British Imperial Rhetoric

Abstract

Chapter 2 is concerned with the political foundation of Jones’s Roman fragments, which stand as a challenge to British imperialism. In examining the Roman imperial analogy as it is appears in British political rhetoric across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this chapter establishes the necessary context for understanding Jones’s poetry as a subversive response to imperial values, capitalism, and propaganda. Analysing the Roman fragments in this way provides the opportunity to explore both Jones’s engagement with British imperial rhetoric and his belief in the creative potential of the Roman analogy to speak to contemporary concerns. It demonstrates the ways in which he based his criticism of modern imperialism—whether of its hypocrisy or its direct acts of force (such as in the poem ‘Isis’ (1956) which responds to the Suez crisis)—within an ancient Roman setting.