SOURCE: Faulkner, Peter. “William Cowper and the Poetry of Empire.” Durham University Journal (July 1991): 165-73.

In the following essay, Faulkner focuses on Cowper's expressions of British Imperialist ideology—and its inherent ambivalence—in his poetic works.

Cowper's ‘Boadicea. An Ode’ must be one of the most forceful and effective Imperialist poems of the late eighteenth century. The regular rhythm of its trochaic quatrains gives weight to the prophecy it announces through the movement back and forth in history. The “British warrior Queen” is presented in heroic terms in her resistance to the invading Romans; Boadicea was already a potent symbol of Englishness (one of the long line of representatives of victory-in-defeat). She goes for advice to “the Druid, hoary chief”, again a respected symbolic figure, sitting sagaciously under “the spreading oak”—a neat emblem of his ‘natural’ authority. The Druid's only comfort for her is in predicting the...