Romantic poetry and the standardization of English Typically, as is often true of radical aesthetic experiments, these proceeded under the banner of archaism: new developments pretended to revive old ones Hugh Blair had raised the stakes for such archaisms by claiming, in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, that modernity was the age of prose The early bard sang “indeed in wild and disorderly strains; but they were the native effusions of his heart”; however, in “after ages,” poets “composing coolly in their closets endeavoured to imitate passion, rather than to express it.”12 The prospects for modern poets seemed dim if they were doomed to produce tepid pseudo-emotion Late eighteenth-century poets responded by inventing modes of English that were meant to be perceived as antedating its eighteenth-century codification Archaic English could be seen as reviving the “wild and disorderly” language of true poets, reaching back to a more genuine, though less polished, form of expression In terms of the politics of these archaic Englishes, they resisted the fiction of a unified Great Britain If the standardizers were trying to invent a cosmopolitan, transnational version of English that could supposedly unite England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and North America, archaic poetic English refused the union into Great Britain by privileging individual nations within it and focusing on local areas within them It created a set of polarities that set Addison and Pope against archaic English, urban cosmopolitanism against provincial culture, Great Britain against nationalism, and Latinity against Anglo-Saxon or Gaelic The most famous example of pseudo-archaic English came from Thomas Chatterton, a poor seamstress’s son from Bristol He invented for himself an identity as a fifteenth-century poet, Thomas Rowley, along with a fantasy of what Rowley’s English would look like, as in the opening of this “Mynstrelle’s Song” from Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude (1777): O! synge untoe mie roundelaie, O! droppe the brynie teare wythe mee, Daunce ne moe atte hallie daie, Lycke a reynynge ryver bee; Mie love ys dedde, Gon to hys death-bedde, Al under the wyllowe tree.13 Since Rowley was supposed to be a Bristol native like Chatterton, Chatterton’s poetry located this archaic English not in London but in a provincial English city Especially striking in Chatterton’s “Bristol” English is its etymological art: most of his words have roots in Anglo-Saxon or Norman French, unlike the more Latinate diction of Chaucer, the most famous medieval poet The fictional Rowley’s etymological relation to Chaucer was 81 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008