3 - Political passions

Summary

Although the eighteenth century is widely regarded as the great age of political verse, that label really applies more strictly to a sixty-year period which cuts across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: between the rise of political parties in the 1680s and the fall of Robert Walpole in 1742. During that period the lives and works of most poets were shaped, even defined, by political allegiance. After the mid 1740s poetry was rarely the province of party-politics. With the brief exception of Charles Churchill's pro-Wilkes satires of the early 1760s, few poets tackled political themes with the intensity, even “passion,” of the first half of the century. This account must by necessity be weighted heavily toward the earlier period. Yet a political canon centered on the Tory satirists Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson fails to convey adequately the complexity of party-political debates played out in the poetry of the period. The Whig party - which dominated eighteenth-century political life and institutions between the powerful cabals of Whig politicians during William III's and Anne's reigns through the twenty-year ministry of Robert Walpole and beyond - attracted and sponsored numerous poets, among them Joseph Addison, Thomas Tickell, Richard Blackmore, and Ambrose Philips. Few of these Whig poets are now read, their names familiar only from Pope's Dunciad. Pope and his fellow satirists, best known in their collective identity as the Tory-based Scriblerus Club, were remarkably successful in promoting for posterity the myth that Whig poetry was dull, long-winded, and ignorant. They were fighting a rearguard action against a dominant Whig literary culture and a modern, selfconfident British poetry inspired by great contemporary events such as William III's and the Duke of Marlborough's military victories during the Nine Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession. It is important to reinstate this Whig tradition if only to convey a better sense of the way in which poetic form both mirrored and embodied party-political debate in the early years of the century.