Patriotic ballads were widespread and often formed part of 18th-century sentimental comedies and theatrical entertainments; Rule, Britannia!, The roast beef of old England and God save the King all originated in an 18th-century theatrical context. Propaganda poetry fitted the climate of the wars against France, often in broadsheet form. This type of propagandistic-populist song continued into the later-19th-century music hall tradition that stoked patriotic spirits during the Boer Wars and the First World War. The notion of jingoism (cheerfully unreflective, chauvinistic belligerence) emerged from the chorus of one such effort, sung during the Russo-Turkish War.

Though couched in the diction of ordinary men and women (often sailors, figures of nationalist affection in these years), these verses were often penned by serious poets like Thomas Campbell (Ye mariners of England, 1800-01). Such nationalistic verse was propagandistic in intent and militaristic in nature, part of the war climate that saw the emergence of modern British nationalism, and rarely raised literary ambitions. Serious poetry of nationalistic inspiration can be found in the occasional side-productions of poets like Scott (Carle, now the King’s come, 1822) or Mrs Hemans (Casabianca, 1826, with its notorious opening line “The boy stood on the burning deck”). In the mid-century, Browning’s Home thoughts from the sea (1845) carried an overt imperialistic message, celebrating the 1797 Battle of Cape St Vincent as an inspiration for African colonial expansionism, and Tennyson owed it to his position as Poet Laureate to produce nationally rousing or edifying verse during the Crimean War (The charge of the Light Brigade, 1854).

The Victorians in their nationalistic verse strove for sublime diction and quasi-religious dignity; but the continuity of boyhood and life-sacrificing martial virtue remained as strong as in the earlier Casabianca (Newbolt, The torch of life, 1892). The commemorative cult of the Great War called for a performative repertoire of songs and poems. Edward Spring-Rice’s I vow to thee, my country, written between 1908 and 1912, became a performative classic once it was set to the hymn-tune Thaxted as arranged by Holst in 1916, and has been used on nationally meaningful public occasions ever since. It also strengthened the overlap between religion and English/imperial military nationalism, also manifested in Sabine Baring-Gould’s Onward, Christian soldiers (1865) and Blake’s Jerusalem (1804), belatedly brought to fame by being set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916 after having been anthologized by Poet Laureate Robert Bridges.

While, famously, the Great War’s poetic production provoked a new tendency to evoke the horror and folly rather than the heroism of war (in the work of, notably, Wilfred Owen, and also Rupert Brooke and even Rudyard Kipling, after the death in battle of his only son), it still provided a good few nationalistic classics in the elegiac-heroic mode of praising military self-sacrifice. Laurence Binyon’s For the fallen, Brooke’s The soldier (both 1914) and a great many lesser poems continued a trope that went back to Mrs Hemans’s England’s dead of 1822.

The ablest practitioner of nationalistic verse was Rudyard Kipling. While he could effortlessly display the nationalistic high-mindedness of his contemporaries (e.g. in his Recessional, 1897), many of his military poems, in collections like the Barrack-room ballads (1892; the poem Tommy in this collection gave the British rank-and-file soldiers their affectionate nickname), reverted to the older tradition of impersonating the voice of the common man, using Cockney-style demotic English as spoken by the rank and file, and evoking their cynicism as well as their bravery and loyalty.

Nationalistic verse that is not explicitly militaristic is much rarer in the English tradition and often follows a lyrical-idyllic mode, evoking the harmonious landscapes of the English countryside. It is attested in Mrs Hemans’s The stately homes of England (1828) and Browning’s Home-thoughts, from abroad (1845), an earthy and idyllic companion-piece to his naval-militaristic Home-thoughts from the sea. The lyricism of the English countryside, nostalgically celebrated as the counterpart to the tragic harshness of war, was prominent in the work of the “Georgian” poets, identified as such by way of a series of five anthologies entitled Georgian poetry (1912-22). Their post-Victorian style provoked the anti-Romantic, anti-lyrical and decidedly non-national response of the modernists: T.S. Eliot, the Vorticists. In later life, however, Eliot himself would revert to a post-lyrical celebration of Englishness.