Innovation in Style

While Harrington is best known as a political writer, he began his career as a poet. Chapter 8 argues that he never gave up his literary interests, that his political and literary writings were intertwined, and that his substantive arguments were reflected in the vocabulary and form of his works. Harrington coined new words or adapted old ones to reflect the revolutionary changes of the time. Both his hybrid constitutional vocabulary and Oceana’s composite form can be read as an embodiment of the combination of ancient, English, and modern practices that made up his system, and as a reflection of the idea that his model constitution would reconcile royalists and parliamentarians. Concerned that people find it difficult to understand written constitutional models, Harrington experimented with fiction, dialogue, and visualization to spark his audience’s imagination so that they could ‘experience’, and therefore come to understand and appreciate, his political model.