andrew elfenbein a degree of liberty: in some ways, writers like Chatterton and Burns could be understood less as rebelling against standardization than as taking seriously the standardizers’ praise of British liberty Moreover, the exaltation of alternative Englishes could turn into a quite condescending celebration of the perceived simplicity and primitivism of other times and cultures, as a conservative retreat from the supposed evils of modernity As a result, the politics of language use was never simple or unidirectional: the same choices could occupy quite different places in the political spectrum Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century, many proponents of alternative English were indeed associated with reformist politics; Burns, for example, was an ardent champion of the French Revolution In addition, one of the most energetic reformist movements of the late eighteenth century, abolition, drew heavily on dialect poetry in which slaves were made to speak In these poems, slaves’ non-standard English made them not contemptible or laughable figures, but ones deserving the protection and sympathy of the British nation Tellingly, however, such English could appear only in works written by white writers; when actual African writers, like Phillis Wheatley or Olaudah Equiano, published their works, they used flawless standard English as a means of demonstrating their right to be taken seriously Traces of late eighteenth-century experiments with English can be found throughout Romantic poetry Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798, 1817), Scott in The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Byron in the first canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), and Keats in The Eve of St Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1820) all employ moments of pseudo-medieval English that recall Chatterton Blake and Coleridge imitated Ossian’s prose poetry, and Blake took over Ossianic names, as when Ossian’s “Oithona” became “Oothoon” in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) Wordsworth and Coleridge’s decision to entitle their joint volume Lyrical Ballads was in part a nod to Percy’s Reliques, although their results were quite different from anything that Percy had written; Coleridge also took the name “Christabel” from Percy’s collection Scott followed Burns’s lead by collecting Scottish ballads in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3); James Hogg wrote poetry in Scots; and Hemans adapted some Welsh ballads in her Selection of Welsh Melodies (1822) Yet the most striking aspect of Romantic poets’ relation to English is how consistently they abandoned the more flagrant oddities of eighteenthcentury experimentalism For example, Coleridge rewrote The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to omit many of its most obvious archaisms, as in the altered title His changes to the following stanza suggest the results: 84 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008