“The Laureate Hearse Where Lyric Lies”: The Making of Romantic Apostasy

Abstract

When the reigning Poet Laureate, Henry James Pye, died in August 1813, Leigh Hunt promptly addressed the matter on the front page of the Examiner, displaying it prominently as that week’s ‘Political Examiner.’ Rather than speculate, as might have been anticipated, as to who might be picked to succeed Pye, Hunt saw the vacancy as an opportunity to abolish an arcane office which he considered politically as well as poetically indecent – indeed, ‘noxious.’ Not opposed to the ornamental trappings of monarchy per se, Hunt singled out the Laureateship as not simply absurd but actually ‘contagious’ and finally degrading both to the Sovereign and to the Laureate. A pernicious office, ‘paid for annually flattering the Prince to his face in so many set terms, whatever may be his merits or demerits’ (‘Office’ 513), the Laureateship stigmatizes its occupant as the king’s officially sanctioned verse-maker (versificator regis) at the same time as it compromises the dignity of the ruler who would bestow a sinecure upon a rhyming flatterer.

As detur digniori was the maxim upon which the thing was likely to be bestowed, they thought it would become me to accept it.

(Southey to Wynn, 20 Sept. 1813)