REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789-1874

In the wake of the French Revolution, political theorists and activists advanced a newly coherent set of democratic principles that form the foundation of our modern political world - the principles of Republicanism. The fate of that project was intertwined with the course of Nineteenth-century English poetry. This study explores how poets who espoused republican political ideals sought to embody and advance those principles in their verse. By examining a range of canonical and non-canonical authors- including Blake, Shelley, Cooper, Linton, Landor, Meredith, Thomson and Swinburne - Kuduk Weiner connects the formal strategies of republican poems to the political theory and expressive cultures of republican radicalism. This study traces a strain of powerful, complex political poetry that casts new light on the political and literary history of nineteenth-century England.