Milton’s Heirs: Epic Poetry in the 1790s
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Joseph Crawford is a junior research fellow at the University of Cambridge. His first book. Raising Milton’s Ghost will be published by Bloomsbury in late 2010. He is presently researching the historical contexts of early gothic literature in English.
Footnotes
1. William Hayley, An Essay on Epic Poetry, ed. M. Celeste Williamson (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968) 31. Subsequent citations will be cited in the text by page.
2. Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735) 26.
3. Jean Terrasson, A Critical Dissertation upon Homer’s Iliad (London, 1722) 1: 84; Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 146.
4. John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale UP, 1953–1982) 1: 810–14.
5. Amongst these scriptural epics were Samuel Wesley’s History of the New Testament (1701) and History of the Old Testament (1704), Abel Evans’s Prae-Existence (1714), the anonymous The Last Day (1720), Thomas Newcomb’s Last Judgment (1723), William Roberts’ Judah Restored (1774), Elizabeth Smith’s Brethren (1787) and Israel (1789), Mary Scott’s Messiah (1788), Elizabeth Hands’s Death of Amnon (1789), and Ann Holmes’s Adam and Eve (1800).
6. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (London: Oxford UP, 1989) 7.
7. To this list should perhaps be added Helen Maria Williams’ 1784 epic, Peru. Although less overtly concerned with the American Revolutionary War than the poems of Dwight or Barlow, Williams’ celebration of peace-loving Americans resisting invasion by warlike Europeans had obvious resonances with recent events, especially given Williams’ own opposition to the American war.
8. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1986) 158.
9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966) 1: 183.
10. The first reviewers of Southey’s Joon of Arc criticized it for having been written too quickly, suggesting that such haste implied “so slight an opinion of (perhaps) the most arduous effort of human invention.” See Christopher Smith, A Quest For Home (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1997) 115.
11. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 137–39, 164–65.
12. Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992) 167–93.
13. Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995) 107.
14. James Ogden, Emmanuel (London, 1797) 130, 110.
15. James Burges, Richard I (London, 1801) 2: 70.
16. James Ogden, Revolution (London, 1790) 42; James Pye, Alfred (London, 1815) 60–61; Richard Cumberland, Calvary (London, 1792) 68–69.
17. Sarah Pyke, Israel (London, 1795) I: V, 2: 8, 2: 147–48; Robert Southey, Joan of Arc (Bristol, 1796) 94.
18. Samuel Wilcocke, Britannia (London, 1797) 12.
19. John Ogilvie, Britannia (London, 1801) 527–34.
20. Hannah Cowley, The Siege of Acre (London, 1801) 88, 124.
21. Walter Savage Landor, Gebir (London, 1798) 60. It was once commonly asserted that the plot of Gebir was inspired by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, but Simon Bainbridge has shown this to be improbable, as Landor began writing it as early as 1796. See Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 32.
22. Of all these epics, The Niliad is the only one of which I have been unable to locate any surviving copies. My information on it comes only from a mention of it in the Critical Review XXV, new arr. (1799), which mocks Hildreth’s use of Classical machinery: “In an epic poem upon a victory so peculiarly attributed to providence, it was injudicious to derive its success from the heathen gods, as, according to the most ancient and orthodox opinions, those deities were the fallen angels. Mr Hildreth has therefore given the glory to the devil” (354–55).
23. John Marchant, “Dedication,” in John Milton, Paradise Lost (London, 1751) v–vi.
24. George Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964) 16.
25. DNB 14: 618; Curran 164.
