ABSTRACT
Questions of authority coloured much of the British poetic landscape in the early to mid-eighteenth century. Contemporary concerns over the assertion, use and misuse of authority that both secured and dogged Sir Robert Walpole’s political reign as the first modern British Prime Minister unearthed a wave of criticism against the rise of Grub Street and its power to shape public opinion and founded much of the vigorous religious and theological debate during the period. These concerns also reverberated throughout the Augustan poetic sphere – or, at least, such is the scene presented by modern critics. Combating a commonplace perception of Augustan poetry as stifled by rules and neo-classical regulation, Margaret Anne Doody’s reexamination of Augustan poetics presents the modern reader with an alternative perspective: “The poetry of the Augustan Age is ambitious and adventurous. It has confidence in its own authority.” This, she advances, is demonstrated by the selfassured way it “imports new languages and remodels old ones.”1 Harriet Guest, also concerned with constructions of poetic authority, is a little more circumspect in her consideration. Specifically addressing a religious poetic as both incoherent yet distinct from secular Augustan poetics, Guest proposes that “the terms on which the audience is addressed, the position of the poet, and the nature of his authority … are the key terms in understanding both the treatment of religious or moral themes in certain kinds of poetry and their exclusion from others.” Religious poets of the period “can all be seen as concerned, more or less selfconsciously, to negotiate the authority with which they speak.”2 Where Doody interprets this process of re-negotiation and re-modelling as an ostensible sign of poetic confidence, Guest presents the evolution of poetic authority in Augustan devotional poetry as a varied and hesitant compromise. Both underline the same process that I wish to examine in detail in this chapter. The poets considered here demonstrate an acute understanding of their role in this particular development, and their poetic responses can be read as a series of experimental exercises of re-negotiation between religion and poetry and between poet and reader. They exemplify the incremental evolution that Guest observes in religious poetry of the early to mid-eighteenth century but culminate in and very much contribute to a renewed confidence and bravado that bridges the religious and secular in midcentury poetics.
