Introduction: Beowulf or Brutus of Troy?

Strabone, Jeff

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95255-0_1

Jeff Strabone⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print ((PERCP))

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Abstract

Strabone offers a new theory of poetry’s role in the rise of nationalism. It provides an important revision to Benedict Anderson’s account of European nationalism in Imagined Communities and new insights about poetics, print media, and medievalism. The book’s Archipelagic approach to British literature and history devotes roughly equal attention to England, Scotland, and Wales. This chapter draws on England’s legal and ecclesiastical history to highlight the absence of early modern interest in pre-Chaucerian poetry, including Beowulf. Instead, Elizabethan textual antiquarians used pre-Norman laws and sermons—but not poetry—to antiquate the history of the Kingdom and Church of England. The chapter includes a thorough review of scholarship on nationalism, mediation, and Romanticism, and explains how poetic metre can be used as an epistemological tool.

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Notes

1.
Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism”, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 1, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra Williams and Aubrey Williams (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale UP, 1961), p. 255, l. 135–140. The “he” in line 135 is Virgil; the Stagyrite is Aristotle. According to Pope, the rules he found were the same for Homer as for himself—and for all poets regardless of time and place.
2.
Robert Southey, Poetical Works: 1793–1810, vol. 2, Madoc, ed. Lynda Pratt (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004), p. 77, l. 64–78.
3.
This is one of Benedict Anderson’s three paradoxes of nationalism. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 3rd ed. (London: Verso, 2006), p. 5.
4.
While Ireland also fits this pattern, I have decided for practical reasons to limit the scope of this study to these three.
5.
Nennius, Historia Brittonum, in British History and the Welsh Annals, ed. and trans. John Morris (London and Chichester: Phillimore, 1980), p. 19.
6.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 72.
7.
See William Camden, Camden’s Britannia, Newly Translated into English: With Large Additions and Improvements (London: F. Collins and A. and J. Churchil, 1695), p. v–ix.
8.
Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, for the vse of all suche as are studious of Eloquence, sette forth in English (London, 1553), fol. 86r.
9.
Rebecca Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2012).
10.
Basil Morgan, “Crowley, Robert (1517x19–1588)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, hereinafter cited as ODNB.
11.
Robert Crowley, preface to William Langland, The Vision of Pierce Plowman (London, 1550), sig. *.ii.r, *.ii.v. On Crowley’s edition, see Charlotte Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), Chapter 1. After 1561, Piers Plowman was not published again until 1813. Brewer , p. 37.
12.
Daniel G. Calder, “Histories and Surveys of Old English Literature: A Chronological Review”, Anglo-Saxon England 10 (December 1981): 201–244, p. 201.
13.
John Foxe, dedication to The Gospels of the fower Euangelistes translated in the olde Saxons tyme out of Latin into the vulgare toung of the Saxons (London: John Day, 1571), sig. A.ij.r.
14.
Foxe , sig. ¶ ij.r. On legends of pre-Saxon arrivals of Christianity in Britain, see Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004 [1999]), Chapter 5.
15.
On the dispersal of the monastic libraries, see C. E. Wright, “The Dispersal of the Libraries in the Sixteenth Century”, in The English Library before 1700, ed. Francis Wormald and Wright (London: Athlone Press, 1958).
16.
On the earlier efforts of John Leland and John Foxe to catalogue the remains of the monastic libraries, see James P. Carley, “John Leland and the Contents of English Pre-Dissolution Libraries: The Cambridge Friars”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9, no. 1 (1986): 90–100; Carley , “John Leland and the Contents of English Pre-Dissolution Libraries: Lincolnshire”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9, no. 4 (1989): 330–357; Honor McCusker, “Books and Manuscripts Formerly in the Possession of John Bale”, The Library, 4th ser., 16, no. 2 (September 1935): 144–165. On the question of Elizabeth’s direct involvement in Parker’s production of Protestant “propaganda”, Vivienne Sanders argues that “the queen was interested and occasionally involved in the work of Parker’s household”. Sanders , “The Household of Archbishop Parker and the Influencing of Public Opinion”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 34, no. 4 (October 1983): 534–547, p. 546.
17.
John Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, the First Archbishop of Canterbury in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London: John Wyat, 1711), p. 7. Information on Parker and Joscelin is also drawn from David J. Crankshaw and Alexandra Gillespie, “Parker, Matthew (1504–1575)”, ODNB; G. H. Martin, “Joscelin [Joscelyn], John (1529–1603)”, ODNB; and Timothy Graham and Andrew G. Watson, eds., The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England. Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 1998).
18.
For details on the editing methods of Parker’s circle, see Benedict Scott Robinson, “‘Dark speech’: Matthew Parker and the Reforming of History”, Sixteenth Century Journal 29, no. 4 (winter 1998): 1061–1083.
19.
Eleanor N. Adams, Old English Scholarship in England 1566–1800, Yale Studies in English no. 55 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1917), p. 157–158; John Bromwich, “The First Book Printed in Anglo-Saxon Types”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 3, no. 4 (1962): 265–291. On the spread of Anglo-Saxon type after 1566, see Adams , appendix 3, “A Brief Account of the Use of Anglo-Saxon Types”, p. 157–181.
20.
Ælfric of Eynsham, A testimonie of antiqvitie shewing the auncient fayth in the Church of England touching the sacrament of the body and bloude of the Lord here publikely preached, and also receaued in the Saxons tyme, aboue 600. yeares agoe, ed. John Joscelin and Matthew Parker (London: John Day, [1566]), fol. 76v–77r. For the argument that Parker manipulated Ælfric’s words, especially on the question of clerical marriage—his quotations at times “both scrupulously accurate and strikingly out of context”—see Aaron Kleist, “Monks, Marriage, and Manuscripts: Matthew Parker’s Manipulation (?) of Ælfric of Eynsham”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 105, no. 2 (April 2006): 312–327, p. 315. The critical debate about Ælfric’s actual beliefs regarding transubstantiation is beyond the scope of this study.
21.
John Joscelin, preface to Ælfric of Eynsham, A testimonie of antiqvitie, fol. 2v. On the matter of whether Joscelin or Parker wrote the preface, I defer to Crankshaw and Gillespie’s essay on Parker in the ODNB: “Joscelin is credited with the preface”.
22.
Ælfric, letter to Wulfsine, bishop of Scyrburne, in A testimonie of antiqvitie, fol. 64r.
23.
Joscelin, fol. 3r.
24.
Robinson , “John Foxe and the Anglo-Saxons”, in John Foxe and His World, ed. Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), p. 66.
25.
Thomas Stapleton’s English translation—the first—of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, published in Antwerp in 1565, played a similar role in Catholic arguments defending the Roman origins of English Catholicism. Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), p. 84–85.
26.
Benjamin Thorpe, preface to Ælfric of Eynsham, The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church. The First Part, Containing the Sermones Catholici, or, Homilies of Ælfric, ed. Thorpe, 2 vols. (London: Ælfric Society, 1844–1846), vol. 1, p. v.
27.
By “historical time”, I mean time “measured by clock and calendar”—the gloss which Benedict Anderson gives to Walter Benjamin’s “homogeneous, empty time” in Chapter 2 of Imagined Communities. Anderson , p. 24. I engage Anderson on nationalism at greater length later in this chapter and changes in conceptions of time chiefly in Chapter 3.
28.
The classic formulation of “the invention of tradition” is Eric Hobsbawm’s introduction to The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992 [1983]), a text which I discuss more directly later in this chapter.
29.
Information on Nowell and Lambarde is drawn chiefly from Retha M. Warnicke, “Nowell, Laurence (1530–c. 1570)”, ODNB; J. D. Alsop, “Lambarde, William (1536–1601)”, ODNB; and Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention.
30.
William Lambarde, Archaionomia, sive de priscis anglorum legibus libri, sermone Anglico, vetustate antiquissimo, aliquot abhinc seculis conscripti, atq. (London: John Day, 1568).
31.
Brackmann, p. 2.
32.
Brackmann, p. 191.
33.
John Fortescue (c. 1397–1479), the Lancastrian jurist, had argued as early as 1468 in De laudibus legum Angliae for the continuity of English law throughout the many invasions of the island and for its superiority over Roman civil law: “And in all the times of these seueral nations & of theire kinges this roialme was still ruled withe the selfe same customes that it is nowe gouerned witheall.” Furthermore, “neyther the lawes of any paynime nation of the world are of so olde and auncyent yeares”. Fortescue , A learned commendation of the politique lawes of Englande […], trans. Robert Mulcaster (London: Richard Tottell, 1567), fol. 38v, 39r. It was first printed in the mid-1540s and first translated into English in 1567. A new preface by the translator explained the purpose of the book as “to proue the singularitie of this state” (sig. A.iii.r).
34.
I owe this observation to Brackmann, p. 195–196. On the thirteenth-century origin of the Kent legend, see R. J. Smith, “The Swanscombe Legend and the Historiography of Kentish Gavelkind”, in Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998).
35.
Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent: Conteining the description, Hystorie, and Customes of that Shyre (London: Ralph Newbery, 1576), p. 23.
36.
As we will see in the epilogue, Wordsworth commemorated Kent’s legendary defense of its liberties in his 1803 sonnet “To the Men of Kent ”.
37.
Alsop, ODNB.
38.
Lambarde, Archeion, a Discovrse Vpon the High Courts of Ivstice in England, 2nd ed. (London, 1635), p. 7, 8.
39.
Wilfrid Prest, “William Lambarde, Elizabethan Law Reform, and Early Stuart Politics”, Journal of British Studies 34, no. 4 (October 1995): 464–480, p. 466. Lambarde himself used the Norman Yoke rhetoric, as when he tells us in the final chapter of Archeion how “unwilling, on the one part, were the Englishmen to beare the Yoake”. Archeion, p. 260. On the trope of the Norman Yoke, see especially Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995 [1958]), Chapter 3. On the “lasting and baleful influence” of belief in the Norman Yoke in the modern era (p. 38), see Marjorie Chibnall, The Debate on the Norman Conquest (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999), Chapter 4. On the rhetoric of Gothic liberty, see especially Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1952), Chapter 1.
40.
The Peticion Exhibited to His Majestie by the Lords Spirituall and Temporall and Commons […], 1628, 3 Caroli I, cap. 1. Information on Coke is drawn chiefly from Allen D. Boyer, Sir Edward Coke and the Elizabethan Age (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003); and Boyer, “Coke, Sir Edward (1552–1634)”, ODNB.
41.
For a broader survey of early modern and eighteenth-century arguments about Saxon and pre-Saxon origins of the English constitution, see Kidd , Chapter 4. For the history of seventeenth-century thought about the English common law in depth, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987).
42.
Boyer, p. 146.
43.
On the genealogy of the belief that the Druids were the originary source of English common law, see Peter Goodrich, “Druids and Common Lawyers: Notes on the Pythagoras Complex and Legal Education”, Law and Humanities 1, no. 1 (2007): 1–30.
44.
Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, p. 37.
45.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994 [1992]), p. 80.
46.
Two additional volumes of Coke’s case reports were published posthumously.
47.
Helgerson , p. 86.
48.
For a reading of Coke’s reports and Institutes as innovations in literary form, see Helgerson p. 86–90.
49.
Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institvtes of the Lawes of England. Or, A Commentarie vpon Littleton, not the name of a Lawyer onely, but of the Law it selfe, 2nd ed. (London: John More, 1629), n.p.
50.
Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England: Concerning High Treason, and other Pleas of the Crown, and Criminall causes (London: M. Flesher, 1644), sig. Bv.
51.
The Second Part was first published in 1642, the Third and Fourth in 1644.
52.
Warnicke , ODNB.
53.
Drawing on his manuscript marginalia, Brackmann argues that Nowell, distinct from his contemporaries, was concerned with matters “more lexical and linguistic than polemical” in his Anglo-Saxon researches (p. 21), as the philologists would be a century later. While this interest may mark Nowell as special in his time, I would argue that it is still a far cry from a literary or poetic interest in Anglo-Saxon writing.
54.
Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006 [2004]), p. 2, 6.
55.
Stewart Mottram, Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008). The statute is An Acte that the Apeles in suche Cases as have been used to be pursued to the See of Rome shall not be from hensforth had ne used but wythin this Realme, 1533, 24 Henrici VIII, cap. 12.
56.
Helgerson , p. 22.
57.
Helgerson , p. 10–11. Helgerson invokes Anderson’s Imagined Communities by name only once, to say that John Foxe’s invisible church “is just such an imagined community” but that it is merely “[l]ike the nation”, not that it is a nation per se. Helgerson , p. 266. For Peter Burke’s argument on the “withdrawal” of the upper classes from popular culture in the early modern period, see Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1978), especially Chapters 2 and 9.
58.
On Catholic efforts to imagine the English nation in the sixteenth century, see Highley , Catholics Writing the Nation.
59.
Anderson, p. 37.
60.
Anderson, p. 38.
61.
Helgerson , p. 1.
62.
As Charles Barber points out, many of Spenser’s seemingly archaic words were in fact current words from England’s regional dialects, especially those of the north. Barber, Early Modern English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997 [1976]), p. 69.
63.
Shrank, “Rhetorical Constructions of a National Community: The Role of the King’s English in Mid-Tudor Writing”, in Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), p. 180. See also Barber, Chapter 2.
64.
As we will see in Chapter 2, Allan Ramsay faced similar questions of the poetic forms best suited to Scots when he launched the revival of Scots vernacular poetry in the early eighteenth century.
65.
Barber, p. 53.
66.
Information on Wilson is drawn chiefly from Susan Doran and Jonathan Woolfson, “Wilson, Thomas (1523/4–1581)”, ODNB.
67.
Shrank, “Rhetorical Constructions”, p. 187.
68.
Wilson, fol. 86r.
69.
Wilson, fol. 86v.
70.
Wilson, fol. 87r.
71.
Information on Ascham is drawn chiefly from Rosemary O’Day, “Ascham, Roger (1514/15–1568)”, ODNB; and Lawrence V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1963). Derek Attridge points out that Ascham’s Toxophilus (1545) contains the first examples of quantitative verse in English but that the debate did not begin until the publication of The Scholemaster twenty-five years later. Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables. English Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974), p. 129.
72.
Ryan, p. 272–273.
73.
Attridge, p. 10.
74.
Gordon Braden, “Hexameter”, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene et al., 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton, 2012), p. 627.
75.
Attridge, p. 114, note 1.
76.
Ryan, p. 275.
77.
Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, in The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, Now First Collected and Revised, with a Life of the Author, ed. J. A. Giles, 3 vols. (London: John Russell Smith, 1864–1865), vol. 3, p. 249–250.
78.
Ascham, vol. 3, p. 250.
79.
On the quantitative-versus-rhyme debate as “a principal focal point for the discussion of national self-fashioning itself” (p. 31), see also Helgerson, p. 25–40.
80.
Richard Stanyhurst, The First Fovre Bookes of Virgil His Aeneis Translated intoo English heroical verse by Richard Stanyhurst, wyth oother Poëtical diuises theretoo annexed (Leiden: John Pates, 1582), p. 65.
81.
Douglas’s Scots translation of 1513 was published in London in 1553.
82.
Philip Sidney, “A Defence of Poetry”, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), p. 120.
83.
Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William O. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989), p. 13.
84.
Besides the thorough treatments of the debate by Attridge and Helgerson , see also T. S. Omond, English Metrists (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1921), Chapter 1.
85.
Thomas Campion, Observations in the Art of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1602), p. 8.
86.
Campion, p. 11.
87.
Campion, p. 7.
88.
Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Ryme (London: Edward Blount, 1603), sig. F 2r.
89.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “endenize”.
90.
Daniel, sig. F 2v, F 3r.
91.
Daniel, sig. F [8]v. On the link between Daniel’s defense of rhyme and his fears of James’s ascendancy, see Helgerson , p. 37–38.
92.
Daniel, sig. F 3r.
93.
Daniel, sig. Gr.
94.
Daniel, sig. Gr.
95.
Milton attacked rhyme in a preface to Paradise Lost as “no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age”, but without setting off a new round of debate. John Milton, The Poetical Works of John Milton, vol. 1, Paradise Lost, ed. Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963), p. 3.
96.
Daniel, sig. F 3v.
97.
Helgerson , p. 39.
98.
For Thomas Gray’s hypothesis that the Saxons may have borrowed rhyme from the Welsh, see Chapter 3.
99.
John Pitcher, “Daniel, Samuel (1562/3–1619)”, ODNB.
100.
Information on Junius and his edition of 1655 is drawn chiefly from Sophie van Romburgh, “Junius [Du Jon], Franciscus [Francis] (1591–1677)”, ODNB; and Franciscus Junius, Cædmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetica Genesios ac praecipuaram Sacrae paginae Historiarum, abhinc annos M.LXX. Anglo-Saxonicè conscripta, & nunc primum edita, ed. Peter J. Lucas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). The poems contained in the manuscript are the Old English Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan.
101.
See Junius, Cædmonis Paraphrasis poetica, Genesios ac præcipuarum sacrae paginae historiarum (Amsterdam, 1655).
102.
Allan Ramsay similarly added and subtracted syllables to regularize line lengths in his edition of the Middle Scots poets, as we will see in Chapter 2.
103.
John Dryden, preface to Fables Ancient and Modern; Translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, & Chaucer: with Original Poems (London: Jacob Tonson, 1700), sig. Av.
104.
Dryden did include Chaucer’s originals in the back of the book like an appendix.
105.
Dryden, sig. B [2]r.
106.
Dryden, sig. Bv.
107.
Dryden, sig. Br.
108.
For a more explicit statement by Thomas Warton seven decades later that “the Saxon poetry has no connection” with English poetry and that “our national character began” after the Norman Conquest, see Chapter 5.
109.
Dryden, sig. B [2]v. It is safe to assume that Dryden’s estimate of “thousands” of length-deficient lines in Chaucer is in part due to his own ignorance of what counted as a syllable in Middle English.
110.
Jonathan Swift, The Tatler 230 (September 26 to 28, 1710), in The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq, 4 vols. (London, 1710–1711), vol. 4, p. 181.
111.
Swift , A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1712), p. 25–26.
112.
William Warburton, A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles, as Related by Historians (London: Thomas Corbett, 1727), p. 64.
113.
Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991). For a concise treatment of the Oxford Saxonists between 1688 and 1715, see David Fairer, “Anglo-Saxon Studies”, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 5, ed. L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986). See also René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), Chapter 2.
114.
According to Hickes, philology was its own reward. For the student of the “origenall European languages […] the discoverys he will find himself able to make in these thinges will be so delightfull to him, that he will scarse be sensible of his paines”. Hickes, letter to Arthur Charlett, November 24, 1694, in A Chorus of Grammars: The Correspondence of George Hickes and His Collaborators on the Thesaurus linguarum septentrionalium, ed. Richard L. Harris (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992), p. 151.
115.
Hickes, Institutiones Grammaticæ Anglo-Saxonicæ, et Mœso-Gothicæ (Oxford, 1689).
116.
Information on Hickes and Wanley is drawn chiefly from David C. Douglas, English Scholars 1660–1730, 2nd ed. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951), Chapters 4 and 5; Harris, introduction to A Chorus of Grammars; Levine , The Battle of the Books, Chapters 11 and 12; Theodor Harmsen, “Hickes, George (1642–1715)”, ODNB; and Peter Heyworth, “Wanley, Humfrey (1672–1726)”, ODNB.
117.
Hickes, Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-Criticus et Archæologicus, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1703–1705).
118.
Douglas, p. 89.
119.
On Hearne’s editing of the chronicle—and Pope’s attack on him in The Dunciad —see my essay “The Afterlife of Annotation: How Robert of Gloucester Became the Founding Father of English Poetry”, in Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Michael Edson (Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh UP, 2017).
120.
Information on Elstob is drawn chiefly from Mechthild Gretsch, “Elstob, Elizabeth (1683–1756)”, ODNB; and Douglas, p. 72–76. For a reading of Elstob’s life and work from a more feminist perspective, see Shaun F. D. Hughes, “Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756) and the Limits of Women’s Agency in Early-Eighteenth-Century England”, in Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
121.
Elizabeth Elstob, ed. An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-Day of St. Gregory (London: W. Bowyer, 1709).
122.
Elstob, The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (London: W. Bowyer, 1715).
123.
Elstob, preface to Rudiments, p. ii. Italics reversed for all quotations from the preface.
124.
Elstob, preface to Rudiments, p. iii.
125.
Elstob, preface to Rudiments, p. iv.
126.
Elstob, preface to Rudiments, p. xi.
127.
Elstob, preface to Rudiments, p. xxix.
128.
OED, s.v. “sand”.
129.
Elstob, preface to Rudiments, p. xviii.
130.
Gretsch, ODNB.
131.
See list at Williams and Williams, eds., The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 1, p. 236.
132.
Pope , “Essay”, p. 255–256.
133.
Howard D. Weinbrot’s anti-Augustan Pope is not the “young Pope” who called Queen Anne “Augusta” but, rather, “the mature Alexander Pope” who lived under George II in the 1730s. Weinbrot , Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978), p. 52, 134. See also Weinbrot , Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 20. Despite being persuaded by Weinbrot’s argument that the English Augustans, including Pope, were ambivalent about Augustus and other elements of the classical world, I find that the Essay is not ambivalent in its preference for ancient civilizations over the barbarians who succeeded them.
134.
Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), p. 8. On the origins of Augustan verse forms, see especially Doody, Chapter 2.
135.
For a much different reading of Pope’s “Essay” as opening space for “cultural diversities”, see Alok Yadav, Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 146
136.
As Doody says of the Augustan poets, “Decorum is occasional; appetite, permanent.” Doody, p. 8.
137.
Pope, preface to the 1717 edition, in The Twickenham Edition, vol. 1, p. 7.
138.
Culler calls Bysshe’s Art “the beginning of modern English prosody”. It was joined in 1711 by Charles Gildon’s prosody. A. Dwight Culler, “Edward Bysshe and the Poet’s Handbook”, PMLA 63, no. 3 (September 1948): 858–885, p. 872.
139.
Edward Bysshe, The Art of English Poetry (London, 1702), p. 1–2.
140.
Bysshe, p. 12.
141.
On the dearth of anapestic verse for most of the eighteenth century, see Martin S. Day, “Anstey and Anapestic Satire in the Late Eighteenth Satire”, ELH 15, no. 2 (June 1948): 122–146.
142.
Samuel Johnson, “A Grammar of the English Tongue”, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 18, Johnson on the English Language, ed. Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria, Jr. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005), p. 351. On Johnson’s revision of this passage in the 1773 fourth edition of the Dictionary, see Paul Fussell, “A Note on Samuel Johnson and the Rise of Accentual Prosodic Theory”, Philological Theory 33, no. 4 (October 1954): 431–433.
143.
Allan Ramsay, preface to The Ever Green , being a Collection of Scots Poems, Wrote by the Ingenious before 1600, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Thomas Ruddiman, 1724), vol. 1, p. vii. Italics reversed.
144.
On Macpherson’s works of Ossian, see especially Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James MacPherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1988); Howard Gaskill, ed., Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991); and Weinbrot , Britannia’s Issue, Chapter 14.
145.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006), p. 1.
146.
Gellner , p. 43.
147.
Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 3rd ed. (Champaign, Ill.: Common Ground, 2015), p. 84, 83.
148.
One of Nairn’s concerns is to explain the absence of a nationalist political movement in Scotland between 1800 and 1870, a problem which lies outside the scope of this study in time and focus. He is no doubt right that eighteenth-century Scotland was “almost uniquely well equipped for the nationalist battles ahead”. Nairn , p. 83.
149.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On the Metre of Christabel”, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 11, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995), p. 442.
150.
Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), p. 10.
151.
See Anderson, Chapters 1 and 2.
152.
Anderson, p. 5.
153.
Anderson, p. 25. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968).
154.
Gellner, p. 27.
155.
Hobsbawm, introduction to The Invention of Tradition, p. 1.
156.
Hobsbawm, introduction to The Invention of Tradition, p. 2.
157.
Trevor -Roper writes of Celtic Scotland that “It had—could have—no independent tradition.” Trevor-Roper , “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland”, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Ranger , p. 16.
158.
Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 3.
159.
Smith, p. 2.
160.
Smith, p. 25.
161.
Smith, p. 32.
162.
Smith, p. 201.
163.
Kidd, p. 6.
164.
Kidd, p. 287.
165.
Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), p. 36; Patrick Wormald, “The Venerable Bede and the ‘Church of the English’”, in The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism, ed. Geoffrey Rowell (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), especially p. 21–26. See also James Campbell on England before 1066: “It may seem extravagant to describe early England as a ‘nation-state’. Nevertheless it is unavoidable.” Campbell , “The United Kingdom of England: The Anglo-Saxon Achievement”, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 31.
166.
Hastings , p. 18.
167.
Hastings , p. 4. Liah Greenfeld has argued for a similar priority for England as “the first nation in the world” although she locates its emergence as a nation in the sixteenth century. Greenfeld , Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992), p. 14.
168.
Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 92.
169.
Kumar , p. 102; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), Chapter 14.
170.
Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?”, trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 11. (The brackets around “the principle of” appear in Thom’s English translation.)
171.
Renan, p. 19.
172.
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), p. 85. Emphasis in the original.
173.
Nor do I mean to downplay the significance of Jacobitism in the formation of eighteenth-century Scottish culture, as persuasively demonstrated by Pittock in several works. But see Pittock on the reasons that “Jacobitism in Wales differed from that in both Scotland and Ireland”. Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), p. 201–206.
174.
See, for example, Alexander Geddes, “Three Scottish Poems, with a Previous Dissertation on the Scoto-Saxon Dialect”, in Transactions of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland (Edinburgh: William and Alexander Smellie, 1792), vol. 1.
175.
See Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Edward Jones’s Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1784), and, beyond the scope of this study, Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789). Despite the proliferation of editions of Scottish national relics beginning with Ramsay’s The Ever Green in 1724, the first major collection with “relics” in the title that I know of is a volume of more recent texts, James Hogg’s Jacobite Relics of Scotland (1819–1821).
176.
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), p. xii.
177.
John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987).
178.
Trumpener, p. xi.
179.
Trumpener, p. 6, 34.
180.
James Mulholland, Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013), p. 27.
181.
Trumpener notes in an endnote that “ironically” Welsh antiquarian Evan Evans corresponded with Englishmen like Thomas Percy and Samuel Johnson. Trumpener, p. 294, note 9. Such correspondence is not ironic at all but, rather, was the norm.
182.
Mulholland , p. 27.
183.
J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996 [1993]).
184.
Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). On uneven development among the British nations, see also Nairn.
185.
Quoted in Neeson , p. 31.
186.
William Carr, preface to The Dialect of Craven, in the West-Riding of the County of York, with a Copious Glossary […], 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: William Crofts, 1828), vol. 1, p. xvii.
187.
Robert Forby, The Vocabulary of East Anglia; An Attempt to Record the Vulgar Tongue of the Twin Sister Counties, Norfolk and Suffolk, as It Existed in the Last Twenty Years of the Eighteenth Century, and Still Exists […], 2 vols. (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1830), vol. 1, p. 1. On the stigmatization of English dialects by, for instance, Samuel Johnson, see my essay “Samuel Johnson: Standardizer of English, Preserver of Gaelic”, ELH 77, no. 1 (spring 2010): 237–265.
188.
Hutchinson, p. 4.
189.
Hutchinson, p. 2.
190.
Hutchinson, p. 9. See also Trumpener’s understanding of bardic nationalism as a “displacement of political anger into cultural expression”. Trumpener , p. 11.
191.
Hutchinson, p. 34.
192.
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 6.
193.
Chatterjee, p. 7.
194.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 240.
195.
Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), p. 26.
196.
Similarly, Carol McGuirk has turned to Bhabha’s concept of hybridity in reading the poetry of Robert Burns. McGuirk , “Writing Scotland: Robert Burns”, in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 2, ed. Ian Brown et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007), p. 169. On “the blind-spots in postcolonial criticism” in the era of British devolution, see Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), p. 309.
197.
Bhabha , The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 9.
198.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), p. 28.
199.
Ngũgĩ, Matigari, trans. Wangũi wa Goro (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998), p. 18. Compare Fanon: “This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others.” Fanon, p. 246.
200.
Ngũgĩ, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London: James Currey, 1993), p. 35–36.
201.
J. G. A. Pocock, “British History: A Plea for a New Subject”, Journal of Modern History 47, no. 4 (December 1975): 601–621; “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject”, American Historical Review 87, no. 2 (April 1982): 311–336; “History and Sovereignty: The Historiographical Response to Europeanization in Two British Cultures”, Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (October 1992): 358–389; “The New British History in Atlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary”, American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 490–500.
202.
Pocock, “British History”, p. 603.
203.
Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History”, p. 311.
204.
Pocock, “The New British History”, p. 490.
205.
Pocock, “British History”, p. 603–604.
206.
Pocock, “British History”, p. 605.
207.
Pocock, “The New British History”, p. 494.
208.
John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), p. vii.
209.
Philip Schwyzer, introduction to Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550–1800, ed. Schwyzer and Simon Mealor (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), p. 2.
210.
Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989).
211.
Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt, eds., introduction to Wales and the Romantic Imagination (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), p. 3.
212.
Walford Davies and Pratt, p. 6.
213.
Crawford , Devolving, p. 6.
214.
Leith Davis, “At ‘sang about’: Scottish Song and the Challenge to British Culture”, in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Davis , Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), p. 195. See also her Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–1830 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).
215.
Duncan with Davis and Sorensen, introduction to Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, p. 1, 6.
216.
David Fairer, “Chatterton’s Poetic Afterlife, 1770–1794: A Context for Coleridge’s Monody”, in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999), p. 234, 237.
217.
David Duff and Catherine Jones, eds., Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2007). p 13.
218.
Walford Davies and Pratt, p. 4.
219.
Besides Geraint H. Jenkins’s editing of the essay collection A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), there are also single-author volumes on Iolo by Jenkins , Cathryn A. Charnell-White, Mary-Ann Constantine, Ffion Mair Jones, and Marion Löffler.
220.
Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes, eds., “Introduction: Romancing the Celt”, in English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 1.
221.
Nicholas Roe, ed., English Romantic Writers and the West Country (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Tim Fulford, Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries: The Dialect of the Tribe (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), especially Chapter 1. See also Marilyn Butler’s account of John Brand, Joseph Ritson, and others as Northumberland antiquarians demonstrating a “collective ethos, an interest in their local roots and a commitment to popular culture”. Butler , Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), p. 129.
222.
Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah, eds., The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (London: Penguin, 2006).
223.
Penny Fielding, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), Chapter 5.
224.
Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000).
225.
Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell UP, 2007), p. 15.
226.
Sarah Prescott has rightly called eighteenth-century Wales “the piece of the jigsaw usually missing in this context”. Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), p. xiv.
227.
Schwyzer , Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), Chapter 1, especially p. 34–38.
228.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, 2nd ed. (London: Pimlico, 2003).
229.
Weinbrot , Britannia’s Issue, p. 3.
230.
Susan Manning, “Antiquarianism, Balladry and the Rehabilitation of Romance”, in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), p. 52.
231.
See, for example, Joseph M. Levine on English antiquarianism: “The antiquarian impulse was born of the revival of antiquity; it was from first to last a by-product of the admiration for the classics that first awoke during the Italian Renaissance and that flourished for generations as the bedrock of European education and culture. It was humanism that created it […].” Levine , Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell, 1987), p. 73.
232.
See, for example, Stuart Piggott, Ruins in a Landscape: Essays in Antiquarianism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1976), especially Chapter 6. On Stukeley’s early eighteenth-century work on Stonehenge and Avebury, see Piggott , William Stukeley: An Eighteenth-Century Antiquary, rev. ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), Chapter 4.
233.
Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13, nos. 3–4 (1950): 285–315, p. 311.
234.
Momigliano , The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 54.
235.
Manning , “Antiquarianism, Balladry”, p. 53.
236.
On the contributions of Gibbon and Hume to British historiography, see, respectively, Levine , Humanism and History; and Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), Chapters 1 and 2.
237.
Rosemary Sweet, “Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 2 (2001): 181–206, p. 181.
238.
Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), p. 1.
239.
Sweet, Antiquaries, p. 2.
240.
Sweet, Antiquaries, p. xx.
241.
Fielding and Sweet are similarly aware of antiquarianism’s use in legitimating property claims. See Fielding , p. 114; and Sweet, Antiquaries, p. 36–39.
242.
On the “refractory” relationship between antiquarian detail and historical narrative specifically in the case of Scottish antiquarianism during the Enlightenment, see Manning, “Antiquarianism, the Scottish Science of Man, and the Emergence of Modern Disciplinarity”, in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Davis , Duncan , and Sorensen, p. 57.
243.
Fielding , p. 101.
244.
Paula McDowell, “‘The Manufacture and Lingua-facture of Ballad-Making’: Broadside Ballads in Long Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse”, The Eighteenth Century 47, nos. 2–3 (summer 2006): 151–178, p. 152.
245.
McDowell , p. 154.
246.
McDowell , p. 171–173. On women’s roles in all aspects of balladry, see McDowell , The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998); and Ruth Perry, “Ballads”, in The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789, ed. Catherine Ingrassia (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015).
247.
On David Herd and Joseph Ritson as “alternative” antiquarians who avoided the dual pitfalls of distorting their source materials and portraying ballads as a dead practice in need of revival, see Sorensen, “Alternative Antiquarianisms of Scotland and the North”, Modern Language Quarterly 70, no. 4 (December 2009): 415–441.
248.
Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), p. 103.
249.
Stewart, p. 110.
250.
Stewart, p. 122.
251.
Maureen McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), p. 5.
252.
McLane, p. 13.
253.
Erik Simpson, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 3.
254.
Simpson, “Revising Inspiration: Minstrels, Bards, and Improvisers in British and Irish Literature, 1757–1830”, PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2001, p. 57–70. As we will see in Chapter 3, the poem by Gray that we now call “The Bard ” did not have this title until 1768.
255.
Simpson, Literary Minstrelsy, p. 1.
256.
On the influence of the minstrel via Percy and Beattie on Wordsworth, see Kathryn Sutherland, “The Native Poet: The Influence of Percy’s Minstrel from Beattie to Wordsworth”, Review of English Studies 33, no. 132 (November 1982): 414–433. On Wordsworth’s identification with Welsh bardism, see Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842, 2nd ed. (n.p.: Humanities Ebooks, 2015).
257.
Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry”, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), p. 239.
258.
Langan and McLane , p. 246.
259.
Langan and McLane , p. 242.
260.
McLane, p. 10.
261.
Siskin and William Warner, “This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument”, in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Siskin and Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 5.
262.
Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts, eds., preface to Ballads into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child, 2nd ed. (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), p. 5.
263.
Coleridge, letter to William Wordsworth, January [23], 1798, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956–1971), vol. 1, p. 379. Emphasis in the original. For more on this ballad, see Chapter 5.
264.
Langan and McLane , p. 240.
265.
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 1.
266.
Siskin , The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), p. 3.
267.
Mary Poovey, “The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism”, Critical Inquiry 27 (spring 2001): 408–438, p. 422.
268.
Virginia Jackson, “Who Reads Poetry?”, PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008): 181–187, p. 183; Jackson and Yopie Prins, introduction to The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jackson and Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), p. 1.
269.
My thinking about the meaning of form is indebted to Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1987).
270.
Prins, “‘What Is Historical Poetics?’” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 1 (March 2016): 13–40, p. 14.
271.
Ramsay , letter to the Earl of Hartford, included in letter to Sir John Clerk, January 4, 1726, in The Works of Allan Ramsay, ed. Burns Martin, John W. Oliver, Alexander M. Kinghorn, and Alexander Law, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons for the Scottish Text Society, 1951–1974), vol. 4, p. 178.
272.
Wordsworth wrote four poems in the Habbie stanza. Brennan O’Donnell, “Numerous Verse: A Guide to the Stanzas and Metrical Structures of Wordsworth’s Poetry”, Studies in Philology 86, no. 4 (autumn 1989): 1–136, p. 61–62. Three of them he wrote on Scottish themes. For later non-Scottish poets who used the Habbie stanza, see Douglas Dunn, “‘A Very Scottish Kind of Dash’: Burns’s Native Metric”, in Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, ed. Robert Crawford (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), p. 83.
273.
See, for example, Attridge , The Rhythms of English Poetry (London: Longman, 1982).
274.
Paul Fussell, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (New London: Connecticut College, 1954).
275.
Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012), p. 4, 3.

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Strabone, J. (2018). Introduction: Beowulf or Brutus of Troy?. 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_1

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