Front cover image for The white man's burdens : an anthology of British poetry of the Empire

The white man's burdens : an anthology of British poetry of the Empire

In 1898, notoriously, Kipling urged the imperialist nations to 'Take up the White Man's Burden'. The following year, in Satan Absolved, Wilfred Scawen Blunt angrily replied, 'The White Man's Burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash'. Such ideological conflicts - and a whole range of intermediate positions - feature in much of the poetry that British writers produced about the British Empire over the four centuries of its rise and fall. The discourses of postcolonialism have drawn attention to the major and continuing significance of the cultural products of the period of Western imperialism. But, so far, they have concentrated largely upon fiction and upon the writings and experiences of those parts of the world that were subject to colonialism and imperialist oppression. For the first time, The White Man's Burdens offers a cross-section of British poetry in which the Empire was the burden of the song
Print Book, English, 1996
University of Exeter Press, Exeter, Devon, 1996
Poetry
xviii, 387 pages ; 21 cm
9780859894920, 9780859894500, 0859894924, 0859894509
36117903
Contents: Part 1 16th century: George Chapman. Part 2 17th century: Michael Drayton; Andrew Marvell; John Dryden; Aphra Behn. Part 3 18th century: Daniel Defoe; Alexander Pope; George Berkeley; Frances Seymour; James Thomson; David Garrick; Thomas Morris; James Grainger; Anne Penny; Phillis Wheatley; Anna Seward; James Freeth; George Dallas; William Cowper; Hannah More; William Blake; Erasmus Darwin; Robert Shouthey; William Shepherd. Part 4 19th century: Thomas Campbell; William Wordsworth; James Montgomery; Charles Lamb; Felicia Hemans; Reginald Heber; Thomas Hood; Alfred Tennyson; Samuel Rogers; George Beard; Richard Chevenix Trench; Eliza Cook; John Sheehan; Arthur Hugh Clough; Charles Mackay; Christina Rossetti; Aldred Comyns Lyall; Gerald Massey; William Allingham; Francis Hastings Doyle; Charles Kingsley; "Aliph Cheem" (Walter Yeldham); William Rossetti; William McGonagall; Wilfred Scawen Blunt; Douglas Sladen; George Robert Sims; Alfred Austin; George MacDonald; Rudyard Kipling; Lewis Morris; William Watson; Sarah Geraldine Stock; William Ernest Henley; Owen Seaman; Henry Newbold; Hilaire Belloc; Robert Williams Buchanan; Thomas Hardy; Algernon Charles Swinburne. Part 5 20th century: Henry Newbolt; A.E. Housman; Arthur Christopher Benson; Francis Thompson; Alfred Noyes; John Milton Hayes; Harwood Steele; Lawrence Eastwood; Billy Bennett; Alan Sanders; Noel Coward; John Masefield; W.H. Auden; Stevie Smith; Philip Larkin; Jon Stallworthy; Fred D'Aguiar.