The past and future of historical poetics: Poetry and empire

Abstract

AbstractThis essay suggests that with the increasing prominence of “historical poetics” as a set of social collectives, methodologies, and debates (especially about literary analysis), now seems to be an ideal time to assess its history and consider its future. The first part of the essay offers a genealogy of historical poetics, accounting for some of the central tenets of the group and considering detractors of these assertions, especially about the idea of “lyric reading” and the “lyricization” of poetry. The second part explains how the institutional history of historical poetics affects what it might become in the future, particularly if scholars expand its scope to include poetries not aligned with the 19th century Anglo‐Atlantic world. It suggests how postcolonial literary studies and the history of empire might alter some of the original insights of the Historical Poetics group. Examples draw from poetry printed in India's earliest anglophone newspapers between the 1780 and 1800, part of the “unread poetry of colonialism.” Recovering an historical understanding of this poetry demonstrates that Anglo‐Indian newspapers, while poignantly aware of their debts to Britain, perceived their verse as adapting borrowed British literary institutions. Insights devised from historical poetics provide another way to analyze seriously the conventional and common poetry of 18th century Anglo‐Indian newspapers, to assess how its authors perceived the institutional contexts of their writing, and to describe how it differed from Europe's norms. The final section concludes with some thoughts on what historical poetics might reveal about intellectual labor in the professional literary academy. Ultimately, historical poetics is not only about how we study poetry, but is an extended conversation about the value of history in literary study and how historical change is valued (or not) by academic scholars. Scholars can use historical poetics to consider larger questions about how to distribute their attention and how it might be rewarded by their colleagues and professional organizations. Over the next 10 years, it will prove crucial for scholars of historical poetics to reengage with questions about what archives are valuable for an historical reading of poetry and what those archives mean for the analysis of poetry in the academy.