Ann Yearsley’s “Brutus” and the Evangelical Epic Poem

Abstract

Ann Yearsley’s “Brutus” and the Evangelical Epic Poem Matthew Leporati (bio) William hayley’s call in his essay on epic poetry (1782) for british poets to “ascend Parnassus’ highest mound” and “In triumph there the Epic Trumpet sound” was met by an unprecedented resurgence of the genre.1 More epic poems were written in Britain between 1790 and 1820 than at any other time in history.2 Traditionally dealing with questions of nation and empire, the epic genre served as a vital form that Romantic-era poets revived to examine their nation and its place in the world after the French Revolution. Many of these poems have passed largely into obscurity, but studying under-read epics can help to reveal how this poetic form offered unique tools for writers not only to engage developing national, imperial, and religious ideologies, but to construct and position their public identity within explorations of broader national and global contexts. This article examines one such under-read epic: laboring-class poet Ann Yearsley’s “Brutus, a Fragment,” from her final collection The Rural Lyre (1796). This national epic concerns the founding of Britain by the Trojan Brutus, and one of its central figures is the British goddess Liberty (likely inspired in part by Liberty’s appearance in Hayley’s Essay). Situating this poem in the epic revival as well as the evangelical revival of the late eighteenth century, I argue that Yearsley deploys the resources of the epic genre to affirm broadly several imperial assumptions. However, subtle strategies in her epic allow her to subvert imperialist discourse from within and challenge common hierarchical views of colonialism, race, and conversion. The Rural Lyre as a whole is curiously invested in classical literature. After Yearsley’s opposition to “rule” and “precedent” in her Poems, on Various Subjects (1787), readers might well have expected her to extend the idea that “poetry might after all come direct from minds unfettered by classical [End Page 265] education,” as Mary Waldron suggests.3 Had Yearsley underlined her “untutored” status in The Rural Lyre, it might have furnished an implicit attack on her former patron Hannah More: since Yearsley had presented herself in her first collection as a grateful “convert” of More—a “savage” whose “unciviliz’d” mind had been illuminated by her patron—she might have emphasized her lack of formal education in The Rural Lyre to demonstrate that she no longer had any need for More’s influence.4 Yet The Rural Lyre is indebted to the classics, as if to foreground Yearsley’s possession of the kind of cultural knowledge that was often assumed to be beyond the laboring class. In addition to opening with an abbreviated epic, the volume features another poem that reflects Yearsley’s reading of Platonic philosophy (“Remonstrance in the Platonic Shade Flourishing on an Height”), along with several pastoral poems inspired by Virgil’s Georgics. The classical influence on this collection may be explained by the political pressures of the age. During the “war hysteria” of the late eighteenth century, Waldron suggests, a woman stepping out of the “private and domestic” sphere might be seen as “subversive.”5 It may thus have been imperative for Yearsley to cleave to conservative literary forms (along with patriotic themes). Also considering the political climate, Moira Ferguson notes a patriotic turn in Yearsley’s work after 1793, observing that it coincides both with Britain’s declaration of war against France and with Yearsley’s opening of a successful circulating library in Bristol, providing her a steady source of income.6 The relative conservatism or radicalism of Yearsley’s politics, as well as her construction of her own class identity, has long been a source of contention among critics. Where some, such as Ferguson and Donna Landry, see Yearsley primarily as championing the working class, others such as Waldron suggest that Yearsley identified “chiefly with the bourgeois rather than the proletarian.”7 Interpretations of Yearsley’s class identity often [End Page 266] guide the ways that critics read her politics. Those who position her with the proletarian tend to emphasize a subtle radicalism expressed in her work. Others, such as Julie Cairnie, who see Yearsley as...