Chapter 8 - Verse and Verse Satire

Summary

This chapter considers major aspects of Defoe’s output in verse, touching on his debt to influential predecessors from the Restoration era, where his most important models were Andrew Marvell, Samuel Butler, and John Dryden. A discussion follows of characteristic poems that exhibit various modes of satiric writing, including ballads and quasi-Pindaric items such as A Hymn to the Pillory (1703) and The Vision (1706); allusive productions in the fashionable form of heroic couplets, such as The Mock Mourners (1702) and The Dyet of Poland (1705); and his longest poem, Jure Divino (1706), labelled a satire, but centrally an exercise in political theory. The discussion culminates in an analysis of the most successful work in the canon, a biting interrogation of nationhood, The True-Born Englishman (1701), with an exploration of the methods by which Defoe undermined the Little Englander rhetoric of his principal target, the journalist John Tutchin.