A HISTORY OF ENGLAND IN TWENTY-FIVE POEMS

Powerful pens.

From “Caedmon’s Hymn” (circa 730) to Zaffar Kunial’s “The Groundsman” (2022), University of London scholar Clarke traces 1,300 years of British history through verse—some familiar (John of Gaunt’s “This England,” from Shakespeare’s Richard II), some unfamiliar (an excerpt from the satirical “Crumble-Hall” by housemaid Mary Leapor. Major voices are represented, like Chaucer, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lewis Carroll, and W.H. Auden, but Clarke’s compendium is wide-ranging as she considers poems that respond to political turmoil, plague, fire, invasions, court intrigue, and religious tensions, as well as social, political, and cultural changes: “repeated moments of doubt, catastrophe and reinvention in England’s past.” Each chapter offers richly detailed context and an astute close reading. Clarke sees The Battle of Maldon (a commemoration of a Viking incursion into England in 991), for example, as a contribution to the myth-making vital to the cohesiveness of a fledging nation. “What seems, at first, like timeless heroic verse,” she writes, “is in fact an excoriating critique of tenth-century English leadership, and a brilliant piece of propaganda.” The consequences of the Norman Conquest emerge in a verse obituary for William the Conqueror, which Clarke reads as poem of resistance and defiance. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale gives insights into women’s lives in medieval England; Browning’s wrenching “Cry of the Children” lays bare the horror of child labor. Clarke offers a compelling analysis of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” (1812), a prescient poem that depicts a desolate future for a nation at the height of its global power. The poem, Clarke argues, which served as “a message for readers—politicians, opinion-makers, thinkers—in her own present,” resonates in our own time. Discerning choices and incisive analyses amply support her contention that “all poems speak to multiple historical moments, have multiple lives and afterlives.”

A fresh perspective on the past.