‘Incessant toil and hands innumerable’: Mining and Poetry in the Northeast of England

Abstract

In this essay, Keegan begins with a broad discussion of the representation of miners and mining in British poetry prior to 1900. She then offers an overview of poetry written specifically by miners. The essay focuses on two poets, both lead miners in the northeast of England in the second half of the nineteenth century, and both of whose works speak to the cultural and economic impact of rural diaspora. For Thomas Blackah (1828–95) and Richard Watson (1833–91), their unique poetic identities are bound up in their particular dale with its particular dialect. While any poet's intentions in writing are many, both clearly see poetry as preserving and affirming declining communities and celebrating and conserving the natural environment that is a defining feature of that community. Their poetry highlights the distinctive language and the natural environment of their native northeastern regions, and these elements define how they conceive of themselves as artists. Blackah's and Watson's poetry depicts a rootedness in the landscape that exists in tension with the displacements caused by changing industrial and economic conditions.

Joseph Skipsey, the ‘peasant poet’, and an unpublished letter from W. B. Yeats

“…As Bridget Keegan argues, in her essay '''Incessant Toil and Hands Innumerable'': Mining and Poetry in the Northeast of England' (2011), the work of recovering the writing of miner poets began in Gustav Klaus's The Literature of Labour (1985) but stalled thereafter. 5 Keegan's essay, which provides an excellent survey of how miners were represented in literature prior to the twentieth century, concentrates on poetry written by two lead miners, Thomas Blackah (1828-95) and Richard Watson (1833-91), and aims to re-energise the process of bringing literature written by miners to the surface. 6 My article is part of that process.…”