, Scotland, and Wales as culturally distinct nations all draw on the work of the eighteenth-century figures who edited, adapted, understood, and misunderstood their own nations’ rediscovered medieval poetry. The stakes of my argument are thus a revised understanding of the literary canons of the British nations specifically and the role of poetry in the rise of modern European nationalism generally.

Strange as it may seem, turning to native medieval sources as the foundation of a national literature was a new and, to many, an unwelcome idea at the start of the eighteenth century. Europeans had, for centuries, looked to ancient Greece and Rome for their cultural and historical origins, in many cases inventing myths of direct ancestry between the founders of their nations and the ancient Mediterranean world. Although English common law and pre-Norman Christian beliefs had become politically useful in print by the time of the Elizabethan settlement, sustained interest in the archaic poetry of the British nations—either for literary or nationalist reasons—does not appear in print until the eighteenth century. The reframing of medieval poetry in the eighteenth century as the cultural foundation of the modern nation is a curious phenomenon because the transmission of such poetry was utterly discontinuous: many of the manuscript poems newly minted as the originary texts of the nation had not been widely read for several centuries. With the emergence of Romantic ideas of the nation and its native cultural origins, the medieval poetries of England, Scotland, and Wales came to be valued for a new set of reasons: to demonstrate the antiquity of national literatures and to inspire new poets to recall the genius of the ancient bards . The Romantic appropriation of medieval poetry as it entered print circulation for the first time is, I argue, an essential missing element in our theories of the rise of modern nationalism.

One such myth of direct classical descent, treated as historical fact from at least the ninth century, was the legend that Britain had been founded by Brutus of Troy, great-grandson of Aeneas. The Brutus legend first appears in the Historia Brittonum, attributed to Nennius, a ninth-century Welsh monk. According to the story, Brutus was forced out of Rome for accidentally killing his father, as foretold by prophecy. He then wound up on an island “which is named Britannia from his name, and filled it with his race, and dwelt there”.⁵ Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote much the same in the twelfth century in his Historia Regum Britanniae: “Brutus then called the island Britain from his own name, and his companions he called Britons.”⁶ For the seven centuries that the Brutus legend endured as history, Britain was doubly classically descended: from both Troy and Rome, through its founder Brutus. Long after William Camden definitively refuted the Brutus myth in 1586, English poets continued to identify more with the ancient Mediterranean world than with indigenous medieval forebears.⁷

We take for granted that the canon of literature in English begins with medieval poems like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , but the eighteenth-century reader knew nothing of these texts. Seen by only a handful of antiquarians over the centuries, these lonely, unique manuscripts sat neglected in the Cotton Library. They were printed for the first time in 1815 and 1839, respectively. Beowulf may be a 1200-year-old poem, but it is barely a 200-year-old book. The millennium or so in which it was not read or heard is something we typically forget when we consider its current position near the start of English literary history. The recentness of its canonicity is occluded by the ideological work put upon it of antiquating the origins of the English nation. Other than Chaucer and Piers Plowman , the vast majority of Old and Middle English poems had never appeared in print until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same holds true for poetry in Old Welsh and Middle Scots. As the literati of the British nations began to look for further evidence of their distinctne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Beowulf or Brutus of Troy?
• 2. Allan Ramsay and Thomas Ruddiman: Two Ways of Reviving Scotland’s Dead Poets
• 3. The Fall and Rise of the Welsh Bards, or, How the English Became British
• 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Other Bardic Poets: Thomas Chatterton, Edward Jones, Iolo Morganwg, and Odin
• 5. Christabel and the Metre of “our oldest Writers in the most barbarous ages”
• 6. Epilogue: A Millennium of British Poetry?
• Back Matter