Rewriting the Historical and Literary Pasts in British Patriotic Poetry Anthologies

Scholars of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British imperial literature and culture often neglect poetry. Whilst at least some poets and their usually single-authored imperial work have received serious attention, patriotic poetry anthologies of the same period remain comparatively underresearched, as they tend to be discussed very briefly, when not simply mentioned in passing, apparently with the sole notable exception of William Ernest Henley’s 1891 ’Lyra Heroica’ (1891). The first product of a one-year research project entitled ‘The British Empire in Verse: Patriotic Poetry Anthologies in Great Britain, 1880–1914’ and aiming to explore the crossroads between British high imperialism and anthologies of poetry, my paper goes beyond the mere acknowledgment of this type of book by looking at the ways in which it could reinvent the historical and literary pasts. More specifically, my discussion of the ’selectiveness’, ‘typology’ and ‘structure’ of largely forgotten volumes such as ‘Poems of English Heroism’ (1882), ‘Poems of England’ (1896), ‘Poems of the Love and Pride of England’ (1897), ‘Patriotic Song’ (1901) and ‘Poetry of Empire’ (1910) not only suggests that a host of editors compiled specific poetry anthologies with the two-fold aim of historicising the British Empire and promoting its ideology to various audiences, but also shows which authors and texts from the past were deemed suitable to do so