Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies, by Jason R. Rudy

Reviewed by: Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies by Jason R. Rudy Isobel Armstrong (bio) Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies, by Jason R. Rudy; pp. xii + 247. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017, $49.95, £37.00. Adam Lindsay Gordon, Caroline Leakey, Fidelia Hill, Charles Sangster, Henry Lawson, Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson, and Charles G. D. Roberts: these nineteenth-century poets are not familiar figures even to specialists of Victorian poetry. But they have a prominent place in Jason Rudy’s Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies, a study of settler poetry and poems of emigration in three countries—Canada, South Africa, and Australia—on three continents. This book is a must not only for critics of Victorian poetry but also for all scholars working in the long nineteenth century. Rudy has opened a new field: he has mastered the poetry and print culture archives of his three continents, their colonial histories, and their different cultures of settlement. He explores the prolific publication of colonizing poetry over the century and makes it meaningful. His aim is to move away from Anglocentric readings and to repudiate accounts of colonial poetry that disparage both its derivative forms and its sentimental excess. [End Page 161] His overarching argument is that emigrant poetry both articulated and assuaged settler experience of dislocation by creating a sense of community and collective understanding through imagining the new territory as a homeland, relocating the values of the old country in a new context. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) is recalled in the title, but Rudy has in mind the circulation of affect as the bonding agent rather than abstract theorization of community. Generic familiarity and derivative material in well-worn meters capable of being reworked and resignified in and for new spaces is therefore a positive advantage, rather than a weakness. Secondariness references the Britain left behind, while making possible new redactions of experience and nation. An outstanding example is Felicia Hemans’s “The Homes of England” (1827), which was reworked on the three continents. Rudy’s limpid expository style opens up his theme across six chapters. The first considers poetry in the newspapers published aboard emigrant ships for their so-called community in transit, often amounting to a third of the contents. Poetry, in the awful conditions of up to four months at sea, was a source of consolation in three ways: it drew upon the reanimating possibilities of parody; it gave expression to nostalgia by exploring captivity and exile and so reconstituting Britain; and it newly explored the place of culture in a settler community. This is a fine chapter, with some brilliant readings of parodies of Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud” (1855) and Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt” (1843). Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are all concerned with authenticity, plagiarism, the recirculation of genre, and the extent to which a derivative poetry can create structures of affect that both recall the country of origin and resituate new experience. Rudy shows how Lindsay Gordon’s “From the Wreck” (1870) reworks Robert Browning’s “How We Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent” (1845) in an agonistic context. He shows how Scottish dialect is used to underwrite communal consciousness. He takes the example of the American William Cullen Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl” (1818) and “The Indian Girl’s Lament” (c. 1832) to show how, as the same poems migrate across South Africa and Australia, they are not cloned, but recontextualized. He shows how second generation and so-called native-born poets such as Australian Thomas Henry Kendall and Canadian Oliver Goldsmith respond ambivalently to their immigrant status, questioning whether an authentic life is possible. Leakey more successfully understands her experience by repurposing genre. Indeed, the successful poet reproduces Britain in a new context by reproducing sentiment, Rudy argues, so that poetry becomes political and social work. The final two chapters move in a slightly different direction. Chapter 5, “Colonial Laureates,” explores the way in which poets established a local culture of poetry. Although loyalist, local poets did not align themselves with elite and aristocratic elements of British political traditions even...

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