Research seminar: ‘I cannot kill thee’: The Poetics of Peace in the Romantic Era and Beyond

Abstract:

This paper centres on a close reading of a highly unusual poem by the antiwar campaigner Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825), which articulates a peace mentality through an interspecies encounter. An earlier verse epic by Barbauld, intervening publically in debate on British war policy during the Napoleonic Wars, was the subject of my book Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2017). The Caterpillar enters into dialogue with contemporary Romantic war poetry by Coleridge, Wordsworth and Walter Scott, engages with the legacy of Homer and Virgil, and, I argue, anticipates some of the experiments of twentieth-century Imagism and World War I poems by Wilfred Owen.