william hayley

Estudiamos la recepción de La Araucana en Inglaterra durante la transición de los siglos al , un contexto en el que la consolidación del poder imperial británico fue una de las preocupaciones centrales de los escritores y pensadores románticos de pensamiento más radical. Después de describir las circunstancias en las que el poema fue introducido en el ámbito británico, nos centramos en dos obras: Essay on Epic Poetry (1782) de William Hayley, cuya lectura 'romantizada' de La Araucana otorgó una amplia popularidad al poema y determina su recepción posterior entre los ingleses, y Madoc de Robert Southey (cuyas primeras versiones circularon en la década de 1790), obra en la que el escritor inglés elaboró y problematizó poéticamente sus reflexiones sobre el colonialismo británico y para quien el poema de Ercilla se convirtió en un modelo épico anti-imperialista. Abstract We study the reception of Alonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga's sixteenth-century epic poem La Araucana in England during the transition between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a context in which the consolidation of British imperial power was one of the main concerns of the Romantic writers and intellectuals of more radical thought. After describing the circumstances in which the poem was introduced into the British ambit, we focus on two works: William Hayley's Essay on Epic Poetry (1782), whose 'romanticized' reading of La Araucana made the poem widely popular and determined its subsequent reception among the English; and Robert Southey's Madoc (whose first versions disseminated around the 1790s), a work in which the English writer poetically elaborated and problematized his reflections on British colonialism, and to whom Ercilla's poem became an anti-imperialistic epic model.

William Hayley''s "The Hermit's Dog" has a political background in two historical events--the 1792 expulsion of Carthusians from the Grande Chartreuse valley, and the diaspora of a knightly religious order throughout Europe, following the 1798 loss of Malta by the Knights of St. John (Hospitaller) to Napoleon. The poem was written after war broke out between England and France in 1803, after England's refusal to return Malta to the Knights gave Napoleon an occasion to declare the Treaty of Amiens breached. Yet Blake dehistoricizes the poem in his illustration, making the dead noble a knight from the time of the Crusades, and making Hayley's secular hermit into a monk.