Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Cultural History by Marilyn Butler (review)

Marilyn Butler died in 2014, leaving behind an uncompleted, ambitious work on Romantic mythologies. Her argument was that the Romantic imagination posed its characteristic challenge to the established order through the structures of myth in the widest sense—nonrational, “native,” and provincial, rather than classical and metropolitan. In this work, she built on the insights of a group of critics (chiefly Northrop Frye, M. H. Abrams, and Harold Bloom) not oversympathetic to the prevailing ethos of an “Augustanizing” eighteenth century, whose luminaries were (and still are) Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Reynolds, and Burke, and whom critical taste tended especially to privilege in the middle years of the last century. Butler espoused in her own distinctive way an alternative pre-Romantic scenario but did not implement her mature Romantic project, except in a range of individual essays and, incidentally, in her early synoptic study Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (1981).

What she more or less completed instead was a series of prolegomena on a non-Augustan set of writers, beginning in the 1730s, who serve as pre-Romantic forerunners. These were the Scottish or provincial James Thomson and Mark Akenside, the lyrical and bardic poets William Collins and Thomas Gray, the “forgers” of regional or national (as distinct from classical) antiquities, Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson, antiquarian collectors and anthologists such as Joseph Ritson, and finally the towering genius of the unmetropolitan Londoner William Blake. “Pope might advert to classical Athens . . . but Chatter-ton ‘mythologised’ the burghers of Bristol,” as Butler says, but she might have added how much Chatterton strove to be a Popeian poet too and how much an almost Popeian (or even Yeatsian) glow sometimes enters into his fervid Bristolian campanilismo. Similarly, Macpherson’s Ossianic fragments often come laced with Homeric and even Virgilian touches, and Christopher Smart, only cursorily mentioned in Butler’s book, wrote his own Augustanizing corpus of verse alongside the poems that win him his pre-Romantic credentials.

Whether or not “mythologies” is a broad enough umbrella to cover the full range of antiofficial outlooks (“country” vs. court or city, native vs. classic, regional vs. metropolitan, rural vs. urban, private vs. public) is a question that this book leaves suggestively untouched. It is, in the last analysis, a work of fruitful hints, not conclusive definition. It is written with a sober and acute elegance that stands up well to the passage of time. It has been put together with delicacy and skill by Butler’s distinguished colleague Heather Glen. Its riches include a rewarding and unexpected perspective on eighteenth-century poetry as well a glimpse of what might have been given to us on Romantic poetry itself had Butler been able to complete her plan.