William Johnson Fox

 

 

The Poor and their Poetry *.

 

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Literatur: Fox
Literatur: The Monthly Repository

 

POETRY is not the privilege of a class, either in its production or its enjoyment. It belongs to humanity. Nature frames, without reference to rank, the internal organization from which it results, and scatters abroad, with profuse and universal bounty, the ex[190]ternal excitements which act upon that organization, and make the well-strung harp give forth its music. Wherever there is man and nature, there may be poetry. But as this universal essence is rendered perceptible, it necessarily is subjected to various modifications. The life and soul of poetry are always the same; but to make them visible and tangible, they must become incarnate in various forms, which forms bear the peculiar features of age, class or country. Nor is it more certain that the poetry of a rude and that of a civilized period, or of an oriental and a northern region, must exhibit appropriate diversities, than that, in the same country and the same generation, such diversities must also be found between the poetry of the rich and that of the poor, though both may possess the qualities which compel us to admit and to feel that they are poetry.

Poetry is a train of thoughts rich in pictorial and affecting associations. A thought or an expression is poetical, exactly in proportion to its power of calling up such associations. This power must evidently be varied by the peculiar mental habits of those who read or hear. There is much and noble poetry in our language, which only exists for scholars. The finest specimens of this kind are in Gray's 'Odes,' and in Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' He only feels the full force of the one who is thoroughly familiar with the history of his country; or of the other, who feels a classical allusion, as if it were a vernacular idiom. The power of a poet who is a scholar, over readers who are scholars also, is indefinitely multiplied. It includes the power of all the other poets whom he thus makes for the time the satellites of his own genius; presenting to the mind not only the picture which his own fancy has sketched, but including in it, and calling up by it, the productions of all those, his allusion to whom, though it be but in the turn of a phrase, is understood and felt. And so the historical Odes of Gray – besides those bold and rapid sketches which occupy the foreground of the painting – exhibit, by allusion to the narrative, in long and shadowy perspective, the poetical characters and facts of history. The effect of allusion in poetry is like that of a combination of mechanical powers. It invests one man with the strength of many. When poetry, that is to say, when man shall arrive at perfection, its wealth in allusion will be most ample and boundless. It does not, however, follow that the poetry which is now most endowed with this quality is the best poetry. As all machinery, however powerful, requires living strength to set it in motion, so allusion will accomplish little, unless it be worked by the living strength of originality.

The highest order of poetical associations must, after all, be sought in natural object and human emotions. He will never work upon the soul by his allusions, who fails to affect it by his original conceptions. Yet those who can appreciate classical and historical allusions will be disposed to accept them to some extent [191] as a compensation for other kinds of merit, and to require them in the poetry which they most enjoy. Poetry, distinguished by this quality, is therefore peculiarly the poetry of the educated, who must also be the wealthier classes of the community. It is poetry which the poor, because they are also the uneducated, can neither produce nor enjoy.

Let it not be thought for an instant that poetry and poverty are words which can only be forced into combination. The poetry of the poor exists abundantly, in every sense of the expression. Poetry has taken them for its subjects; has painted their rags and wretchedness, their crimes and sufferings; and the world has gazed intently on the picture, and done homage to its truth and power. Even now its worth has received that melancholy increase which Death, the usurer, bestows on works of art by his mighty power of accumulation. 'The Borough' scenery of Crabbe takes its place amongst the productions of departed masters. He was the poet of the poor. But although he was their poet, he was not himself of them. He looked at them from without, and from above. He makes us sympathize, not in what they feel, but in what he himself feels in the contemplation of their emotions. It is poetry concerning the poor, but neither by the poor, nor for the poor. It is made up of observation and sympathy. The poetry of the poor should be something more than this. It should be the language, not of the observant and pitying gentleman, but of humanity in poverty, pouring forth its own emotions for its own gratification.

That such poetry exists would, in the absence of all other evidence, be abundantly demonstrated by the volumes before us. The fact, indeed, that poetry has always arisen at an early stage of the progress of society towards civilization, shows that the appetite for it exists in uncultivated minds. Poetry is the first form of literature; song is the sorrowing or joyous cry of intellect before it has yet attained the distinct articulation of science. And if the poor of populous communities are below the savage in much that tends to develop and delight the imagination; if, too often, they have scarcely more than he has of direct mental cultivation, there is the compensating advantage of the indirect influences upon them of all the soul which has been generated and exhibited in the progress of mankind towards the social condition in which they exist. The poor labourer, considering only his toil, his poverty, and his ignorance, is not so poetical a being in himself, or to others, as the American Indian, or as the Greeks or the Goths were, when they were at a similar point in the scale of social advancement. But untaught though he be, he is one of the people to whom Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton belonged; and in some degree the power is over him of that which has raised the mind of the community, although he knows it not, and we may not be able to indicate [192] the operation and the result with mechanical precision. He breathes the mental air which they have purified. Though it may have been doled out to him with a niggardly hand, he has yet received a portion of that national character, which they contributed to form. He can enjoy poetry, for he is a man and an Englishman. What has always been, so far as it was their spontaneous choice and purchase, the library, even at the smallest, of the cottage of the poorest? We say spontaneous, for we put out of the question the tracts and good books, which, being given by superiors, must be accepted. For many a generation the minimum of the poor man's library has at least contained three volumes, his bible, his hymn-book, and the Pilgrim's Progress – all poetry, each in its way, and cherished by him, though he may not be aware of the fact, because they are poetry as well as religion. The religion of the poor is always poetry; their idolatries of old were poetical; their superstitions in the middle ages were poetical; their present version of Christian theology is poetical; nor will the advocates of a truer and purer version of that religion succeed in rendering it popular, until they feel themselves, and display to others, its superiority, not only in logical consistency but in imaginative beauty. The bible itself is at once the highest source and the highest gratification of poetical taste. It embodies so powerfully the elements of universal poetry, which appeal to humanity in all countries, that it has borne triumphantly along with them the peculiar characteristics of the region in which it originated, and orientalized the associations of Christendom. If to this little library the means of increase are afforded, it is generally in directions which justify our inference from its original character. Extend education, extend reading, strengthen and enlarge the mind, and poetry 'grows with its growth, and strengthens with its strength.' There is then, in this sense also, a poetry of the poor. And if they possess the principles of its enjoyment, they must also, they do, in them possess the materials for its production.

All the world knows, that some of the very highest names in every department of intellectual achievement are those of men who have sprung from the lowliest origin. This has pre-eminently been the case in mathematical science, while it has been common also both in the fine and useful arts, in law, literature, politics, theology, and even in poetry. But in their elevation they have also acquired that education, which we have assumed as generally distinguishing the rich from the poor. They have thus qualified themselves to produce the kind of composition which we have characterized as the poetry of the wealthier classes. The distinction of classes has been overwhelmed in these splendid developments of humanity. Such was Akenside, who, as our author justly says, 'breathed the soul of Plato into British song.' In such cases as these, the individuals had ceased to be poor and of [193] the poor. They had acquired the tastes, habits, feelings, associations, modes of thought, of the more elevated classes; and lost, at least in some degree, or modified thereby, those which peculiarly belong to their original condition. And this remark applies to poets generally, however proverbial may have been their poverty. What we desiderate as, in this sense, the poetry of the poor, must emanate from men who remain surrounded by the scenery, partakers of the privations, subject to the wrongs, real or imaginary, and animated by the passions and hopes, which belong exclusively to poverty. This is rarely to be expected, because talent will infallibly educate itself, and will almost as infallibly rise in society. It has thus fallen into the train or into the ranks of aristocracy. It has been taken from its den to be tamed, and trained, and domesticated in a mansion. If excellence has been attained, it has not been excellence bearing the peculiar stamp of the poet's native station; all traces of that have been deemed blemishes and carefully obliterated. In former times, the poet was pensioned by some noble patron, – he has now the better patronage of a reading public; but in either case, he ceases to be identified with those who are now commonly described, and who begin to glory in the name, with a portentous pride, as the working classes.

The author now before us has had but one predecessor, – ROBERT BURNS; for we set no store by the twaddling verses of sundry rhyming laundresses, dairymaids, and butlers, who have been cockered into a very transitory reputation by the pious charity of some well-disposed and respectable persons, who found their milk-and-water effusions congenial with their own mental and moral mediocrity. When Apollo and the Muses sojourn, as they sometimes do, in the cells of poverty, it is certainly not that they may be sent to an adult Sunday school, be put into livery, and the whole marched to church to sing a hymn of thanksgiving, composed expressly for the occasion by Mrs. Hannah More, in honour of the condescending benevolence towards them of the upper classes. From Taylor the water-poet, who was a very sponge, down to the latest concoction of rhyme in the pantry and the kitchen-garden, there is nothing of this description that can be read with patience, or rather that can be read without patience. The productions of these people are usually the humble reflections of the tastes of their masters and mistresses. Bloomfield and Clare are of a far better order, though not of the highest order; they belong to a 'bold peasantry;' what they have done, they have done well. But the genuine poverty of society does not live in the fields. Its horrors and its passions, in their sternest form, are city born. Let there be meadows and mountains, but there must also be streets, alleys, workshops, and jails, to complete the scenery of the poetry of poverty. By neglecting these, Bloomfield and Clare have lost the best subjects [194] for their best powers. We should rather say, perhaps, that they only occupy an inferior rank, because their mental constitutions were not matured by city poverty to qualify them for the most powerful composition in this species of poetry. They are too merely pastoral, – their subjects are not soul-stirring, – they deal in what Burns despised: –

' Shepherds' pipes, Arcadian strains,
  And fabled tortures, quaint and tame.'

But Burns was quite another-guess sort of man. He first saw, in their real nature and extent, the peculiar topics of the poet of poverty, and prepared the way for the yet more extended range which has been taken by our author. The education which he obtained for himself was not that which passes for education with the wealthy and fashionable: he seldom wandered towards the region of classicality, and when he did he was sure to lose himself. Rightly did he repent of having ever put such names as Chloris and Daphne into his nervous rhymes. A few good English books, histories, essays, and poems, these he devoured, 'unmixed with baser matter,' or with foreign matter; and his strong constitution became all the stronger. The leading topics of his poetry are precisely those which, without reference to an individual instance, we should have marked out as the proper themes for one who would achieve the highest honours of the poet of poverty. They are what we have already referred to as the universal elements of poetry, freed from the modifications which belong to an educated taste, and coloured with the modifications which belong to the condition of those who toil. He looked on nature with the freshness of a first love. The mountain on whose outline he gazed was not to him a peg on which to hang school quotations and allusions. The emotions with which rocks, woods, and streams inspired him, were, like the rocks themselves, primary, and not secondary. They were not the debris of an old world of poetry. His associations with scenery were those of humanity. With the exception of a little Scotch history, he sang nature as Adam would have sung it, had Adam been created a poet. Nor was his love, the next great universal topic, much more conventional; although it must be deplored that he lowered it towards the degraded regions of physical instinct. He loved as also Adam would have loved, had there been twenty Eves in the world instead of one; but Adam was only a natural man, – Burns was also a poor man. When he looked on the fields, he felt that they were appropriated; when he loved, he therefore also hated. Whether animate or inanimate, he sang of beauty as he felt it, and of oppression too, in the language of keen perception and intense passion. For Burns was a politician: his clear mind saw at once the absurdity of excluding from poetry the subjects by which social man is most engrossingly occupied, and most stormily agitated; he set the example of writing on these subjects, not as the laureate of a [195] party, but as the Tyrtæus of humanity; he would have told prince, peer, or potentate, as readily as he has told the masses and the millions, and with as little of insolence as of sycophancy, that 'a man's a man for a' that.'

The author of the volumes before us is said to be a working man of the name of Elliot, somewhere in the north. On this point, posterity will be better informed than we are at this present moment. We will answer for it that his name will be known long enough and wide enough. His poems have been slowly making their way into notice, but the attention which they gain they are sure to keep. His three volumes are devoted, in succession, to what we have indicated as the three great topics of the poetry of Burns. Politics predominate in the Corn Law Rhymes; his perception of the beauties of nature is most exhibited in the Village Patriarch; and his last publication is, as its title declares, on Love. His education, self-attained we may presume, is also precisely of the description which we have pointed out, as adapted to enrich the poetry without destroying or transforming the peculiar feelings and mental habits of the poor man. We had seen the Corn Law Rhymes, now in the third edition, occasionally advertised and noticed, but hastily concluded, from the title, that it was merely a collection of political squibs in middling verse, and were quite unprepared for the grand poetical prospect which burst upon us when we opened the volume. It is not merely that the distress which is described in many of these poems must of itself, if told without affectation, produce a powerful effect upon the feelings; or that there is something sublime in the stern wrath of those who feel themselves to be wronged by power, insulted by pride, and half-starved by monopoly; it is not merely that we meet with many passages which have all the caustic humour of the epigrams of Burns, and the crushing satire of Byron's 'Age of Bronze;' but there is intermingled with all, and pervading and elevating all, the imagination of a genuine poet, – an imagination that, while it gilds the stormy clouds of passion, is yet ever aspiring towards the pure air and sunny light of heaven as its native elements and its final rest.

' O that my poesy were like the child
  That gathers daisies from the lap of May,
  With prattle sweeter than the bloomy wild!
  It then might teach poor Wisdom to be gay,
  As flowers, and birds, and rivers, all at play.
  And winds, that make the voiceless clouds of morn
  Harmonious.   But distempered, if not mad,
  I feed on nature's bane, and mess with scorn.
  I would not, could not if I would, be glad,
  But, like shade-loving plants, am happiest sad.
  My heart, once soft as woman's tear, is gnarl'd
  With gloating on the ills I cannot cure.'
                                                Village Patriarch, p. 53.

[196] How little appear the commonplace attempts which are continually made to excite pity and horror, by the fall of princes and nobles, by tales of inquisitorial racks and tortures, by bloody murders and grim ghosts, compared with the homely and unpretending power of an 'owre true tale' as told by a poet:

               THE DEATH-FEAST.

' The birth-day, or the wedding-day,
     Let happier mourners keep;
  To death my festal vows I pay,
     And try in vain to weep.
  Some griefs the strongest soul might shake,
     And I such grief have had:
  My brain is hot – but they mistake
     Who deem that I am mad.
  My father died, my mother died,
     Four orphans poor were we;
  My brother John work'd hard, and tried
     To smile on Jane and me.
  But work grew scarce, while bread grew dear,
     And wages lessened too,
  For Irish hordes were bidders here
     Our half-paid work to do.
  Yet still he strove, with failing breath
     And sinking cheek, to save
  Consumptive Jane from early death –
     Then joined her in the grave.
  His watery hand in mine I took,
     And kissed him till he slept:
  O, still I see his dying look!
     He tried to smile, and wept!
  I bought his coffin with my bed,
     My gown bought earth and prayer;
  I pawned my mother's ring for bread,
     I pawned my father's chair.
  My Bible yet remains to sell,
     And yet unsold shall be;
  But language fails my woes to tell –
     Even crumbs were scarce with me.
  I sold poor Jane's gray linnet then,
     It cost a groat a-year;
  I sold John's hen, and missed the hen
     When eggs were selling dear;
  For autumn nights seemed wintry cold,
     While seldom blazed my fire,
  And eight times eight no more I sold
     When eggs were getting higher.
  But still I glean the moor and heath;
     I wash, they say, with skill;
  And workhouse bread ne'er crossed my teeth –
     I trust it never will.
  [197] But when the day on which John died
     Returns with all its gloom,
  I seek kind friends, and beg, with pride,
     A banquet for the tomb.
  One friend, my brother James, at least
     Comes then with me to dine;
  Let others keep the marriage-feast,
     The funeral feast is mine.
  For then on him I fondly call,
     And then he lives again!
  To-morrow is our festival
     Of death, and John, and Jane.
  Even now, behold! they look on me,
     Exulting, from the skies,
  While angels round them weep to see
     The tears gush from their eyes!
  I cannot weep – Why can I not?
     My tears refuse to flow:
  My feet are cold, my brain is hot –
     Is fever madness?   No.
  Thou smilest, and in scorn – but thou,
     Couldst thou forget the dead?
  No common beggar curtsies now,
     And begs for burial bread.'

Magnificent as is the indignation of our author at the heartless extortion which taxes the means of universal support, we yet like his 'countenance more in sorrow than in anger;' and his kindlier emotions have paid a more than just, a generous tribute, to the memory of one whose name we take to be more honoured by the following lines, than by all the senatorial eulogies which have been pronounced in St. Stephen's, or by all the marble which may be raised, sculptured, and inscribed, in Westminster Abbey.

               ELEGY.

' Oh, Huskisson! oh, Huskisson!
  Oh, Huskisson! in vain our friend!
  Why hast thou left thy work undone?
  Of good begun is this the end?
  Thou shouldst have lived, if they remain
  Who fetter'd us, and hated thee.
  Oh, Huskisson! our friend in vain!
  Where now are hope and liberty?
  Thou shouldst have lived, if with thee dies
  The poor man's hope of better days.
  Time stops to weep; but yet shall rise
  The sun whose beams shall write thy praise.
  Thy widow weeps – but what is she,
  And what her paltry, common woe?
  Worlds weep – and millions fast for thee
  Our hope is gone! – why didst thou go?
  [198] Pleased hell awhile suspends his breath,
  Then shouts in joy, and laughs in hate;
  And plague, and famine, call on death
  Their jubilee to celebrate.
  A shadow bids improvement stand,
  While faster flow a nation's tears.
  Oh, dead man! with thy pallid hand
  Thou rollest back the tide of years! '
                               Corn Law Rhymes, pp. 37, 38.

If the last two lines be not poetry, why then 'the pillared firmament is rottenness.'

The Village Patriarch is the description of a man, poor, blind, and old, a man of five-score years, of his person, his recollections, his sensations, walks, talks, dreams, and death; death which, as the bailiffs invade his cottage, and the workhouse opens its doors, sets free 'the last of England's high-soul'd poor.' The beauty of the descriptions with which this poem abounds are enhanced and made more affecting by frequent reference to the patriarch's blindness. The loss of sight is not that of sensation.

' Yet sweet to him, ye stream-loved valleys lone,
   Leafless, or blossoming fragrant, sweet are ye;
For he can hear the wintry forest groan,
   And feel the beauty which he cannot see,
   And drink the breath of Nature, blowing free!
Sweet still it is through fields and woods to stray;
   And fearless wanders he the country wide,
For well old Enoch knows each ancient way;
   He finds in every moss-grown tree a guide,
   To every time-dark rock he seems allied,
Calls the stream Sister, and is not disown'd.'
                                            Village Patriarch, p. 7.

Both in this poem and in the 'Love,' there is a sustained excellence of versification, thought and imagery, which is very unusual. He never drops, as the songs of Burns sometimes do, from the verse which was inspired to the verse which is manufactured. His mind is healthful and vigorous; always knows its work, and does its work; and the prominent passages are such as the subject naturally throws out, not such as are elaborated and polished with infinite pains for the production of effect. What is not quoted is as good as what is quoted; and the most impressive and beautiful passages are, as they ought to be, and as every one knows the best scenes of Shakspeare are, so connected with, and dependent for their effect upon the entire piece of which they form a portion, as to appear to positive and great disadvantage in quotation. His stories and his sketches of character, both of which are frequently introduced, are so good, that we only regret not having space to give specimens of them, which we will not introduce because we cannot present them [199] entire. We must make room for the poor boy, Chantrey, from the poem of Love:

' The worm came up to drink the welcome shower;
  The redbreast quaff'd the rain-drop in the bower;
  The flaskering duck through freshen'd lilies swam;
  The bright roach took the fly below the dam;
  Ramp'd the glad colt, and cropp'd the pensile spray;
  No more in dust uprose the sultry way;
  The lark was in the cloud; the woodbine hung
  More sweetly o'er the chaffinch while he sung;
  And the wild rose from every dripping bush,
  Beheld on silvery sheaf the mirror'd blush;
  When calmly seated on his pannier'd ass,
  Where travellers hear the steel hiss as they pass,
  A milk-boy, sheltering from the transient storm,
  Chalk'd, on the grinder's wall, an infant form:
  Young Chantrey smiled; no critic praised or blamed;
  And golden promise smiled, and thus exclaimed:
  "Go, child of genius! rich be thine increase;
  Go – be the Phidias of the second Greece!"
    Greece! thou art fallen, by luxury o'erthrown,
  Not vanquish'd by the Man of Macedon!
  For ever fallen! and sculpture fell with thee.
  But from the ranks of British poverty
  A glory hath burst forth, and matchless powers
  Shall make th' eternal grace of sculpture ours.
  Th' eternal grace? alas! the date assign'd
  To works, call'd deathless, of creative mind,
  Is but a speck upon the sea of days;
  And frail man's immortality of praise
  A moment to th' eternity of Time,
  That is, and was, and shall be, the sublime,
  The unbeginning, the unending sea,
  Dimensionless as God's infinity.' – Love, pp. 18, 19.

We must observe that, in his love strains, he is no 'ranting Robin;' but that his morality must be allowed by all to be sound on all points, except with those who will condemn his 'gall of bitterness' towards the aristocracy, and not allow his plea that it comes from one of those who are held, by that aristocracy, in 'bonds of iniquity.' His theology, too, so far as it appears, has the simplicity and truth which naturally belong to the theology of poetry, when poetry lives in the light of cultivated intelligence. While, generally speaking, his 'song is but the eloquence of truth,' and its materials are the merest matters of fact, he has made occasional excursions into the regions beyond, has shown that he 'can call spirits from the vasty deep,' and in all the humbleness of his name, station, and subjects, compete with the crowned bards who have waved the wand of magic and commanded the regions of the air; 'Brutus will raise a spirit as soon as Cæsar.'

   [200] ' He waked not, though a hand unearthly drew
The curtains of his bed, and to the hue
Of ashes changed his cheek.   With open eyes
He slumber'd still; but speechless agonies
Wrought on his face convulsed his heart's despair,
And terror smote his damp, uplifted hair.
His spirit felt a spirit's strong control,
An injured spirit whisper'd to his soul:

   No worm slinks down when I approach, –
      No night-bird stints his ditty;
   Yet will I mourn thee, though unheard,
      For now my love is pity.
   Again I'll hear thee talk of truth,
      When Rother's rose is sweetest;
   Again I'll meet thee, perjured one,
      When thou thy new love meetest.

   While stars in silence watch my dust,
      I'll sigh, where last ye parted.
   O'er her who soon shall droop, like me,
      Thy victim, broken-hearted.
   And in that hour, to love so dear.
      The stillest and the fleetest,
   Unfelt I'll kiss my rival's cheek,
      When Rother's rose is sweetest.' – Love, pp. 50, 51.

The great difficulty of the supernatural is mastered here, and a state of mind, of which the conception is most original, and which is most strange and unnatural to humanity, is made to commend itself to our inmost hearts as true to the nature of a disembodied spirit. The passage is free from that exaggeration which is the greatest blemish by which these volumes are disfigured.

We must now take leave of our author, in the hope of an early and of frequent meetings. His poetry, in the view which we have taken of it, is no trifling matter. It is one of the signs of the times. The wealthy, the literary, the powerful, employ themselves about many things which are of far less moment. These 'rhymes' are no cold coruscations flitting about, like the northern lights, in a dim and distant region, for idle people to gaze at. They are intense flashes of liquid lava from that central fire, which must have vent, or its expansion will shiver to atoms the great globe itself. The intellect of poverty is too powerful, and too impetuous, to be bound within the narrow confines of the condition of poverty: already the pressure has broken down those boundaries in the direction of political right. But this is only a portion of the great change which is going forward. We do not mean that the wealthy will be plundered, the property of the country divided, or any of the other wild schemes be realized which madmen desire, and foolish men dread. We trust, the world is doomed to no such unspeakable calamities, but to a progression of good, which, beginning with intelligence, and advancing to freedom, will [201] not stop, till it rests in happiness; in happiness far more equally diffused over the whole surface of the country, than has ever yet been allowed to be the case by partial institutions. We may yet have to pass through a stormy period in which indignation will demand, and apprehension concede, and both misunderstand the real value of what is given and taken; but experience will successively cast down from their altars many social idols which are now worshipped, and discover that many supposed injuries are real interests – until, at length, the forms and operations of government shall be directed solely to the benefit of the whole, the production of the greatest happiness to the greatest number.

 

 

[Fußnote, S. 189]

* 1. Corn Law Rhymes. 3d edition.   London, 1831.
2. The Village Patriarch, a Poem, by the Author of Corn Law Rhymes.   London, 1831.
3. Love, a Poem, by the same.   3d edition, London, 1831.   zurück

 

 

 

 

Erstdruck und Druckvorlage

The Monthly Repository.
New Series, Bd. 6, 1832, März, S. 189-201.

Ungezeichnet.
Für die Zuschreibung vgl. Mineka 1972, S. 407.

Die Textwiedergabe erfolgt nach dem ersten Druck (Editionsrichtlinien).


The Monthly Repository (1832 - 1838)   online
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Werkverzeichnis

Fox, William Johnson: [Rezension zu:]
Poems, chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson, pp. 154. Wilson. 12mo. 1830.
In: The Westminster Review.
1831, Januar, S. 210-224.
URL: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000506030

Fox, William Johnson: The Poor and their Poetry.
In: The Monthly Repository.
New Series, Bd. 6, 1832, März, S. 189-201.
URL: https://archive.org/details/nsmonthlyreposit06londuoft
URL: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008635166

Fox, William Johnson: Living Poets. – No. 2. Ebenezer Elliott.
In: Lectures Addressed Chiefly to the Working Classes by W.J. Fox.
Published from the Reporter's Notes.
Vol. I. London: Charles Fox 1845, S. 226-247.
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89099801680
URL: https://books.google.fr/books?id=d2dEAQAACAAJ

Fox, William Johnson: Robert Burns the first Poet of the Poor.
In: Lectures Addressed Chiefly to the Working Classes by W.J. Fox.
Published from the Reporter's Notes.
Vol. III. London: Charles Fox 1846, S. 142-158.
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t93779k51
URL: https://books.google.fr/books?id=6SgWAQAAMAAJ

 

 

 

Literatur: Fox

Armstrong, Isobel: Victorian Scrutinies. Reviews of Poetry 1830-1870. London 1972.

Armstrong, Isobel: Victorian Poetry. Poetry, poetics and politics. London u.a. 2003.
Vgl. bes. S. 25-40.

Brandmeyer, Rudolf: Poetiken der Lyrik: Von der Normpoetik zur Autorenpoetik. In: Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte. Hrsg. von Dieter Lamping. 2. Aufl. Stuttgart 2016, S. 2-15.

Bristow, Joseph (Hrsg.): The Victorian Poet. Poetics and Persona. London u.a. 1987.

Bristow, Joseph: Reforming Victorian poetry: poetics after 1832. In: The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. Hrsg. von Joseph Bristow. Cambridge u.a. 2000, S. 1-24.

Byrne, Sandie: Poetry and Class. Cham 2020.

Christ, Carol T.: Victorian Poetics. In: A Companion to Victorian Poetry. Hrsg. von Richard Cronin u.a. Malden, MA 2002, S. 1-21.

Goodridge, John (Hrsg.): Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets. 3 Bde. London u.a. 2006.

James, Gregory: The Poetry and the Politics. Radical Reform in Victorian England. London 2014.

Salmon, Richard: The Literature of Labour: Collective Biography and Working-Class Authorship, 1830-1859. In: The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910. Authorial Work Ethics. Hrsg. von Marcus Waithe u. Claire White. London 2018, S. 43-59.

Shattock, Joanne: Reviewing. In: A Companion to Victorian Poetry. Hrsg. von Richard Cronin u.a. Malden, MA 2002, S. 378-391.

Waithe, Marcus: The Pen and the Hammer: Thomas Carlyle, Ebenezer Elliot, and the 'Active Poet'. In: Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1750-1900. Hrsg. von Kirstie Blair u.a. New York 2013, S. 116-135.

 

 

Literatur: The Monthly Repository

Armstrong, Isobel: Monthly Repository (1806-1838).
URL: https://ncse.ac.uk/headnotes/mrp.html

King, Andrew u.a. (Hrsg.): The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. London u. New York 2019.

Mineka, Francis E.: The Dissidence of Dissent. The Monthly Repository, 1806-1838. Under the Editorship of Robert Aspland, W. J. Fox, R. H. Horne, & Leigh Hunt. With a Chapter on Religious Periodicals, 1700-1825. New York 1972.

Wu, Duncan: The Lamb Circle and the Monthly Repository. In: Romanticism. The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism 12.2 (2006), S. 143-149.

Wu, Duncan: William Hazlitt (1737-1820) and the Monthly Repository: New Attributions. In: The Lamb Society Journal 136 (2006), S. 133-143.

 

 

Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer