disagreements without resolving them.
Ralegh demonstrates what he knows about the globe and military endeavors, and his praise of Semiramis leads to his positive evaluation of her military might. He devotes a full section of his work to her campaign in India, enumerating at great length the reported size of her army, including the numbers of footmen, horsemen, chariots, camels, raw hides, galleys, and soldiers. He concludes, “These incredible and impossible numbers, which no one place of the earth was able to nourish, (had every man and beast but fed upon grasse) are taken from the authority of Ctesias whom Diodorus followeth” (Ralegh 1652, p. 183). Bradstreet condenses this section significantly as the conclusion to her section on the Babylonian queen:
An expedition to the East she made
Staurobates, his Country to invade:
Her Army of four millions did consist,
Each may believe it as his fancy list.
Her Camels, Chariots, Gallyes in such number,
As puzzles best Historians to remember;
But this is wonderful, of all those men,
They say, but twenty e’re came back agen.
The river [Indus] swept them half away,
The rest Staurobates in fight did slay;
This was last progress of this mighty Queen,
Who in her Country never more was seen.
The Poets feign’d her turn’d into a Dove,
Leaving the world to Venus soar’d above:
Which made the Assyrians many a day,
A Dove within their Ensigns to display:
Forty two years she reign’d, and then she di’d
But by what means we are not certifi’d.
(Bradstreet 1678, 73–74)
While Ralegh’s prose demonstrates familiarity with the logistics of war befitting a wise counselor, Bradstreet instead amplifies that which is confusing and unknowable in referring to historical “puzzles” and insists that Semiramis died “by what means we are not certifi’d.” She also elevates the “last progress of this mighty Queen” and Semiramis’s final transformation into a dove, “Leaving the world to Venus soar’d above.” Ralegh stresses learned citations and evaluates logistics according to his experiences in the field; Bradstreet navigates the problems of fame and infamy, foregrounding interpretive puzzles before elevating Semiramis as she soars out of the picture, ending with a summation of her reign as a monarch.6
I would argue that this poem is not only or even primarily a Puritan reflection on the failings of monarchs. Just as Ralegh wants to demonstrate his abilities as a judicious counselor with experience of the world, Bradstreet wants to demonstrate that she can compass the world imaginatively. The fact that she includes so many lines of poetry that repeat Ralegh’s judgment of prior historians is telling (they could have easily been cut, to good effect). She’s not just taking issue with monarchs; she is signaling her own authority and scholarly interest. And in condensing them, she draws our attention to myths and arguments. When in “The Prologue” she undermines her own contention that the muses stand as evidence of women’s poetic abilities with the line “The Greeks did nought, but play the fools & lye” (Bradstreet 1678, p. 4), this is not just a retreat from classical exempla back into the orthodoxy of Puritanism. Judging “lying Greeks” is part of her project; the cultural distinctions she draws are as much about her scholarly judgment as they are about distinctions among nations and civilizations.
“The Four Monarchies” is an ambitious work recounting the successes and failures of ambitious people, and charting global space is certainly an important part of this undertaking. In mapping the globe, enumerating military forces, and weighing the merits of historical interpretations, Ralegh used his Historie to demonstrate his membership in “an early modern European community of learned counselors who deployed historical analysis to produce prophetic advice” (Popper 2012, p. 74). Though Bradstreet had no hope of serving the government, in “Monarchies” she limned the bounds of empire, recounted great architectural feats, and highlighted interpretive disagreements in order to assert her power as a poet and an interpreter of history. Bradstreet embraces both her own ambition and her judgment more fully in the “Monarchies” than she does in either “The Prologue” or her elegies.
“Or Round the Pictured Orb Instructive Trace”: Sarah Wentworth Morton’s Lady Harriet Ackland
Like Bradstreet, Sarah Wentworth Morton foregrounds scholarly citation and judgment in an ambitious engagement with world history and global space that we risk overlooking if we chiefly associate either her episodic approach to epic or the “various imperfections” for which she apologizes (1790, p. viii) with gendered marginalization. Morton published three long poems in the 1790s, Ouâbi, or The Virtues of Nature (1790), Beacon Hill. A Local Poem (1797), and The Virtues of Society. A Tale Founded on Fact (1799), which offer different glimpses of poetic ambition as expressed through poems that engage world history. All three are framed as “American” and situated with respect to both a European present and a classical past. As she entreats in her introduction to the first of these works, Ouâbi, or The Virtues of Nature (1790), “I am induced to hope, that the attempting a subject wholly American will in some respect entitle me to the partial eye of the patriot” (p. viii). In each of these poems, Morton recenters world history in the United States, generally through the yoking of European cultural achievements with North American vitality. This vitality is figured through rugged and sublime natural prospects, racial heterogeneity, and the transportable ideals of post-revolutionary Liberty. It is also evident in a thoroughgoing Eurocentrism that in Ouâbi, for instance, fuels the Vanishing Indian motif that was so prevalent in later US literature. Here I focus on Morton’s final long poem of the 1790s, The Virtues of Society (1799), which treats the heroism of Lady Harriet Ackland, who traveled with her husband to Canada and then to upstate New York, nursing him when he was struck down during the Battle of Saratoga.7
Morton makes frequent use of “prospects” in her long poems in passages that look both down on the landscape and into the future. This is, as Christopher N. Phillips explains, “a familiar gesture that could be used to make arguments about the meaning of landscape, the trajectory of the nation, or even the nature of knowledge” (2011, p. 17). Beacon Hill most obviously depends on this strategy, concluding, appropriately, with the United States figured as a beacon that shines out over the globe: “Till the full ray of equal Freedom shine,/And like the sun this genial globe entwine” (Morton 1797, p. 52). But it is a key feature in her representation of American exceptionalism in other long poems as well. The Virtues of Society stresses westward movement both through the revivification of classical exempla in America and the movement of its heroine, Lady Harriet Ackland, from England to upstate New York. This movement from east to west is then rendered through a number of North American prospects that are explicitly set against the picturesque qualities “Of peaceful Albion’s bliss-encircled isle” (Morton 1799, p. 9). Harriet’s decision to follow her husband to “the thunder of the plains” leads to a sea voyage in which the waves create delusions of English landscape that are then swept away with wind and wave, such that, “To the fond view the painted prospects die,/And flowers,
