A Tale of Two Bridges: The Poetry and Politics of Infrastructure in Nineteenth-Century Wales

Abstract Drawing on Brian Larkin’s concept of ‘infrastructural poetics’, this article considers and compares a selection English- Welsh-language poems, by writers including Eliza Mary Hamilton, Frederick Faber, Richard Llwyd, Eben Fardd, about two nineteenth-century infrastructures that transformed North Wales Great Britain’s relationship to Ireland: the Menai Suspension Bridge (1826), Britannia Tubular (1850). I argue these non-canonical poems complement perspectives derived from parliamentary records, official reports, technical planning documents, scientific manuals, journalism, enhancing our understanding infrastructural imagination. Specifically, building association development modernity, explore how under discussion participate in negotiations Wales’s place future United Kingdom, evolved between 1819 1852. show that, although was site impressive engineering feats accelerating industrial extraction, English-language present picturesque terms, drawing popular images Celtic fringe evoke timeless, ideal beauty. Anglophone verse Bridge, contrast, focuses explicitly infrastructure’s technological modernity but claims it as an English landmark. Both strategies, suggest, effect erasure – distinct cultural political entity conceived Anglo-British. Poems written Welsh, work Welsh English, complicate picture, not because they reject British nationalism imperialism, seek embed modern nation more centrally within those ideological frameworks.