> Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2012 11:07:12 +0100
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Fortnightly monthly
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Ah but--
>
> If you are "middle-class" does it follow that the poetry you write
> will be "middle-class poetry"? That is the standard modern or Marxist
> view, I suppose, of the inescapable assimilative process of social
> position or wealth, -- your class totally infuses your mind, but I
> think grave doubts are possible. Is Wordsworth's poetry "middle-
> class poetry"? The (urban) middle-class didn't on the whole like it
> very much. What class was "men" in the phrase "the language of men"?
> when I was younger we believed in the concept "déclassé" and were
> later revealed to come from various middle or lower class strata which
> we never thought about. How would you class Douglas Oliver's poetry
> now? (Not DO., but DO.'s poetry). Or John James'?
>
> Meanwhile, six large volumes have recently been published --
> John Goodridge (editor), Eighteenth Century English Labouring Class
> Poets 1700-1800. 3 volumes, 2003
> John Goodridge (editor), Nineteenth Century English Labouring Class
> Poets 1800-1900. 3 volumes, 2006
>
> This enormous collection constitutes something like 10 percent, at a
> guess, of the published poetry under these headings. The authors are
> agricultural labourers, carters, weavers (especially weavers),
> artisans of various kinds, etc. (Burns and Clare are more-or-less
> omitted because already well in-print (though Burns is actually not
> very well available because of disregard of the song music)). So there
> was an enormous amount of activity, whether more or less than activity
> elsewhere I don't know.
>
> The bulk of this poetry is, I would say, clearly "middle-class", and
> a lot of it is modeled on people like Wordsworth and Thompson. It is
> predominantly provincial / northern. Chartist poetry is strong among
> it but not all Chartist poets were labouring class. I find there is a
> lot of admirable writing here and a great variety, which comes open to
> you if you stop worrying about locating exceptionality, though that
> quality is not absent. Most people educated in Eng Lit, like me, were
> taught to seek and trust only exceptionality, and that that
> constituted the history of it.
>
> PR
>
>
>
>
>
> On 2 Aug 2012, at 10:17, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> > That's not quite true, I'm afraid. Protestants had a thing about
> > books, and printers were both working-class and occupationally
> > disposed to some kind of literacy. I think E.P.Thompson could be of
> > assistance on that. Certainly the Corresponding Societies that
> > people like Francis Place figured implied the existence of reading
> > working classes. While all those Bible quoting millenarians of the
> > 17th century civil upheavals were presumably not relying on someone
> > to read for them. Would you consider John Bunyan middle-class? Even
> > before Clare and Blake there are people like Stephen Duck or Anne
> > Yeardesley or John Taylor the Water-Poet while a lot of those
> > Elizabethan playwrighting poets came from poor backgrounds, Marlowe
> > or Ben Jonson for instance. Even Spenser seems to have been a
> > journeyman clothmaker's son. While others like Donne or Pope had
> > Catholic connections which made them just as socially ambiguous as
> > poor scholars. While I don't feel I need to go into detail about
> > those from the upper reaches: the Sidneys, Herberts, Shelley, Byron,
> > Wyatt, the Cavalier poets etc etc.
>
> That's all true, and I really neglected that dissenting tradition.
> Besides, your list makes evident that the terms of middle-class etc
> are dynamic through the centuries, it is not that easy to box
> individual poets away. But multiple exceptions as there are, I still
> suppose that the bulk of literature (not the good stuff, just the
> bulk) has tended to be produced by e.g doctors, parsons, teachers and
> their non-working daughters, but not by grooms and milkmaids and wet-
> nurses and miners. But perhaps this is partly a myth, perhaps the
> literature itself has often denied its more interesting origins in
> order to wear a coat of gentility?
>
> > In fact I feel a terrible itch to rewrite your last 'it's a
> > reasonable assumption that the body of English poetry that's been
> > written down exists despite the work of middle-class authors' but of
> > course I'm not going to do that as it would be a terrible thing to do.
>
> Well, I almost wrote something like that myself. If the bulk of poetry
> and its readers is characterized by middle-classness, then the things
> that stand out often reflect some unusual imput from elsewhere. The
> labouring world that most writers know so little about (in my view)
> has been one of the great reservoirs of new vitality through the
> centuries. That would explain why, as Jamie says, its not often that a
> writer gets kudos just for being middle-class, because that's just the
> dull norm position.
>
> (It's now come into my mind that Chesterton wrote in praise of
> Browning's South London lower-middle-classness, rather in the tones of
> J.G. Ballard praising the exoticism of suburbia; obviously that kind
> of praise depended on finer distinctions than the broad triple band of
> Cleese Barker and Corbett.)