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Importing Ease: Merchant Trade in the Country House Poems of Mildmay Fane

This article considers how authors adapted the genre of the seventeenth-century country house poem in order to reconcile the rise of merchant trade with feudal economic models resistant to the importation of foreign luxury goods. After a survey of examples illuminating a shift in the country house poem’s attitude toward foreign trade, I focus on how in “A Peppercorn or Small Rent” Mildmay Fane uses this shift to reconceptualize the roles of both poet and poem in the economy of literature. By titling his poem “A Peppercorn” (an imported commodity excluded from earlier examples of the genre), Fane highlights the fact that works of literature, like foreign luxury goods, circulate in the marketplace. While the country house poem is typically understood as a genre emblematic of the patronage relations underlying its creation, Fane points to the fact that the future of literary production may lie less in the poet’s ability to court patrons than in the poem’s status as a commodity. Fane’s poem, therefore, exemplifies an ideological shift with implications not only for the economics of foreign trade, but also for how literature circulates in society.