Political Poetry Research Articles

Писать стихи в эпоху перемен: основные тенденции поэзии после 1989 года в России и Германии

The paper provides a review of the collection of scientific articles (in the German language) dealing with the study of the main trends in German and Russian poetry after 1989: Gedichte schreiben in Zeiten der Umbruche. Tendenzen der Lyrik seit 1989 in Russland und Deutschland / Hrsg. von Henriecke Stahl und Hermann Korte. Band 2. Leipzig: BiblionMedia, 2016. 676 S. This publication is an outstanding event in literary studies. The reviewed collection of scientific articles reflects mutual interest of German scientists in contemporary Russian poetry, and Russian philologists in poetic works by German authors. The articles in this collection cover the latest main trends and artistic landmarks of contemporary Russian and German poetry, reveal the new values and traditions in poetry, characterize the work of famous and significant poets of the last decades. Materials, presented in 5 sections, conceptualize the new trends in the development of contemporary poetry that appeared during historically significant periods for Germany and Russia (1989, 2000), the new nature of poetic texts (heterogeneity, performativity), determined by the accelerated socio-cultural changes and migration processes in the countries. In the new historical and aesthetic conditions, in the new information culture, new forms of existence of poetry are developing, determined by the art market, publishers’ interests and the new demands of readers. Contemporary poetry is increasingly living in the social media (Vkontakte, LiveJournal), acting as a platform for political discussions on the topic of the day. Today the trend of objectification of poetry is an important stage in its development. Free verse and experimental poetry, “primitivist” and political poetry with its protest potential, intermedia and visual poetry projects in Russia and Germany are perceived as a sign of that objectification. The main significance of the collection under review is determined by the theoretical understanding of poetic practices and artistic languages, coexisting today in the poetic landscape, as well as a two-way analysis techniques in the study of the latest Russian and German poetry.

Murdered in the Tabloids: Billposting and the Destruction of the Duke of Suffolk in 1450

This essay examines the media campaign surrounding the sensational murder of the most powerful political figure in mid fifteenth-century England, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. Once a great war hero, Suffolk became unpopular when the English suffered military defeat in France and lost Normandy in 1449, a disaster for which Suffolk was singularly blamed by the public at large. He was impeached by parliament only to be saved and sent into exile by King Henry VI. On his journey to the continent his ship was intercepted by another called Nicholas of the Tower, and he was beheaded by the ship’s sailors in the name of vigilante justice. This essay considers the political verses or bills put in circulation prior to Suffolk’s murder which satirized and lambasted the duke’s role in Henry VI’s faltering government on the eve of the Wars of the Roses. The billposting campaign deliberately encouraged the duke’s downfall and eventual murder, and so Suffolk might be considered the first great victim of proto-tabloid journalism in England, signaling the importance of both publicity and public opinion during the ensuing Wars of the Roses.

Traveling Words: A Reflection on “Rotundamente negra” and Afro-Descendant Women's Cultural Politics

Abstract This paper is both a personal reflection and critical analysis of the circulation of the poem “Rotundamente negra” by Afro-Costa Rican poet and cultural activist Shirley Campbell among Afro-descendant women in Latin America. As I heard various recitations and interpretations of the poem at several meetings of Afro-descendant social movements across the Americas, I was also bearing witness to the process by which creative cultural expressions become politicized and popularized by their audiences, especially Afro-descendant women, to reflect a collective desire, goal, and identity. When the poem was first published in 1994, its circulation was limited among literary circles in Costa Rica and the local Afro-Costa Rican women's movement. Now a quick search on Google reveals hundreds of “hits” on social media sites and electronic magazines, revealing not only the impact of technology, but also of the physical transnational flows of Afro-descendant women and their ideas at conferences, meeting one another, and finding common ground through political activism and poetry. Most significant is the meaning women attach to the poem and the places where it is interpreted, recited, or posted. The circulation and the appeal of the poem signals that Black women in various parts of the Americas are collectively using it not only as a tool of self-expression, but also as a point of departure for consciousness-raising, identity formation, and collective action. In a region where Black women live doubly-invisible lives amongst the most marginalized of the hemisphere, the poem is both a self-affirmation and a battle cry. The poem relates to the “everyday” of Black women's lives and reveals itself to be a seemingly “innocent” but influential tool of empowerment. Black women recognize themselves in the verses and they “recognize the array of forces controlling their lives” (Bobo 1995, 6). “Rotundamente negra” politicizes as it circulates through the Americas with its message of racial identification and pride that defies the homogenizing tendencies of mestizaje and blanqueamiento. The poem has become an affirming instrument to support, but also a meaningful platform for Black women's organizations, activists, and individuals.

Czesław Miłosz’ American Experience in Światło dzienne (Daylight)

Miłosz’s volume Światło dzienne (Daylight, 1953) is conventionally read by critics as the political poetry deeply engaged with history. The article offers a corrective to this traditional reading by interpreting the volume as an interplay of European and American influences. As a European poet, Miłosz had experienced the violent demise of ideals that were the foundation of the Old World. Światło dzienne (Daylight) is, therefore, at one level, an elegiac volume, in which both persons and ideas are mourned. On the other hand, to the extent that for Miłosz America continues the noble ideas abandoned in Europe, he cannot accept what he regards as their misguided or perverse incarnations. This explains the emotional climate of the whole volume, with its dominant mood of disappointment, anger and a refusal of reconciliation. Światło dzienne (Daylight) is American in its outlook on taking seriously America’s status as a superpower and its influence on the future di­rection of the global history. It is anti-American, however, in identifying America’s perceived failures to live up to the post-war challenge for the human civilization in general, and the consequent dangers. The article intends to assess Miłosz’s debt to English-language poetry in this volume in light of his personal notes from his reading and translation work at the time.

Murmuring Name Upon Name: The Yeatsian Imperative in Heaney’s Political Poetry

Murmuring Name Upon Name: The Yeatsian Imperative in Heaney’s Political Poetry

African Anti-Colonialism and the Ultramarinos of the Casa dos Estudantes do Império

In this article, I examine space occupied by students at the Casa dos Estudantes do Imperio , a crucial nexus for independence campaigns in Lusophone Africa. Drawing on readings of Casa ’s journal, Mensagem , I argue that students saw political affiliation as a constant movement between formulations of home and the world. I situate this dilaectical approach in context of Portuguese fascism, paying particular attention to political poetry published in Mensagem , and analyzing ways in which members of Casa imagined their relationship to other African anti-colonial movements.

‘Returnees’ and political poetry in Western Sahara: defamation, deterrence and mobilisation on the web and mobile phones

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the relationships between literature, migration and politics in Western Sahara, in a context of a four-decade decolonisation conflict. Since a few years, some Polisario Front personalities have been rallying the Moroccan ‘side’ and have aroused the production and circulation, on the web and the mobile phones, of a new kind of satirical poetry targeting these ‘ralliés’ considered as betrayers of the independence cause. This sensitive literature, whether funny or violent, rare but successful, amuse and disturb Sahrawi audiences, provokes poetic responses, create new debate opportunities and allow social sciences to better understand how politicians from both parties try to exploit and/or control population movements in that area and how people live and manoeuvre around these policies.

Codex Vitae: The Material Poetics of Randolph Healy's ‘Arbor Vitae’

Randolph Healy's 1997 poem ‘Arbor Vitae’ connects formally experimental poetry with an Irish tradition of politically engaged literature. Eschewing questions of national boundaries or authenticity, Healy instead develops a poetics and ethics of intersection. His apparently depersonalized poem is composed of essayistic fragments that address the role of the deaf in Irish society. This essay argues that Healy's formal choices refuse the oral basis of the lyric, and instead align his poem with nonverbal forms of communication. This challenge to the authenticity of speech also questions the language policies of the Republic of Ireland and reveals the role of the state in disciplining citizens, particularly through education. In addition to the accumulation of disparate pieces in the poem, Healy's formal innovation continues in the poem's paratextual apparatus, contributing to his development of an alternative to the epic and the lyric. As Healy incorporates references to the material basis for all communication in this poem, he establishes the lived body as key to connecting the hearing with the deaf. By fracturing poetic expectations in ‘Arbor Vitae’, Healy reconnects language deeply to the material and social world of contemporary Ireland, offering a path for conceptual poetry to be also a public and political poetry.

Poetry, Philosophy, and Esotericism: A Straussian Legacy

This article concerns the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ (Plato, Rep. 607b). With the guidance of Leo Strauss, and with reference to French cultural anthropology and the Hebrew Bible, I offer close readings of the origin myths told by the characters of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium and Socrates in book 2 of the Republic. I contrast Aristophanes’ prudential and political esotericism with Socrates’ pedagogical esotericism, connecting the former with poetry’s affirmation of the primacy of chaos and the latter with philosophy’s openness to the measures of nature or phusis. Aristophanes regards the political poetry of Olympianism as a necessary corrective of original human disorder, while Socrates traces the sickness of souls and cities to an excess of poiēsis, ‘poetry’ or ‘production’ in all of its cultural and material senses. The quarrel between Socrates and Aristophanes illuminates fundamental questions that were of central concern to Strauss: What is the status of nature? Must we orient ourselves by the forceful impressions of culture, or can we make out natural standards of how to live? Is war the primary human condition, or peace? Are human beings essentially erotic, or thumotic? Is philosophy an expression of reckless boldness, or of saving moderation?

Linking Words with the World: The Language Poetry Mission

The poets associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School have remarkably borrowed from the Pound-Olson tradition of political poetry and poetics. But, they have also experimented with newer methods and matters that deviate from the tradition. Such continuation and departure from the tradition of the socio-cultural oriented language poets has been investigated here. Their poetic tenets have been examined through the ideas formulated by the outstanding cultural critics; Adorno, Jameson, Bakhtin, Foucault, Lukács, and Benjamin. Based on the thorough examination it has been found out that besides many other socio-cultural demands the language poets want to connect the words of art the world people live. Such connection, as they perform, has been disturbed for long time.

The Reception of G. Herwegh’s Personality and Work in Russian Culture: from Revolutionary Pathos to a Scandalous Love Affair

This paper offers an overview of the perception of work and the evaluation of the personality of 19th century German poet Georg Herwegh. The research demonstrates that the character of perception is determined by the cultural and historical context in the receiving culture, and it is even more so with political poetry that is based on the rhetoric of spiritual edification. The analysis is made with reference to previously unstudied materials, namely, marks and notes from the archive of V. A. Zhukovsky made on the pages of Herwegh’s most popular book. On the basis of this material the authors conclude that this period was characterised by the initial attempt to represent Herwegh and his poetry within the framework of the history of German literature from its emergence to the mid-19th century. The second period of Russian authors’ reference to his poetry was dominated by the appearance in Russia of the ideological tonality typical of the political poems that won the German poet his fame. The beginning of this period was the post-revolutionary decade of the 1820s. Russian literature specially turned to Herwegh’s legacy, thus marking a new stage of perception by publishing Selected Poems, a new voluminous anthology of translations of his works, as well as a number of literary studies. A new burst of attention began between 2009 and 2013 when numerous articles on the relationship between the Herzens and Herwegh were published. Post-Soviet Russian scholars have examined the controversial personality of the German author through a lens which has brought new traits to the fore: the love triangle between Herwegh and the Herzens which was the main prototype of the conflict in Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts. The paradigmatic shift in the perception of the German poet connected with the change from the textual to the biographic discourse is directly reflected in Russian mass literary culture.

Translating Arabic Political Poetry Into English

Translating Arabic Political Poetry Into English

Parenthetical “I say (you)” in Late Medieval Greek vernacular

In this paper, I argue that the first-person singular of the “ordinary” verb λέγω/λαλῶ (‘I say’) in the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century political verse narratives Chronicle of Morea and War of Troy does not always carry its “normal”, representational content (‘I inform/assure [you]’). Frequently, λέγω/λαλῶ structures the discourse rather than conveying conceptual meaning and, thus, has procedural meaning. In this respect, the verb can be compared to modern discourse markers (i.e., semantically reduced items which abound in spoken language). An important − yet not decisive − criterion to distinguish the conceptual from the procedural use is the position of λέγω/λαλῶ: all “DM-like” examples are parenthetical. As for their precise pragmatic function, these forms are used, in particular, to signal a clarification towards the listener (“I mean”) or, more generally, to grab the attention of the audience. Applied to the modern binary distinction between interpersonal and textual discourse markers, they thus belong to the former category. Finally, I tentatively relate the observation that the procedural parenthetical examples show a marked preference for pre-caesural position to the concept of “filled pauses”, which makes sense given the adopted oral style of the Late Medieval Greek political verse narratives.

The Roman Adversarial Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century Political Satire

This article examines the use of the Roman satiric dialogue in eighteenth-century political verse. It studies partisan satires that pit their speakers against a cautionary interlocutor (adversarius) in imitation of Horace's Satire 2.1 and Persius' Satire 1. It begins with an overview of Pope's use of the dialogue form in his Imitations of Horace, and his shift in the later 1730s to a model of antagonistic encounter between ideological opponents in the style of Persius. Its main body is an examination of later eighteenth-century satires that find alternative political uses for Persius' dialogue form to those of Pope and the Whig Patriot satirists who followed his lead. It studies Thomas Newcomb's inversion of Pope's Epilogue to the Satires for the purposes of ministerial propaganda; Charles Churchill's variations on the dialogue form under the banner of Wilkesite opposition; and Peter Pindar's comic burlesque of the traditional postures of dialogic satire in One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-Six. The article reveals the Roman dialogue to have been a distinctively flexible framework for eighteenth-century satirists, capable of accommodating positions and arguments on both sides of the partisan divide.

Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire by Isabel Torres (review)

TORRES, ISABEL. Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2013. xv + 228 pp.In her book Isabel Torres sets out to study Spanish Golden Age love poetry in relation to the historical and social pressures found in the "imperial 'home' space" (ix). Torres takes as a starting point the "nagging" question "What has love got to do with it?" However, she soon reformulates it, discarding either a strictly biographical or, on the other hand, purely formal answer to the question. Instead, the author prefers to inquire "what love, as a complex and contestatory signifier, actually does" (xii). The context is an imperial Spain in which the idealism and anxiety of an emerging and yet threatened national self-consciousness are embedded in the coordinates of desire, temporality, and loss represented in love poetry.The section on Garcilaso de la Vega focuses on the tension made patent between a productive imitation of the Petrarchan model-which transforms and nourishes the work-and a "project of lyric self-creation" that simultaneously needs to move beyond "imitative/emulative" poetics (5). This terrain has been previously covered by Anne J. Cruz and Ignacio Navarrete, yet Torres brings admirable nuance to the analysis. In Chapter 1, "Garcilaso: Transfiguration and Transvaluation," the author delves into the synthesis of dialectical opposites (immediacy/mediation, unity/loss, rest/motion, origin/originality, memory/imagination) without forcing through her reading an erasure of the residues of conflict that remain and may be recalled within any given opposition. For example, in her reading of Sonnet XI Torres notes how the reader is faced with what seems to be "an objective site of aesthetic contemplation" that can nonetheless only be accessed through "immersion in a subjective imagination that is rendered in deceptively material terms" (29). The summing statement for the analysis of Eclogue III follows the same logic: "The anxieties expressed in the text about the vulnerability of the voice, and of the written artifact itself, as it takes shape and is shaped in time, are integral to Garcilaso's self-conscious poetics. But in Eclogue III such concerns are balanced by a sophisticated self-elaboration that is enabled and sustained through appropriation, and by the sheer rhetorical force of a sensed infinity that promises infinite renewal" (34).Chapter 2, "Garcilaso de la Vega: luz de nuestra nacion?," further explores the manifest-and less clearly resolved-tensions in the poet's more patently political poems (or segments thereof), specifically the imbalance in the arms and letters dichotomy. Once more, critics such as Cruz provide a precedent that Torres develops with considerable finesse. Elegy II demonstrates an encounter between the aesthetic distance provided by letters and the "anguished questioning of a subject voice" which cannot escape the tragedy caused by imperial arms (38). Sonnet XXXIII, with its lyrical movement from the position of the conqueror to the position of the conquered, displays a transfer also between the historical past, literature's role in the creation of a collective remembering and forgetting, and a poetsoldier's intimate experience, all together revealing how "the new literary political orders he proclaims are marked very deliberatively with the anxieties of the old" (43). Eclogue II receives close attention with the aim of bridging the apparent incongruity in the shift between the pastoral scene and the historical account of the House of Alba. In this section Torres identifies the consistency throughout of "water/mirror poetics" (59), which play out inherent tensions between reality and illusion, past and present, art and time (as found in ekphrasis), and integration and disintegration both at the level of the self (think Albanio and Nemoroso) and in relation to an emergent national consciousness. Against readings that would interpret Garcilaso's political poetry as harmonizing the arms and letters, and would offer the poet as a model "luz de la nacion," Torres highlights the paradox of the self as haunted by an "indeterminate human condition" navigating imperial ideology as reflected in its literary reconstructions, revealing how the success of the individual and the community often depends on the sacrifice of one for the other (59). …

Poetry as an Act of International Diplomacy: English translations of Willem van Haren's Political Poetry during the War of the Austrian Succession

AbstractIn the eighteenth century the worlds of diplomacy and poetry were inextricably connected. This is demonstrated by the work of the Dutch statesman and poet Willem van Haren (1710‐1768), whose political poems played an important role in the negotiations of international political relations during the War of the Austrian Succession. Several poems were translated into English by the Irish poet Samuel Boyse and published in The Gentleman’s Magazine. It is argued that the great interest in Van Haren's work in England can be clarified by the country's positioning in the European conflict, and by Anglo‐Irish relations during the 1740s.

Masculinity and political geographies in England, Ireland and North America

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Space, Mobility, and Agency in Palestinian American Poetry

This article proposes a framework for exploring the role of mobility in the rearticulation of agency relating to white and minority identities in poems by Lisa Suhair Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Suheir Hammad. In this context, we show how the political poetry of Majaj, Hammad, and Nye employs mobility to destabilize racialized structures and definitions underlying ethnic and white identities and challenge the invisibility of related power hierarchies and hegemonic discursive formations. Through translational representations of mobility, we argue, the poets and poetic subjects unmask racialized locations and map transformative itineraries shaped by choice and affiliation; the resulting identities are constantly negotiated and reshaped in relation to struggle, justice, and global concerns. The examination of mobility in this context also reveals the conditions of existence and circulation of white privilege to unmask its influence on ascriptions of human value and worth.

The Cambridge Introduction to German Poetry by Judith Ryan (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Introduction to German Poetry by Judith Ryan Charlotte Melin The Cambridge Introduction to German Poetry. By Judith Ryan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 238. Cloth $72.00. Paper $25.19. ISBN 978-0521687201. Conceived as a German studies approach to poetry, Judith Ryan’s solidly planned introduction is a reader-friendly history of literature designed for student audiences, yet also rewarding material for scholars and others interested in the lyric genre. Ryan, of course, is one of the leading authorities on German poetry and the depth of her knowledge in this area indelibly shapes the chapters, which deftly combine interpretations of poems in literary context with thoughtful treatment of historical connections and aesthetic movements. Thus, for example, in a chapter examining poetic roles in early poetic texts, Ryan begins with close readings of several works written in Middle High German to set the stage for analysis of the problem of poetic persona. The chapter concludes with an insightful discussion of the romantic nostalgia for all things medieval and Paul Celan’s appropriation of this tradition in the poem “Matière de Bretagne.” Other chapters have a similarly ambitious scope, reflecting Ryan’s obvious conviction that poetry functions as a dynamic site of knowledge production where issues of representation, subjectivity, ethics, and discourse abound. The volume is organized into thematically focused chapters that proceed overall in a chronological sequence through German literary history. An introductory chapter (“Exploring the Poem”) provides several models for how to approach a poem through different entry points or perspectives. Here Ryan describes poems as puzzles, emphasizing the openness of the interpretive process by displaying how varied approaches yield different readings of texts. Following the second chapter on “Poetic Roles in Early Song-Lyrics,” Ryan turns her attention to “Devotional Poetry,” “The Rhetoric of Passion,” “Classical Antiquity and Modern Experience,” “Romantic Poetry and the Problem of Lyric Unity,” “The Self and the Senses,” “Modernism and Difficulty,” “Poetry after Auschwitz,” and finally “Political Poetry.” Poems discussed in the volume are quoted in full text version and accompanied by an English prose paraphrase. The close readings Ryan performs of these examples are impeccably done and a pleasure to read—striking illustrations of how to interpret the complex interplay of form and meaning in works of the lyric genre. Some of the most compelling interpretations of individual texts explore the work of poets who have long occupied Ryan’s research (like Rainer Marie Rilke), but the readings of other poetry offer rich insights as well. Refreshingly, the volume incorporates a generous sampling of examples prior to the age of Goethe, including poems by Paul Fleming, Andreas Gryphius, and Walter von der Vogelweide. In addition to poets [End Page 407] whose work certainly would be expected in such a volume (from Goethe, Brentano, Eichendorff, and Heine to Benn, Brecht, and the postwar generation that includes Bachmann, Celan, Enzensberger, and Sachs), work by many other poets appears as well. An emphasis is placed on the lyric genre tradition, which means predominantly short poems with strong aesthetic orientation, thus Hofmannsthal, Hölderlin, Mörike, and Trakl receive treatment, alongside less conventional selections by Günter Grass, Ulla Hahn, and others. Poetry scholars will be pleased with the breadth of the selection, though likely to notice that it follows implicit criteria that no doubt reflect the pragmatic limitations that such a project faces in terms of space and inclusiveness. Ryan has, for example, written about the tradition of the long poem in German literature, yet wisely elects to exclude it from the present volume, mentioning for instance Durs Grünbein’s poetic cycle Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (2005) only briefly. Likewise experimental poetry, performance works, and multimedia productions, which play an increasingly important role in poetic discourse of the twenty-first century, are not a part of this survey. Faculty teaching courses about poetry would presumably find it useful to supplement this textual presentation with audio and visual materials found, for example, at the curated website Lyrikline.org. They would also be well advised to consult the growing body of research on teaching poetry in foreign language courses, including the forthcoming 2015 American Association of University...

Exclusion and Desecration: Aphra Behn, Liberalism, and the Politics of the Pindaric Ode

Sometime after William of Orange’s landing in Britain, the Tory writer Aphra Behn seems to have been solicited by Gilbert Burnet—counselor and propagandist for William and Mary—to write a coronation ode on behalf of the new sovereign. In response, Behn crafted an ode of refusal, addressed not to the king or to the public but directly to Burnet himself. In this poem, “A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Dr. Burnet” (1689), Behn strikes a tone quite different from that found in her earlier political verse: the characteristic amplification and hyperbole of the conventional panegyric is replaced with sarcasm and understated wit. Her refusal is consistent with her steadfast support for the House of Stuart and with her hostility to parliamentary and popular power. But in its emphasis on private political feeling, it is also surprisingly consistent with certain tenets of liberal thought. Rather than speaking in the odd mixture of the vatic and the abject called for by ceremonial verse, it bases its claims on an elegiac voice of dissidence, a right of refusal, and a rhetoric of isolation and individual exceptionality that is closely aligned with our understanding of liberalism as a practice based on the sacred natural rights of the individual, and with acts of conscience. The poem is thus not only an expression of a conscience-driven refusal of the revolution’s outcome: it is, more precisely, an assertion of a sacred individual right to that dissent, as well as an affective and elegiac embrace of the virtual exile and loneliness that results. The sacral qualities of divine-right kingship are in this poem transferred to the individual conscience. Though Aphra Behn was a devoted supporter of the Stuart monarchy, seeing her merely as a Tory writer obstructs us from seeing other implications of her thinking, particularly the way her proto-Jacobitism is genealogically linked to liberalism. In this essay, I call attention to a less-visible facet of her politics by reading her ode to Burnet not simply as a refusal of political modernity but also, more specifically, as a desecration of