Celebrating Queen Anne and the Union of 1707 in Great Britain's First Georgic

Abstract

The most ambitious poem to celebrate the Union of 1707 was John Philips's georgic Cyder (1708). A climactic passage portrays Queen Anne as a semi-divine author of the Union. What does Cyder tell us about the way Anne was understood in 1707? A nonjuror supported by Robert Harley's moderate Tories, Philips uses the georgic to propose a model of political cooperation and experimental pragmatism. He also celebrates Anne as an antitype of earlier monarchs, specifically Edgar the Pacific and Henry VII, while his invitation to read typologically acknowledges the problems posed to Jacobite sensibilities by the Hanoverian succession.

Recent scholarship on classical literature and the eighteenth century

“…This aspect of georgic poetry forms part of Fairer's broader argument for the validity of identifying ecocritical elements in poetry that predate Romanticism. Pellicer (2014) has addressed georgic's popularity to the political climate of the eighteenth century. He has discussed the centrality of grafting in Virgilian and eighteenth-century georgic as a means of advocating the union of different political factions, and even different countries.…”