Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century: Imagined Antiquities. Jeff Strabone. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xv+351.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewPoetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century: Imagined Antiquities. Jeff Strabone. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xv+351.James MulhollandJames MulhollandNC State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis is a rich swirl of a book whose tone is set from the start with acknowledgments that have their own epigraph (from no less than Lex Luthor in the 1978 film Superman). Poetry and British Nationalisms argues that the “literature of the British nations—English, Scottish, and Welsh—all developed from native bardic traditions” (2). This was a peculiarly modern development and a component of nationalism defined “not by dynasty, religion, laws, political boundaries, or sovereignty,” but rather by a “shared native culture of age-old historical duration” (2).Strabone argues that there were two stems to this process of national formation through native bardic traditions: the publication of medieval manuscript poetry that became the British nation’s “cultural foundations”; and the imitation of medieval poetry’s forms by eighteenth-century and early Romantic-period authors, who sought to forge “new poetic continuities between the past and the present” (2). In the process, Strabone rewrites Benedict Anderson’s claims about imagined communities, so that the “modern nation is an imagined cultural community” (41). The eighteenth century is the age when a nation fabricates its antiquity through “national relics”: printed objects that archaize the nation’s origins, in contrast to the newness of the novel and the newspaper. These are “imagined continuities,” Strabone writes, for “imagined communities” (46).But this is also a story about the changing valuation of verse forms, in a way familiar to practitioners of historical poetics. Alexander Pope might seek to embody civilization with his couplets, but by the end of the eighteenth century, Romantic poets would write more like those “medieval barbarians” whom Pope snidely dismissed (35–36). This historical shift, in Strabone’s telling, breaks up the orthodoxy of eighteenth-century syllabic verse, leads to Romantic experimentation, and forms the modern English literary canon that can be traced back to Beowulf. Strabone is at his best when he is recounting the elaborate tracing of textual affiliations among well-known and unknown poets alike that describe this historical shift.Poetry and British Nationalisms begins with an extensive historical account of medieval poetry’s marginalization as a predecessor tradition for the British nation. In the early modern period, the publishing of retrieved medieval texts focused on religious and legal tracts, and interest in ancient poetry was scant because “culture had not yet become the glue of nation” in Britain (9). Chapter 2 turns to Scotland across the eighteenth century by concentrating on two authors, Allan Ramsay and Thomas Ruddiman, who, while known, are not a visible part of the common eighteenth-century academic canon. Ramsay is the primary focus, especially his The Ever Green (1724), which heralds a “bardic narrative of national literary history” for Scotland, an example of a new national conception “based not in political institutions but in culture” (77–78). Ramsay sought a “bardic re-imagining of national literary history” that would express native traditions in what a medieval translator of the Aeneid calls “oure awin langage” (121, 86).Chapter 3 is also organized around two literary figures: Evan Evans, a Welsh antiquarian and poet, and Thomas Gray. Strabone places these authors in a long history of printing in Wales. He asks two good questions about Welsh bardism and its eighteenth-century revival: “What … is so radical about publishing old and old-seeming poetry as a way to resist empire?” and “What is the value of cultural nationalism as a resistance to empire?” (197). These are questions of textual and historical mediation, which transforms from “no problem” into a “big problem” across this period (124). The chapter’s most original contribution is its serious consideration of Gray as a historian, especially when it lays out his metrical experiments as a form of literary history (180). This adds new dimensions to our reconsideration of Gray that began in 1990s and further banishes the image of him as simply a talented but fastidious poet.The association of poetry with prophecy and song found in these Welsh bardic traditions is a “mark of Romanticism’s emergence,” and this is a book that feels driven toward Romanticism as an endpoint (192). Chapters 4 and 5 concentrate on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is portrayed as an encompassing literary figure whose scholarly interests consistently returned to Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, and “Gothic, or otherwise Northern” traditions (216). Strabone’s attention creates fascinating new offshoots about Coleridge’s place in the English canon. Pantisocracy, for example, Coleridge’s unfulfilled dream of an American utopia in Pennsylvania, is perceived as “neo-bardism” connected to the Madoc myth, which purports that a medieval Welsh explorer was the origin of the America’s indigenous tribes (240).The mixing of cultural traditions that this outlook provides raises methodological questions. Is the Abyssinian maid of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (1816) a bardic figure, as Strabone suggests (254)? Is a Welsh bard akin to the “solitary reaper” of Wordsworth’s poem (or, perhaps, the singing women of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems)? Textual and historical mediation rightly preoccupies Strabone’s account, but the cross-national and cross-cultural poetics of bardism is not as fully theorized. To call someone a bard in the eighteenth century is to unite dissimilar things that are meant to operate figuratively, not literally. Tracing the textual origins of these figures is worthwhile, but only if we remember that they are supposed to be mobile, at best adjacent to one another—a kind of cultural translation often at odds with the nationalism that undergirds Strabone’s book.Ancient British poetry may have taken on the “ideological function of backdating the nation’s cultural origins” so that “culture became the foundation of the modern nation and literary history its proof” (15, 275), as Strabone claims, but Pope’s classical Greece and Rome were also conscripted quite effectively into British national formation, as Suvir Kaul has shown.1 And the idea that the early modern nationalism of “church and state” differs from the modern bardic nationalism because the latter possessed a “belief in culture’s power to bind strangers together even in the absence of state institutions” and “does not require political boundaries, national laws, or statehood” (17) would seem suspicious, I think, to historians like Kathleen Wilson and Holger Hoock, who have demonstrated how state power, national expansion, and cultural production worked in tandem.2 Strabone seems to intuit these connections when he shows how Abyssinian maids and Scottish reapers coexist in the same literary imagination (and scholarly history) of emergent Romanticism.These are worries that are not easily resolved by any scholar, and they do not detract from Strabone’s most significant contribution, which is his thorough accounting of the centuries-long construction of British bardism from the eddies of half-understood texts and the rainstorms of lived and invented traditions. Strabone’s level of detail is impressive and will add much to our understanding of the relationship between bardic imaginations and the formation of national literatures. The importance of this detail is strongly visible in the last chapter, which offers a powerfully contextualized reading of Coleridge’s Christabel. This poem was the “spark” that revived Anglo-Saxon accentual meter and—perhaps less convincingly—led to “the emergence of modern free verse” (262). Coleridge sought to imitate the accentual verse of Anglo-Saxon poetry by distributing anapests in otherwise iambic poems. Coleridge did this, Strabone convincingly hypothesizes, because he had limited information about accentual verse, and so relied on an obscure and erroneous essay by Thomas Percy, the antiquarian and ballad editor, that posited the importance of anapests for Anglo-Saxons (287).Strabone’s enthusiasm for Coleridge’s Christabel is palpable, and in this chapter his writing is at its most vivid; rarely have anapests been as interesting as they are here. In the process, he demonstrates how historical poetics might contribute to a renewed sense of poetry’s history. Christabel—such an influential and well-considered poem—takes on a new life in the metrical questions that Strabone asks of its origins. If there is a chapter to be read in this book, it is this one, because it combines close prosodic analysis, which can be dry, with excellent literary detective work and a fine sense of the historical scholarship that has made this Romantic-era poem essential reading. For this reason, and for his comprehensive account of British bardism’s winding textual manifestations, Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century will be read for many years to come. Notes 1. Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).2. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London: Profile Books, 2010). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 4May 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708450HistoryPublished online February 28, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.