Abstract
The epilogue looks forward to a nineteenth century of proliferating medieval texts of all three British nations in print, new poetry that more closely resembled archaic sources, and the expanding metrical license of poets in English generally. It situates the appearance in print of texts like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—first published in 1815 and 1839, respectively—in the context of the eighteenth century’s use of archaic poetry to antiquate the nation as a cultural formation of long historical duration. Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins are offered as cases of poets who, building on newly available poetic models and historical prosodic knowledge, wrote poems that mimicked archaic poetic elements to a degree not previously possible in English poetry.
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Notes
- 1.
Henry Morley, English Writers (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867), vol. 2, p. 106–107. The passage is quoted at length in John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall, eds., Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. Ballads and Romances, 3 vols. (London: N. Trübner, 1867–1868), vol. 2, p. 176–177.
- 2.
Information on Morley is drawn chiefly from Fred Hunter, “Morley, Henry (1822–1894)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- 3.
On Blake’s interest in the ancient Welsh, see Arthur Johnston, “William Blake and ‘the Ancient Britons’”, National Library of Wales Journal 22, no. 3 (1982): 304–320. On Blake’s interest in the Welsh bardic revival—that, for instance, he had “completed a body of work that certainly draws on the work of Owen [Pughe] and Iolo ”—see Marilyn Butler, Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), Chapter 6 (p. 172).
- 4.
Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842, 2nd ed. (n.p.: Humanities Ebooks, 2015), p. 88.
- 5.
William Wordsworth, “The Vale of Esthwaite”, in Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797, ed. Carol Landon and Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997), p. 444. The brackets appear in the volume.
- 6.
Wordsworth, Benjamin the Waggoner, ed. Paul F. Betz (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981), p. 60.
- 7.
Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sketches, in Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Geoffrey Jackson (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004), p. 146.
- 8.
J. R. Watson, “Wordsworth, North Wales and the Celtic Landscape”, in English Romanticism and the Celtic World, ed. Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 96.
- 9.
Fiona Stafford , “Inhabited Solitudes: Wordsworth in Scotland, 1803”, in Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic, ed. David Duff and Catherine Jones (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2007), p. 101. For a critique of Wordsworth as poetic colonizer of Scotland, see Leith Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–1830 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), Chapter 4.
- 10.
Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Kristine Dugas (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988). For a reading of “Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle” in the context of minstrelsy, see Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), p. 160–165.
- 11.
Wordsworth, “To the Men of Kent”, in Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983), p. 171. On “To the Men of Kent” and the significance of regional specificity to Wordsworth, see Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000), Chapter 8.
- 12.
Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, trans., De Danorum Rebus Gestis Secul. III & IV. Poëma Danicum Dialecto Anglosaxonica (Copenhagen: Th. E. Rangel, 1815).
- 13.
On the details of Thorkelin’s research trip, see Kevin S. Kiernan, “Thorkelin’s Trip to Great Britain and Ireland, 1786–1791”, The Library, 6th ser., 5, no. 1 (March 1983): 1–21. For biographical details and a critique of Thorkelin as a fraud of a scholar, see Magnús Fjalldal, “To Fall by Ambition—Grímur Thorkelín and His Beowulf Edition”, Neophilologus 92, no. 2 (April 2008): 321–332.
- 14.
John Mitchell Kemble, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, the Travellers Song and the Battle of Finnes-Burh (London: William Pickering, 1833); and Kemble, trans., A Translation of the Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf (London: William Pickering, 1837). Substantial excerpts of the original with Latin translation had appeared earlier in John Josias Conybeare, ed., Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Harding and Lepard, 1826).
- 15.
Frederic Madden, ed., Syr Gawayne; A Collection of Ancient Romance-Poems, by Scotish and English Authors (London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1839).
- 16.
John Jamieson, An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: W. Creech, A. Constable, and W. Blackwood, 1808). On the making of Jamieson’s dictionary, see Susan Rennie, Jamieson’s Dictionary of Scots: The Story of the First Historical Dictionary of the Scots Language (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012).
- 17.
James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair: together with A Ballad of Good Counsel, ed. Walter W. Skeat. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1884).
- 18.
If it seems I have given too little attention to Scottish Gaelic literature, the reason is that the printing of its archaic manuscript poetry did not begin in earnest until the mid-nineteenth century, and thus beyond the scope of this study. For a concise history of the Scottish Gaelic language and literature, see Colm Ó Baoill, “A History of Gaelic to 1800”, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Gaelic Language, ed. Moray Watson and Michelle Macleod (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010). On the history of Scottish Gaelic in print, see Ronald Black, “Gaelic Orthography: The Drunk Man’s Broad Road”, in the same volume. For a sense of scale, Black has written: “It can provisionally be calculated that 184 or 185 Gaelic books were published between 1567 and 1800 […].” Black, “The Gaelic Book”, in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 2, ed. Stephen W. Brown and Warren McDougall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012), p. 180.
- 19.
Thomas Maclauchlan, ed., The Dean of Lismore’s Book. A Selection of Ancient Gaelic Poetry, from a Manuscript Collection Made by Sir James M‘Gregor, Dean of Lismore, in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1862).
- 20.
William F. Skene, ed., The Four Ancient Books of Wales Containing the Cymric Poems Attributed to the Bards of the Sixth Century, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868).
- 21.
John Rhŷs and J. Gwenogvryn Evans, eds., The Text of the Mabinogion and Other Welsh Tales from the Red Book of Hergest (Oxford: J. G. Evans, 1887).
- 22.
Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols. (London: H. Frowde, 1898–1905).
- 23.
Eduard Sievers, Altgermanische Metrik (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1893).
- 24.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Richard Watson Dixon, October 5, 1878, in The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, 2nd rev. imp. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1955), p. 14.
- 25.
Michael Raiger, “Coleridge and Hopkins”, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s., 44 (winter 2014): 1–13, p. 1.
- 26.
Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson. A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1897), vol. 1, p. 50. John Beer quotes this passage in his “Tennyson, Coleridge and the Cambridge Apostles”, in Tennyson: Seven Essays, ed. Philip Collins (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1992), p. 2.
- 27.
Edward B. Irving , Jr., “The Charge of the Saxon Brigade: Tennyson’s Battle of Brunanburh”, in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 176–178.
- 28.
See Abraham Wheelocke, ed., Chronologia Anglo-Saxonica, in Bede, Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ Gentis Anglorum Libri V (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1643), p. 555–557; Edmund Gibson, ed., Chronicum Saxonicum ex MSS Codicibus Nunc Primum Integrum Edidit, ac Latinum Fecit (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1692), p. 112–114; and George Hickes, Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-Criticus et Archæologicus, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1703–1705), vol. 1, p. 181–182.
- 29.
Thomas Chatterton, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971), vol. 1, p. 27.
- 30.
Guest printed both the original text and his own verse translation. Tennyson also consulted his son Hallam’s prose translation, published in 1876. On Tennyson’s interest in the poem, see also Michael Alexander, “Tennyson’s ‘Battle of Brunanburh’”, Tennyson Research Bulletin 4, no. 4 (November 1985): 151–161; and Michael P. Kuczynski, “Translation and Adaptation in Tennyson’s Battle of Brunanburh”, Philological Quarterly 86, no. 4 (fall 2007): 415–431.
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Strabone, J. (2018). Epilogue: A Millennium of British Poetry?. In: Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95255-0_6
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