Abstract
In the Table Talk, Coleridge states that ‘Elegy is the natural poetry of the reflective mind; it may treat of any subject but it must treat no subject for itself, but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel regret for the Past or desire for the Future, so Sorrow and Love become the principal themes of Elegy. It presents everything as lost and gone or absent and future. The Elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric Epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice.’2 If we add specificity to Coleridge’s remark and focus on the poetic tradition that hearkens back to the Iliad, then the opposition he is exploring concerns more than the situation of the poet in relation to these genres. Opposing elegy to epic in this fashion emphasises that both genres are linked to the mediation of war. When combined with its clear dicta regarding the temporality of elegiac utterance, Coleridge, it could be argued, subtly provides a poetics of wartime that is distinct from epic, a poetics that disfigures the subject of sorrow and love in order to testify to violence and loss.
‘Loud howls the storm! the vex’d Atlantic roars!
Thy Genius, Britain, wanders on its shores!
Hears cries of horror wafted from afar,
And groans of Anguish, mid the shrieks of War!’1
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Notes and references
See M. A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
G. Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
and D. O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
See also R. W. Jones, Literature, Gender and Politics in Britain during the War for America 1770–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) for a superb overview of the key cultural debates that animated the American crisis in Britain.
I am signalling the distinction between the archive and the repertoire first articulated in D. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
See P. Mackesy, The War for America 1775–1783 (London: Longmans, 1964), pp. 124–6 and p. 154 for discussions of Howe’s disappointing campaigns in Pennsylvania.
For a discussion of St. George’s life see M. Myrone, Body Building: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750–1810 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 237–40.
J. Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
J. Thacher, The American Revolution: From the Commencement to the Disbanding of the American Army Given in the Form of a Daily Journal, with the Exact Dates of all the Important Events; Also, a Biographical Sketch of the Most Prominent Generals by James Thacher, M.D., a surgeon in the American Revolutionary Army (New Haven: Hurlbutt & Kellog, 1860), p. 228.
Thacher, The American Revolution, p. 228. J. Thacher’s A Military Journal during the American Revolutionary War, from 1775 to 1783 (New York: Richardson & Lord, 1823) records the event slightly differently when it states that ‘the spot was consecrated by the tears of thousands’, p. 274. For some sense of the strongly sentimental flavour of these reports see W. Sargeant, The Life of Major André (New York: Appleton, 1871), pp. 395–403.
Sarah Knott’s bracing reading of the tropes of sensibility which permeate representations of André’s death, both from members of the Continental Army and from later British commentators, argues persuasively that exhibitions of sensibility and affection were fundamental to fantasies of cohesion on both sides of the conflict. See S. Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 154–93.
A. Hamilton, ‘Letter to John Laurens, October 1780’ in H. C. Lodge, ed., The Works of Alexander Hamilton (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1886), vol. 8, p. 26.
See H. Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
See S. Conway, ‘From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, Circa 1739–1783’, William and Mary Quarterly, 59.1 (2002), pp. 65–100 for a discussion of the changing representations of the Americans and for an exhaustive survey of the scholarship on this issue.9. André himself wrote a detailed account of the entertainment that was published first in the Gentleman’s Magazine and then throughout the daily press.
See also Jay Fleigelman’s classic analysis of the familial tropes used to represent the American crisis in J. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
See D. Posner, ‘The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard’, Art Bulletin, 64.1 (March 1982), pp. 75–88.
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© 2015 Daniel O’Quinn
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O’Quinn, D. (2015). Invalid Elegy and Gothic Pageantry: André, Seward and the Loss of the American War. In: Ramsey, N., Russell, G. (eds) Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137474315_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137474315_3
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