The Story Of Poetry English Poets And Poetry From Pope To Burns

Download or read book The Story of Poetry: English poets and poetry from Pope to Burns written by Michael Schmidt and published by Orion Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [In the eighteenth century], a rural English wholesomeness survives, but only just. The wider world is one of cultural importations and studied politeness on the one hand, and aggressive xenophobia on the other. A year after Indian printed calicoes were banned because they were too popular, the novelist-to-be Daniel Defoe wrote his one famous poem, The True-Born Englishman (1701), making fun of national prejudices which threatened to impoverish English political and cultural life for years to come. The political point of his poem was rather more ingratiating, for the King of England was not English-born and the King was himself a catalyst of xenophobia. If we miss out or over-simplify the eighteenth century, we misread the nineteenth and twentieth and, more to the point, we ignore some extraordinary poetry.