Why Poetry?

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Why Poetry? Jennifer Keith (bio) In a cultural climate and scholarly marketplace that increasingly marginalize poetry, especially eighteenth-century poetry, relatively few critics are willing to assert its value. Among the few are Suvir Kaul and Linda Zionkowski who, in Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 2000) and Men's Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660-1784 (Houndsmill, 2001), describe new agendas for the poetry of the Restoration and eighteenth century arising precisely from poets' sense that their work was in danger of being marginalized. Kaul's attention to the specificity of poetry vis-à-vis nation and empire fills a long-standing omission in studies of imperialism in eighteenth-century literature that have largely ignored poetry in favor of prose narratives and drama. For Kaul, writers such as Dyer, Thomson, and Young use verse in particular to promote or critique nationalism and imperialism because on the one hand they "imagined poetry to be a unique and privileged literary form for the enunciation of a puissant (and plastic) vocabulary of nation" (5), and on the other they "wrote more defensively, with a sense of the diminishing prestige of the form" in the second half of the eighteenth century (42). For Zionkowski, writers such as Pope and Johnson participate in the eighteenth-century professionalization of poetry to establish authority and assert their value in the emerging bourgeois culture, especially its tendency to condemn them as frivolous and effeminate. Despite their different foci, both critics invite us to consider not only how eighteenth-century poets tried to make poetry matter but also to question how we as critics may expand our questions about the ways poetry matters. Both critics assert the importance of poetry by linking it to public and commercial themes as they emphasize poets' participation in the market, whether global or domestic. In his nuanced study of nationalism and empire in poetry of the long eighteenth century, Kaul questions why poetry, especially long poems of mixed genre, mattered so much to writers dealing with themes of [End Page 87] nation and empire. "Why should poetry," he asks, "become so manifestly the literary and imaginative space for such cultural and ideological work?" (10). In Kaul's account, James Thomson's "Rule Britannia" figures prominently, as do poems of mercantilism (e.g., Edward Young's Imperium Pelagi and Henry Needler's "A Sea-Piece") and those critiquing the market in slaves (e.g., Cowper's antislavery poems and More's "The Slave-Trade"). Kaul raises the question—Why poetry?—to make an irrefutable case for the significance of poetic form to literary study. Poetic form helps promote or critique nationalist and imperialist projects, "the plastic, expansive dynamic of each poem providing a formal structure for the expression of, and the reconciliation or sublimation" of the ideological contradictions of nationalism and imperialism (10). The "internal movement, particularly the dynamic of the long (or even ambitious) poem in this period . . . reminds us about the halting, uncertain, but always willful and aggressive craft of those who imagined Britain as a power dominant in the world" (34). Zionkowski's focus on the professionalization of poetry from 1660 to 1784 traces the role of shifting masculine ideals in making poetry "men's" as opposed to "women's" work. Analyzing the work of Rochester, Oldham, Dryden, Pope, Gray, and Johnson, she provides a compelling account of the function of class and gender in the changing valuations of the poet's role. Replacing the ideal of poet as aristocrat with poet as professional laborer, "male poets of the Restoration and the eighteenth century employed the discourses of class and gender to determine a stable character for themselves in the culture of commercial print" (20). Zionkowski effectively distinguishes the major shift in masculine cultural authority from the class-based to the occupation-based. Her analysis of Oldham in relation to Rochester establishes this metamorphosis: Oldham's "experimentation with libertine personae, his ambivalence toward publication, his equation of the pen with the sword—are a testament to the social influence of aristocratic writers," but "his repeated criticism of coterie practices reveal an expanding confidence on the part of writers like himself...