Chapter XI. The Eighteenth Century. 3. Poetry

The canon of eighteenth-century poetry—its formation, its legacy and the many successful efforts to expand its limits—was an enduring subject in studies published in 2023, even if this subject is not their central or explicit focus. The persistence of canonical names might, then, document eighteenth-century poetry’s exemplification of how, despite the waning cultural prestige of ‘high literature from the past’ and the counterpressure of alternative canons, ‘received literary history’ remains ‘the domain of white, male hegemony’, as Simon During writes in an essay included in a special issue commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory’s Cultural Capital, ‘Elegizing Cultural Capital’ (Genre 562023 15–31) (p. 18). Yet, as During notes in relation to Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, returning to canonical texts in their historical environments is one strategy for re-invigorating the study of English literature and the practice of literary criticism. Reading for the signatures of religious, educational and rhetorical contexts in Gray’s poem reveals how canons (and cultural capital) are made from ‘inside literature’s most engaging, influential, and forceful texts’ (pp. 25–6), and how the process of canon-formation can be uncovered by an ‘immersion in those texts that best allow us to analyze and celebrate the coherence and power of the literary archive as an intelligible unit’ (p. 30). Below, we return to Gray’s ‘Elegy’, which remains a staple in studies of eighteenth-century poetry. But it is Pope and Swift who figure as the most repeatedly analysed poets in monographs and essays published in 2023. (Such is the pervasiveness of Pope, in particular, that attempting to confine Pope studies to a single part of this section would be ineffective.) Long canonical, and abidingly so as 2023’s work attests, Pope and Swift continue to underwrite intellectual engagements with eighteenth-century poetry, including work on the inside of the canon—its technical construction, poem by poem, through the work of allusion, translation and (turning outside) reception. Testifying to wide critical interest in the processes by which eighteenth-century poets established literary authority through affiliation with the classical canon, one of the poets who features most in the publications under review is not a poet from the eighteenth century at all, but one from the first century BCE: Horace. Other poets receiving particular attention in 2023 include Thomson (the subject of several chapters and essays) and Oliver Goldsmith (whose most famous poem, The Deserted Village 1770, is marked in an anniversary special issue). This canonical emphasis is balanced somewhat by the new, multi-volume edition of the works of Allan Ramsay, and a book-length study of James Macpherson (though one that looks beyond his poetry). So far, so male—a characteristic of the canon that seems as difficult to break as the patriarchal ideology underpinning it. Yet, as we discuss below, some fresh work on women poets and labouring-class poets (most prominently, a fulsome special issue on the sailor-poet, William Falconer), including their relationship to the institutions subtending the canon’s politics of inclusion, continue the vital work of unpicking those threads.