Epilogue: A Millennium of British Poetry?

Abstract

The epilogue looks forward to a nineteenth century of proliferating medieval texts of all three British nations in print, new poetry that more closely resembled archaic sources, and the expanding metrical license of poets in English generally. It situates the appearance in print of texts like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—first published in 1815 and 1839, respectively—in the context of the eighteenth century’s use of archaic poetry to antiquate the nation as a cultural formation of long historical duration. Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins are offered as cases of poets who, building on newly available poetic models and historical prosodic knowledge, wrote poems that mimicked archaic poetic elements to a degree not previously possible in English poetry.