Description
Book SynopsisLong before Patrick O’Brian’s and C. S. Forester’s novels of the great age of combat sail, a vast popular poetry abounded in Britain about the war at sea against the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. This book tells the story of how that poetry, with its sailors and admirals as folk heroes, became a driving force for morale, national identity and patriotism that would flourish until 1918. Focusing on the sea poetry of Britain during that twenty-two year war, 1793-1815, the book shows how heretofore overlooked invasion poems, sea battle ballads, victory odes, seascapes and sailors’ elegies are crucial to a full understanding of literary, naval, and social history during the era of Nelson and Romanticism. The author opens a straight channel to link literary and military readerships and lays an important plank in the bridge of war literature arching from Homer to Hemingway.
Trade Review«Hahn's research and reading seem encyclopedic: the book is filled with facts and moves authoritatively between the canonical poets and the ‘Ocean Bards’. [...] It is a "major book on poetry."» (SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900)
«Professor Hahn makes a strong case for our examining this often and easily dismissed poetry as an important indicator of its contemporary cultural ‘mise en scene’. [...] a "very readable work". [...] This book belongs in university libraries.» (The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer)
«...this pioneer author has pointed the way...» (International Journal of Maritime History)
«The book’s deep archival research is admirable in making these poems and excellent commentary available, much as Paul Fussell did in his Great War book.» (Professor Donald Mell, University of Delaware)
«Hahn’s valuable recovery of these poems reveals how central the figure of Jack Tar was to the period’s cultural imagination and how crucial to the war effort and recruitment was the work of largely forgotten writers.» ("Romanticism and War" Simon Bainbridge in: Oxford Handbooks Online, 2018, pp. 1-18, p. 8)
Table of ContentsContents: The Navy, the Nation and the Ocean Bards – Invasion Poems: Resistance and Recruitment – Ballads of the Lower Deck: Jack Tar’s Disciplines, Dangers and Delights – Battle Odes: Admirals and Victory – Seascapes and Elegies – Bibliography – Index
