Chris - to pick up on your point about canons and national ID. I think
the disparities between English and Scottish lists were engineered often
to reflect political antipathies, in an exclusively opportunistic manner.
A good deal of the anti-Scottish sentiment c.1760 was contrived as an
attack on Bute's govt. and its stash of Scot supporters. Bute's
unpopularity must have damaged the status of eg Macpherson's Fingal
(Churchill had a stab). I'm not sure that this worked the other way --
even violently Jacobite Scot poets like William Hamilton seemed to respect
and draw overtly upon English models. But Hamilton's spectacle of
opposition was to revert to an earlier stage of the English canon -- to
courtly lyric, rather than the verse essays and mock heroic satires that
chiefly characterized his period. Pound seems to have taken this tack
also, though in a diffuser spirit. Anyone know what Burns thought of
Milton?
k
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