Colonial literatures dwell under several forms of aesthetic and historical erasure. They are often read according to standards of literary value developed in faraway European metropoles, which they can at best only imitate, but not exceed; and they are often read within an anachronistic temporality, as anticipations of future national or postcolonial literatures that they can at best only herald, but never be. Colonial literatures fail to meet the aesthetic standard of originality, and they fall short of the cultural standard of authenticity. They are not “at home” anywhere. These ramifying forms of disavowal are especially true for colonial poetries, which have almost never received the kind of attention granted to novels in critical accounts of empire, colonialism, and nation building. As Jason R. Rudy argues in his eye-opening new book, Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies, “Victorian colonial writing—poetry especially—has historically been understood as second-rate, leaving a vast and diverse body of colonial literature largely unexamined, generally misunderstood, and absent from historical account” (4). This inattention will be impossible to defend in the wake of Rudy's book, which makes a powerful and persuasive case that “poetry was vital in establishing that sense of community” on which settler colonialism depended for its success (2).

Drawing upon intensive archival research in the largest settler colonial spaces of Britain's nineteenth-century empire—Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada—Rudy demonstrates how poems pervaded every aspect of the settler experience, from emigration, to arrival, to the formation of incipient communities, to the development of “native” literary sensibilities in the second and third generations. “Poetry was everywhere” in the British colonies, Rudy claims, playing “a significant, necessary role as emigrants shaped new colonial identities for themselves” (2). Rudy's emphasis on the social and political roles that poems served in colonial settlement dovetails with work by Tricia Lootens, Mary Ellis Gibson, and others, which has set aside the presumptions of inferiority that have impeded the study of much nineteenth-century verse. “I am most concerned,” Rudy writes, “with asking how reading British colonial poetry reshapes our understanding of the period, its history, and colonialism more broadly” (4–5).

Imagined Homelands demands that we suspend the assumption that colonial poetry must, by definition, be bad. The project's most far-reaching effect is the way it revaluates aesthetic qualities, like “imitativeness” and “generic-ness,” that are almost always stigmatized. As Rudy argues, to judge a poem “generic” is not to insult it, since “genre was among the most powerful tools for imagining connections … across vast spaces,” providing “an affective glue for far-flung emigrant communities” (105). Imagined Homelands is a book about the kinds of connections, whether imagined, imaginary, or otherwise, that settler colonial poetry could forge.

The first three chapters take up the experiences of dislocation and estrangement that were common for first-generation settlers, and which their poems worked to mediate, precisely by being generic, portable, and easily recognizable. In the first chapter, Rudy examines emigrant poems published in shipboard newspapers, many of which parodied poems by Tennyson, Hood, and others. In the second he focuses on the initial publications created in colonial settlements, which tended to reprint (or plagiarize) British and American poems in acts of “unauthorized poetic reproduction [that were] foundational to colonial culture” (46). Chapter 3 discusses global Scottish migration and the ways in which the creation of a fabricated “Scottish dialect,” rendered in songs and ballads that imitated the work of Robert Burns, could simultaneously mark a “general sense of Scottish culture” (77) abroad while also revealing “a more heterogeneous ‘neo-British’ colonial space” than historians of the British Empire have usually depicted (79). “Dialect in these nineteenth-century colonial spaces was itself generic in its function as shared, recognizable, and portable,” Rudy argues (78), and, in this way, poems written in Scottish dialect had a greater community-making power in the colonies than in Scotland itself.

The last three chapters consider the experiences of second- and third-generation colonial poets, who sought more concertedly to craft “native” literatures that belonged within and to particular settler locations. These efforts included attempts by some second-generation poets to shift from the first-person plural subject that had characterized earlier colonial verse, to a first-person singular form that could meditate on the relationship between the “native” poet, the colonial landscape, and the other kinds of “natives” who occupied it. Or they included the labors of “colonial laureates”—authors such as Richard Hengist Horne, Susanna Moodie, and Charles Sangster—who were tasked with the work of “maintaining ceremony in far-flung colonial spaces” and “training settler colonialists to see foreign spaces as extensions of Great Britain” (135). Finally, at the end of the century, poets such as the Bulletin School in Australia and the Confederation Poets in Canada came to deploy a language of race—the “Anglo-Saxon” spirit of a global “Greater Britain”—to stabilize the ideal of a shared, collective, coherent culture, which the burgeoning nationalist movements around the Empire were increasingly disrupting.

Imagined Homelands is therefore a book about the settlers’ experiences of colonialism as mediated through their poems and their concurrent constructions of global “English.” Rudy writes in the introduction that “to view colonialism from the perspective of poetry requires understanding that poems have histories and also that the meanings of poems change as they circulate through different communities and across time” (6). It is worth considering, as Rudy does, what counts as a community, who is allowed to belong to a community, and whose poems can circulate through the communal spaces that colonialism opened for some but also narrowed for others. While discoveries of work by native poets continue to complicate the story of nineteenth-century US poetry, few equivalents have yet been located in the archives of British settler colonialism that Rudy examines. The late emergence of race as a salient concept at the end of Imagined Homelands thus raises different kinds of questions. To what extent were the aesthetic categories that this book tracks—imitation, parody, genre—as well as a term like poetry itself—racialized from the very beginning? Can the inclusion of colonial poetries within the story of Victorian poetry enable scholars to reconsider how other kinds of exclusionary practices structured the formation of their canon? In addition to all its other contributions, Rudy's book gives Victorianists an opportunity to rethink the relationship between the history of poetics and the formation of whiteness.