I think it should be noted that poets such as Duck, Clare, Burns,
Hogg, Chatterton, were not exceptions. They are some of those who are
still known and read out of a very large number of such poets, you
could call it a movement, in the 18th & 19th Centuries in UK.
Nottingham Trent University holds a database containing over 1400
names. Six large volumes of "English Labouring Class Poetry" were
published in 2003/5 under the general editorship of John Goodridge,
with 129 poets in 2500 pages. Most of these had books published, some
of which went into multiple editions and culminated in a collected
poems. The audience for this industry was at first of a higher,
educated, class interested in natural virtue and talent manifesting
itself among the uneducated, but later the working-class poets also
wrote for an audience of their fellows. They wrote several different
kinds of poetry, -- rural-pastoral, urban-social, Romantic, political,
dialect and comedy, Chartist songs...
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