Suvir Kaul. Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire. Ch. 3

In the eighteenth century “the material benefits […] of trading and colonization were inescapable points of reference for any and all literary and intellectual production” (135).

“Thomson is best understood as a poet of empire” (134).

Suvir Kaul begins the chapter with a discussion of the historicity of “poetic terms and icons” (131) he considers central to national, imperial and colonial discourses during the mid-eighteenth century. Kaul’s sense is that these “terms and icons” were developed out of earlier terms and their usages, and that they in turn influenced later poetics and politics. Moreover, he sees “generic innovation” and the use of “formulaic images and topoi” (132) in the service of and constituting political and poetic interventions at the time. Kaul concludes that the prestige of traditional poetic forms (in mid-century) is significantly due to contemporary reworkings, and that these reworkings are themselves enabled and motivated by “the influence on the poetic imagination of the new horizons of colony and empire” (132). Last but not least, in their reconfigurations of earlier poetic forms and iconography, mid-century poets begin to naturalise nationalist and imperialist terminologies and positions, both with respect to their poetic materials as well as to their self-identification as poets and their social and cultural functions. To Kaul, James Thomson represents a central figure in the production of such a poetics of nation and empire.

According to Kaul, the “proper functions” of Thomson’s poetry “are twofold: the shaping of public opinion and the celebration of national strength” (133). Close attention to his poems (and especially to his long poems) thus:

1) sheds light on the centrality of mercantilist and imperialist ideas to mid-century social and cultural discourses;

2) allows for the recognition of how Thomson’s longer poems were involved in the negotiation, representation and promotion of a variety of perspectives and attitudes, of how these poems can serve as registers of such views and their disparities, as well as of the social and cultural work involved in the literary organization of difference(s);

3) foregrounds the often partisan, public and political participation of poetry.

Identifying Thomson’s longer poems as a balancing acts between military and mercantile imperialism, between pastoral and urban imagery, and between visions of empire as mutable or immutable, Kaul can read a poem such as Liberty as “a record of the difficulty of sustaining” narratives of empire (176).

Turning to Britannia: A Poem, Kaul identifies “a philosophy of history and of the progress (and decline) of empires” (135) as one of its fundamental concerns, a subject he subsequently develops in his readings of The Seasons, Liberty and The Castle of Indolence. In Britannia, pastoral and national epic forms (peace and war, country and city interests, mercantilism and militarism) alternate. These figures are juxtaposed to provide a larger view of imperial enterprise, of its benefits and hazards. However, this arrangement also results in the continued subversion of pastoral imagery of domestic harmony and peace, due to the poem’s crucial investment in the promotion of imperial conquest and rule. Furthermore, Thomson’s historicised narrative of empire(s) threatens a similar decline for the British Empire, which needs to be compensated for in imagery, in the formal juxtaposition and integration of terms and topoi, and in the immense output of poems and lines. Nevertheless, according to Kaul, “[n]o meditation upon empires, however hopeful and hortatory, can close itself off from a fear of disintegration, and this is the fear that surfaces in the desperate vision of a Britain that has lost its trading prowess” (143) in Britannia (and possibly also in Liberty).