The eighteenth-century jeremiad and progress-piece traditions in anna barbauld's “eighteen hundred and eleven”

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Anna Barbauld's use of the progress-piece genre in “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” suggests that her reliance on an Enlightenment model of progress serves mainly as an almost elegiac means of witnessing the regression of western Europe during the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon. Indeed, she places the only hope for the continuation of Western Enlightenment progress in America. Yet this seemingly pessimistic flight of progress may also respond more critically, and in a cautionary way, to the predominantly male progress-poem tradition. Barbauld's use of an anachronistic Johnsonian, neo-Juvenalian verse form may be viewed as a sign of resistance against the supposed “naturalization” of the progress poem by such contemporaries as Coleridge, and against the futile gestures of isolation in mid- to late eighteenth-century poets such as Gray, Collins, and Cowper. She thus positions her view of progress, which recovers earlier cyclical models of civic humanism, more centrally in a public, cosmopolitan forum than did the first-generation Romantics or the Sensibility poets, who relied on the progress piece as more of a vehicle for private reflection or as separation from a corrupt public sphere. She recovers the traditional moral authority of, for instance, Pope's epistles by forsaking another questionable form of “progress”: poetic movements towards naturalized diction, affective lyrical voices, and even the nominal “feminization” of such public genres. Rather, she adopts the more openly artificial modes of Augustan verse to deliver a highly stylized prophecy of cultural extermination for the English nation's complicity in warfare. Such apparently anachronistic verse is germane to Barbauld's aim of relocating this genre in the center of commercial, political, and civic life, rather than allowing it to remain in the isolated, remote retreats of her male contemporaries and immediate predecessors.