‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760-1790' explores under-examined relationships between poetry and historiography between 1760 and 1790. These were the decades of Hugh Blair's ‘Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal' (1763) and ‘Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres' (1783), Thomas Percy's ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry' (1765), Adam Ferguson's ‘Essay on the History of Civil Society' (1767) and Lord Monboddo's ‘Of the Origin and Progress of Language' (1774). In all these texts, verse is examined for what it can tell the historian about the progress of enlightened man to civil society. This book contends that several writers of tracts on history and poetics did not merely view verse as a sign of human progress. Rather, they recognized that the particular characteristics of verse (rhythm and metre, line endings, stress contours, rhyme, etc.) had special kinds of agency – that is, these had determining effects – on thinking about progress in the time. The special characteristics of poetry are read and, crucially, felt, as ways of understanding humankind's development from savagery to ‘polish'. The aesthetics of verse (understood as elements of ‘taste' in British discourse) mediates one's understanding of human development, focusing on how that mediation has a special shape and force that has never adequately been explored.
John Regan is a research fellow in English Literature at the University of Cambridge, UK.
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