Abstract
A thousand years of poetry cannot be squeezed into a short paper, and no attempt is made to write a history of this class of English verse. Unlike History, which marches from old to new, the paper goes backwards in time, beginning with Dryden’s celebrated satire on the person of Charles II, and then it considers the opposite side of politics, adulation, as seen in a paean on Queen Anne by Nahum Tate. Going further back in time, a minor fifteenth-century poem, De Veritate & Consciencia, is given a friendlier mention than it had hitherto received; it is indebted to Piers Plowman, and probably to The Simonie, now much admired. There is more on minor, rather than major, Middle English verse, and then on to the verse of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, especially the fierce poem on William the Conqueror, in the annal that records his death in 1087. I try to show that there are two sides to politics, the satirical criticism of tyranny and corruption and complaint of poverty on one side, and genuine or pretended delight in and praise of government on the other side. Academics, as a group, are pinkos: satire and complaint are well received by them, and adulation of those who govern has a bad press.
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Stanley, E.G. A Thousand Years of English Political Poetry: A Limited Selection. Neophilologus 96, 315–331 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-011-9279-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-011-9279-8