In Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire, Suvir Kaul argues that
the aggressive nationalism of James Thomson's ode "Rule, Britannia
" (1740) is the condition to which much English poetry of the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries aspires. Poets as varied as
Marvell, Waller and Dryden, Defoe, Addison, John Dyer and Edward
Young, or Goldsmith, Cowper, Hannah More and Anna Laetitia
Barbauld, all wrote poems deeply engaged with the
British-nation-in-the-making. These poets, and many others like
them, recognized that the nation and its values and institutions
were being defined by the expansion of overseas trade, naval and
military control, plantations and colonies. Their poems both
embodied, and were concerned about, the culture and ideology of
"Great Britain" (itself an idea of the nation that developed
alongside the formation of a British Empire).
Poems in this period thus flaunt various images of poetic
inspiration that show poetry and culture following triumphantly
where mercantile and military ships sail. Or sometimes, more
self-aggrandizingly for the poet, they enact the process by which
the Muses use their powers to inspire and show the way. Even at
their most hesitant, these poems were written as interventions into
public discussion; their creativity is tied up with that desire to
convince and persuade. Finally, as Kaul writes, it is their
encyclopedic desire to incorporate new experiences, visions, and
values that makes these poems such fine guides to the world of
poetry in the long years in which "Great Britain" was consolidated
as an empire, at home and abroad.
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