"New Worlds by the Numbers": Davenant's Poetics of British Empire

• In Event: Imagining the New World: Poets in the Age of Discovery

Abstract

In the early seventeenth century, England's mathematical practitioners turned geometry into an instrument of imperialism, even as the nation's poets embraced the neoclassical resurgence of epic poetry as inherently numerical. In his 1638 Madagascar, William Davenant — laureate to Charles I and Charles II — uses "Numbers" (his preferred synonym for poetry) to measure England according to the metric of the exotic island. His royally-sponsored verses fashion a specifically imperial model of national poetry at the dawn of England's transition into the British Empire. Placing Davenant's chapbook into conversation with portrayals of Madagascar in pamphlets and small-format cartography shows how these cheap prints share an economically-driven imperial mathematics that ultimately justifies England's new-world conquests. As Davenant reframes epic conventions with financial prosperity for a broad public print sphere, he transforms the practical number-work of empire into a poetics that makes territorial expansion the empiric ground of his nation's greatness.

Author

• Katarzyna Lecky, Bucknell University