Empire of the Sea: Blake's “King Edward the Third” and English Imperial Poetry

In the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid, Juno, still nursing an animus against Troy, entices Aeolus to blow Aeneas off his epic course. In reply Neptune rises to command the winds: “Speed your flight, and say this to your king [Aeolus]: not to him but to me fate granted the empire of the sea [imperium pelagi] and the stern trident” (Virgil 1:138–39). ¹ Neptune’s response sets the tone and supplies the theme for a tradition of English imperial poetry that stretches from Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599) through Edward Young’s “Imperium Pelagi” (1730) to Blake’s “King Edward the Third” (composed c. 1778–80, published 1783). ² For my purposes, this tradition culminates in the work of George Ill’s poet laureate William Whitehead, whose royal odes form the most immediate target of Blake’s parody in “Edward.” ³ In this early work from Poetical Sketches, Blake combines satiric allusion and prophetic stance in a way that defines his anti-imperialist conception of poetry.