"The Hero as Man of Letters": Intellectual Politics and the Construction of the Romantic Epic

Abstract

Although the thirty years from 1794 to 1824 saw the production of more epic poetry than any other period in British literary history, the epic's function within the culture of Romanticism remains largely misunderstood and neglected. The problem in theorizing the Romantic epic stems from the uncommon diversity of epic performances during this period and from the epic's sudden reappearance after a long period of apparent dormancy in the eighteenth century. When the Romantic epic is defined, however, not as poetic form but as a repeated political act, the epic's eighteenth-century history now appears as a continuous process of generic transformation and its formal diversity no longer threatens its generic categorization. In place of understanding the epic as literary genre, I define the Romantic epic as a recurring and highly stylized rhetorical intervention by the intellectual community beginning in the mid-eighteenth century with the primary function of expanding the power of the intellectual "class." Investigating the epic's eighteenth-century transformation, I examine the relationship between classical epics and William Collins and Thomas Gray's Pindaric odes, James Macpherson's Ossian "translations," and James Beattie's Minstrel. I argue that these so-called pre-Romantic poems reveal both a Romantic rejection of the Augustan epic and a Romantic desire to repurpose the epic's structures toward the emerging interests of the intellectual community. The conscious task was to develop a new epic mode, one that would make a hero of the man of letters, to write the kind of epic performance found in Robert Southey's Joan of Arc. Focusing on the Romantic epic's function, I demonstrate that the Romantic epic provided a pattern through which intellectuals began to see themselves and the world. In order to change society Romantic intellectuals were modifying the genre which, in turn, was reshaping intellectual consciousness. Thus, acting reciprocally, I show that the epic was at the center of the larger Romantic project: an intellectual effort to deliver humanity from commercial society.