Recent research into a self-taught tradition of English rural poetry has begun to offer a radically new dimension to our view of the role of poetry in the literary culture of the eighteenth century. In this important new study John Goodridge offers a detailed reading of key rural poems of the period, examines the ways in which eighteenth-century poets adapted Virgilian Georgic models, and reveals an illuminating link between rural poetry and agricultural and folkloric developments. Goodridge compares poetic accounts of rural labour by James Thomson, Stephen Duck, and Mary Collier, and makes a close analysis of one of the largely forgotten didactic epics of the eighteenth century, John Dyer's The Fleece. Through an exploration of the purpose of rural poetry and how it relates to the real world, Goodridge breaks through the often brittle surface of eighteenth-century poetry, to show how it reflects the ideologies and realities of contemporary life.
In his pioneering presentation of Victorian self-taught poets and poetry, The Poorhouse Fugitives (1987), Brian Maidment organizes his material into three principal areas: "Chartists and Radicals," "The Parnassians," and "Lowly Bards and them. Some of these import "Parnassian" and political writing into "homely" poems, or use dialect forms and local materials to comment on social and cultural issues.They tend to represent communities in serious rather than sentimentalized ways and 1900, and well over half of these were writing in the second half of the nineteenth century. 3 Clearly there were many hundreds of laboring-class poets seeking effective modes of writing and print outlets for poetry in this period. In this essay I shall examine a number of examples of their poetical output, and consider some of the literary strategies these poets adopted and critical issues these strategies raise.In the scholarly "recovery" of hidden or lost traditions like laboring-class poetry, the issue of quality is not any the less important for having the potential to be
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