"Recovered Utopian Notions"

"The imprint of his childhood among anticolonial poets and his father's generation of war poets, evident in his Romantic sense of his own agency, also manifested in his insistence on poetry's importance to liberatory politics. EP and his father drew on their vestigial belief in the potential for heroic action to question the imperial, great-man historical imagination that had given them that belief. In doing so, they helped imagine a new kind of history and history-making, infused with a poetic vision."

At Aeon, Priya Satia looks at the early influences on E.P. Thompson.