Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681-1714

Abstract

THOSE poets in ‘the first age of party’ who were ‘canonised’ by later critics were almost to a man (for no woman found a place in the canon) Tories. Led by Dryden, Swift and Pope, they seem in retrospect to have towered over their Whig rivals not only aesthetically but politically. Yet, though Whig poets tended to be denounced by their Tory adversaries as poetasters, Dr Williams demonstrates that they were regarded by contemporaries as the dominant political voice in poetry. Charles Montagu, earl of Halifax, now chiefly remembered for his role in the foundation of the Bank of England, was then also held to be the Maecenas of his age. ‘The Poet Tribe are all at my Devoir’, the Jacobite Willam Shippen had him boast in Faction Displayed, ‘And write as I command, as I inspire’. Daniel Defoe was a Whiggish poet before he became a novelist, being notorious for producing reams of execrable verse.