National eyes: Romantic poetry and the rise of British nationalism

Following the first Act of Union in 1707, Great Britain was a nation in need of a collective identity. Political acts of union were inadequate for consolidating a nation divided by conflicting languages, cultural experiences, histories, religions, class interests, genders, and races. Echoing the sentiments of Matthew Arnold, this study follows the logic that culture comes to the aid of politics to interpolate national subjects. Great Britain must be understood as a project rather than an essence, an "imagined community" that unified gradually over time and required considerable political will and institutional leverage to both imagine and create. Because of its economic and military supremacy, England held cultural hegemony within this project. This study will specifically examine the contribution made by the British Romantic poets to the cultural construction of British national identity. It will argue that the British Romantic poets both inherited and helped consolidate core beliefs and attitudes around which emerged a uniquely British structure of feeling. These beliefs and attitudes include the idea of a pastoral English homeland, the myth of a classless society, Britain's chosen status, the civilizing mission of empire, and the phenomenon of "counter-patriotism." The first chapter historicizes and conceptualizes Britishness, paying particular attention to the role played by English studies in its construction. Chapter two explores how antiquarians and literary critics reinvented the poet as a bardic figure existing within an invented tradition of national poets. Furthermore, it will demonstrate how William Wordsworth became part of this tradition and how his poetry came to define British national identity in terms of an English pastoral. The third chapter demonstrates how the distinctive properties of Wordsworth's English pastoral abetted nationalism by reifying signs of class inequality. Chapters four and five explore the centrality of Providence in constructions of Britishness and its import for debates concerning the pursuit of empire, especially in the work and thought of Samuel T. Coleridge. Chapter six examines the intersection of imperial discourse, gender and patriotism in poems by Felicia Hemans and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Finally, a coda on William Blake will illuminate alternatives to nationalism in the Romantic Age.