British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
WARTON LECTURE ON ENGLISH POETRY
Poetry against Empire: Milton to Shelley
Dr Karen O'Brien, University of Warwick
8 November 2001
The lecture will discuss the tradition of anti-imperial poetics in the late seventeenth-century to early nineteenth-century England. Particularly in comparison with the poetry of the Roman Empire, English poetry of this period was distinguised by a reluctance or refusal to produce a dedicated poetry of empire at a time of unprecedented imperial expansion. The lecture will explore the literary, cultural and political reasons for this, and for the development of a globally aware, anti-imperial sensibility in English poetry.