alan marshall
Here imperialism has, as it were, lost its idea—has lost touch with its roots, and
itsroots, in a sense, were perfectly simple: the hapless confusion of want and
need, or greed and hunger (‘How definitely glad I am that greed is|an alternative
to hunger’^65 ), in people who could not sit still for moving around. We think of
imperialism as a function of the ‘Competitive|expansion’ (economist-speak for
warmongering) of the nation-state, which in turn undermined the nation-state:^66
but what happens if we see it instead as a function of our inherently nomadic
tendencies, our tendency to move and be moved, to expand on this or that, to
ruminate, to drift—as poets drift (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud...’)? Then it
becomes a clue to a way of life that might be existentially prior to the nation-state: a
mild state of anarchy, or even euphoria. Imperialism might then be seen, in ironic
and utopian terms, as the product of the corruption of our anarchic tendencies
by the acquisitive nation-state which preys off our insecurities, our unfortunate
need to belong, with its tribalism and biologism (‘the genetic links are everywhere
claimed’^67 ); as well as our shambolic need to piece together our identities out of
our belongings (‘we give the name of|our selves to our needs.|We want what we
are’^68 ). This chronic need, in a word, to have and be had.
Nevertheless, even as Prynne causes the scales to fall from (or is it dance before?)
our eyes, the poetry is loaded with allusions to what Rukeyser called ‘this century
of World Wars’. ‘Western Frontier’ might be a reference both to Frederick Jackson
Turner’s famous essay on ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’
(1893), published in the early days of American empire, and to Erich Maria
Remarque’s celebrated novel of the Great War,All Quiet on the Western Front
(1929); ‘Drang nach Osten’ evokes Germanic expansion eastwards into the Slavonic
and Baltic states since the Middle Ages, but above all Hitler’s disastrous invasion of
the Soviet Union; ‘the Polish border’ was the flashpoint in Britain’s declaration of
war in 1939; Russia and China suggest the Red Menace and the onset of the Cold
War; and Suez, of course, refers to the humiliating invasion of Egypt in 1956, when
the United States pulled the rug on the undying imperial pretensions of Britain and
France.
What Prynne opposes to our imperial antics and the lofty paternalism with which
we cling to the spoils (‘We want|too much for the others.|We must shrink...our
(^65) Prynne, ‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’, 23.
(^66) ‘Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national
limitations to its economic expansion...Of all forms of government and organizations of people,
the nation-state is least suited for unlimited growth because the genuine consent at its base cannot
be stretched indefinitely, and is only rarely, and with difficulty, won from conquered peoples’, writes
Hannah Arendt. ‘How a competition between fully armed business concerns—‘‘empires’’—could
end in anything but victory for one and death for the others is difficult to understand. In other
words, competition is no more a principle of politics than expansion’ (Hannah Arendt,The Origins of
Totalitarianism 67 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 126).
Prynne, ‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’, 21.
(^68) Prynne, ‘Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self’, inPoems, 20.