Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century: Imagined Antiquities by Jeff Strabone (review)

There is much to like about Jeff Strabone's study of bardic poetry and cultural nationalism in Romantic-era Britain. Not least, the book's reminder that the Romantic era is defined by its engagement with medieval language and literature. As Strabone also reminds us, that engagement reaches back to the philological and antiquarian research of the first half of the eighteenth century, which in turn has its roots in earlier, Tudor antiquarianism and politics. Whatever else it achieves, the book's focus on the centrality of the Middle Ages to the emergence and development of Romanticism is both successful and welcome.

Chapter 1 focuses on Allan Ramsay's The Ever Green (1724), deftly linking Ramsay's collecting and editing of Middle Scots verse with better-known works such as Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Thomas Warton's The History of English Poetry (1774–81), and the archaic verse and forgeries of Thomas Chatterton. Strabone carries out similar work in Chapter 2, focusing on Evan Evans's Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (1764) and the ways in which the study of Welsh and Norse poetics influenced the poetry and unpublished literary historiography of Thomas Gray. The chapter is also notable for its attention to the editorial conventions of antiquaries such as John Urry and Thomas Tyrwhitt and to textual design and publishing history, which add nuance to Strabone's argument and suggest new avenues for research. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the ways in which the cultural nationalism of Scots and Welsh editors and poets influenced the work of later eighteenth-century writers including Edward Jones, Iolo Morganwg, and the book's key figure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Chapter 5, Coleridge's Christabel and Kubla Khan receive careful, detailed examination that sets Strabone's scholarship in its best light.

Running through all five chapters are the book's intertwined twin foci: cultural nationalism and poetic meter. The concept of cultural nationalism employed here follows in the path set down by scholars such as Krishan Kumar and Colin Kidd, carefully balanced with those articulations of Welsh, Scots, and English identity found in the letters and published works of eighteenth-century editors and poets. The result is an idea of nationhood that rests on a sense of shared cultural history rather than on loyalty to the nation-state. In the context of eighteenth-century Britain, Strabone rightly observes that cultural history remained both porous and malleable. As Strabone argues, Gray's borrowing from Welsh literary traditions, like Ramsay's and Percy's editing with an eye to English and Scandinavian examples, respectively, leads to works in which national languages and poetics demonstrate national uniqueness. At the same time, their shared bardic nature is shown to provide common ground for sympathetic, related identities within a polyglot Great Britain (later, as Strabone acknowledges, encompassing Ireland). These arguments are not only convincing and timely but a useful reminder of the need for further investigation of the interplay of linguistic studies, local antiquarianisms, and writing and publishing practices as forces in the construction of complex identities in the past and the present.

The book turns on a series of extremely productive case studies of poets' and editors' engagements with poetic meter, which is revealed as a fundamental unit of meaning and a necessary means of understanding the connections between medieval and Romantic poetics. Ramsay's knowledge of Middle Scots meter, like Iolo Morganwg's of medieval Welsh, and the "association of variable line lengths and syllabic looseness" (p. 230) with Northern cultures on the part of Gray and Coleridge, are explored alongside close, technical readings of the neomedieval verses of these and other bardic poets in ways that are surprisingly seamless. At times the reader can feel like one of Coleridge...