Poetry and Class Sandie Byrne Poetry and Class Sandie Byrne Poetry and Class Sandie Byrne University of Oxford Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK ISBN 978-3-030-29301-7 ISBN 978-3-030-29302-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Cover illustration: © duncan1890 / Getty Images, Medieval Woman Early Flemish style This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 The Late Middle Ages 23 3 The Early Modern Period 107 4 The Eighteenth Century 149 5 The Late Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth Century 213 6 The Mid- to Late Nineteenth Century 259 7 The Twentieth Century: To the 1960s 311 8 The Twentieth Century: After the 1960s 357 Index 433 v ABBREVIaTIONS OG Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1986. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. SHNSP Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems 1988–2013. London: Faber and Faber, 2014. DDNSP Douglas Dunn, New Selected Poems 1964–2000. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. HCP Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed Paul Keegan. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. THCP Tony Harrison, Collected Poems. London: Penguin Viking, 2007. P3 Tony Harrison, Plays 3. London Plays 3. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. P5 Tony Harrison, Plays 5. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. PMP Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. MNSP Paul Muldoon, New Selected Poems 1968–1994. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. CRMSPH Craig Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. CRR Craig Raine, Rich. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. vii CHAPTER 1 Introduction Class I am very grateful to Prof Ed Larrissy for kindly inviting me to contribute a chapter to the Cambridge Companion to British Poetry 1945–2000,1 from which came the germ of the idea for this study. What could be said in such a short piece was, of course, limited; some excellent poems were treated cursorily or not at all. This work is an attempt to flesh out that piece, to place the subject in a broader context, and to extend its coverage to ear- lier periods. This is by no means the first work to consider the relationship between literature in English and social class. A number of important works have been published in the last few decades, including Lawrence Driscoll’s Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature,2 which looks at prose fiction; John Kirk’sThe British Working Class in the Twentieth Century: Film, Literature and Television,3 which is mostly concerned with prose but touches on the poetry of Tony Harrison; Julian Markels’s The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature,4 which focuses on nineteenth-­century social realist fiction; Pamela Fox’sClass Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–19455; Christopher Hilliard’s To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain,6 which charts roughly the same period; editors Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke, and Chris Weedon’s Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class,7 which examines twentieth-century writing, particularly of the 1930s; Ian Haywood’s Working-Class Fiction © The Author(s) 2020 1 S. Byrne, Poetry and Class, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_1 2 S. BYRNE from Chartism to Trainspotting8; Gustav H. Klaus’s The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing9; editors Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji’s Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780–190010; more recently, editors John Goodridge and Bridget Keenan’s A History of Working-Class Literature,11 which looks at prose and poetry from 1700 to the present. Sonali Perera’s work asks whether there can be an international working-class novel.12 Before these, P.M. Ashraft published the invaluable two-volume Introduction to Working-Class Literature.13 A History of Working-Class Literature covers the period from 1700 to the present, but its foreword, focusing primarily on pre-industrial times, seems to equate working-class labour with the agrarian and pastoral. The place of working-class writing in British literary history has always been marginal. Yet archival research has increasingly turned up numbers of English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish authors, princi- pally poets. To read their writing is to experience the silent majority sud- denly finding a voice, the shepherd or washerwoman or haymaker stepping forward out of the ‘dark side of the landscape’ towards us with tremen- dous energy. Plebeian poets of the rural South such as Duck, Bloomfield, and Collier are of course enormously important, and some later essays in Goodridge and Keenan’s collection do look at writing about the city. It is important to remember that poets in the twenty-first century also give voice to the silenced, as well as to consider the ethics of that ventrilo- quism, and to pay equal attention to the representations of northern and southern urban and industrial landscapes as well as northern and southern pastoral and anti-pastoral.14 Many works on twentieth-century poetry mention the social class of poets based on parental occupation, at least when that occupation is deemed to be working class, and a number of works discuss overt political statements in the poetry. Some more detailed shorter studies include sections in Paul Bentley’s Ted Hughes, Class and Violence15; Neil Roberts’s ‘Poetry and class’ in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry16; David Kennedy’s ‘“What does the fairy DO?”: The staging of antithetical masculine styles in the poetry of Tony Harrison and Douglas Dunn’17; Peter Childs’s The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey18; and Neil Corcoran’s English Poetry Since 1940.19 This study, especially the sections on poetry between 1960 and 1999, is indebted to those. There have also been a number of works on class and American litera- ture, which is outwith the scope of this study, notably Gary Lenhart’s The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class.20 Labouring poetry 1 INTRODUCTION 3 and Chartist poetry have been the subject of a number of studies, which are surveyed in this work, but there have been far fewer studies of British and Irish poetry and class which are not restricted to the period since 1800 and which do not focus exclusively on working-class writing. Roberts argues that class ‘becomes visible in poetry only when a working-­ class point of view is being articulated: “[m]iddle-classness” tends to be invisible in poetry’.21 Whilst this is largely true of poetry criticism, class is significant and evident in poems and their production and reception beyond a working-class point of view, and to homogenise such a view is problem- atic. This study does not attempt to define class, though it does refer to others’ definitions.22 It does not attempt to construct a working-class genre or canon. It does not attempt to classify the class of any poet. It does accept that both poem and poet are the products of historical moments, shaped by economic-class realities but not straightforwardly reflecting them. It treats poems as imaginary constructions of social realities. It examines poems by writers who declare themselves to be of a particular class or who perform class, and it examines poetry on issues of class or issues which have been circulated or received in a way that has been determined or influenced by the poet’s assumed class. It cannot offer a comprehensive history of the representation of class in English literature, or a neat formula to explain the relationship between class and publishing or criticism, a relationship which is much less simple than ‘working-class equals excluded’. It cannot map a convenient trajectory from obscurity to canonicity for working-class poets or the reverse for writers from a higher social class. It can attempt to note some changes in the literary representation of class and in the status and reception of poetry and poets denoted as of a particular class, and it can attempt to relate the forms of poetry to these topics. It will address poetry which articulates a sense of embattlement, which positions its narrator and/or reader in solidarity and in opposition to an adversarial group, bear- ing in mind Frederic Jameson’s reminder that class consciousness is (figu- ratively) Utopian, insofar as it reflects the unity of a collectivity, the affirmation of collective solidarity.23 It will, however, also look at poetry which does not identify a ‘them’ who are versus ‘us’, which has no apparent instrumental function, but which is received and read as marked for class.