Modern Warfare in Early-Eighteenth-Century Poetry

Between 1704 and 1709 large numbers of poems celebrated allied victories in the War of the Spanish Succession. Most of the poems attempted at once to adapt the heroic forms of the ancients and to represent modern battle accurately. The two aims proved incompatible. Modern war and the modern understanding of war brought constraints on representation and ideas about the nature of heroism that sit uneasily in ancient forms. By the end of the war, there seems to have been a growing realization that ancient martial models might not fit, or be made to fit, modern experience.