In Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire, Suvir Kaul argues that the aggressive nationalism of James Thomson's ode "Rule, Britannia " (1740) is the condition to which much English poetry of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries aspires. Poets as varied as Marvell, Waller and Dryden, Defoe, Addison, John Dyer and Edward Young, or Goldsmith, Cowper, Hannah More and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, all wrote poems deeply engaged with the British-nation-in-the-making. These poets, and many others like them, recognized that the nation and its values and institutions were being defined by the expansion of overseas trade, naval and military control, plantations and colonies. Their poems both embodied, and were concerned about, the culture and ideology of "Great Britain" (itself an idea of the nation that developed alongside the formation of a British Empire). Poems in this period thus flaunt various images of poetic inspiration that show poetry and culture following triumphantly where mercantile and military ships sail. Or sometimes, more self-aggrandizingly for the poet, they enact the process by which the Muses use their powers to inspire and show the way. Even at their most hesitant, these poems were written as interventions into public discussion; their creativity is tied up with that desire to convince and persuade. Finally, as Kaul writes, it is their encyclopedic desire to incorporate new experiences, visions, and values that makes these poems such fine guides to the world of poetry in the long years in which "Great Britain" was consolidated as an empire, at home and abroad.

Eighteenth-century British literary history was long characterized by two central and seemingly discrete movements—the emergence of the novel and the development of Romantic lyric poetry. In fact, recent scholarship reveals that these genres are inextricably bound: constructions of interiority developed in novels changed ideas about what literature could mean and do, encouraging the new focus on private experience and self-perception developed in lyric poetry. In Lyric Generations, Gabrielle Starr rejects the genealogy of lyric poetry in which Romantic poets are thought to have built solely and directly upon the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. She argues instead that novelists such as Richardson, Haywood, Behn, and others, while drawing upon earlier lyric conventions, ushered in a new language of self-expression and community which profoundly affected the aesthetic goals of lyric poets. Examining the works of Cowper, Smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats in light of their competitive dialogue with the novel, Starr advances a literary history that considers formal characteristics as products of historical change. In a world increasingly defined by prose, poets adapted the new forms, characters, and moral themes of the novel in order to reinvigorate poetic practice. "Refreshingly, this impressive study of poetic form does not read the eighteenth century as a slow road to Romanticism, but fleshes out the period with surprising and important new detail."—Times Literary Supplement G. Gabrielle Starr is the Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science and a professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience.

Through an incisive analysis of the emerging debates surrounding urbanization in the Romantic period, together with close readings of poets including William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stephen Tedeschi explores the notion that the Romantic poets criticized the historical form that the process of urbanization had taken, rather than urbanization itself. The works of the Romantic poets are popularly considered in a rural context and often understood as hostile to urbanization - one of the most profound social transformations of the era. By focusing on the urban aspects of such writing, Tedeschi re-orientates the relationship between urbanization and English Romantic poetry to deliver a study that discovers how the Romantic poets examined not only the influence of urbanization on poetry but also how poetry might help to reshape the form that urbanization could take.

In the most comprehensive, up-to-date account of the poetry published in Britain between the Restoration and the end of the eighteenth century, a team of leading experts surveys the poetry of the age in all its richness and diversity. They provide a systematic overview, and restore these poetic works to a position of centrality in modern criticism.

A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY Edited by Christine Gerrard This wide-ranging Companion reflects the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. New essays by leading scholars in the field address an expanded poetic canon that now incorporates verse by many women poets and other formerly marginalized poetic voices. The volume engages with topical critical debates such as the production and consumption of literary texts, the constructions of femininity, sentiment and sensibility, enthusiasm, politics and aesthetics, and the growth of imperialism. The Companion opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry’s relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to slightly less well-known works such as Swift’s “Stella” poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Town Eclogues. Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume. The Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (3rd edition, 2014).

The poetry of the mid- and late-eighteenth century has long been regarded as primarily private and apolitical; in this wide-ranging study Dustin Griffin argues that in fact the poets of the period were addressing the great issues of national life--rebellion at home, imperial wars abroad, an expanding commercial empire, an emerging new British national identity. Taking up the topic of patriotic verse, Griffin shows that poets such as Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Cowper were engaged in the century-long debate about the nature of true patriotism.