The poetry of physical labour 1730-1800: the Duckian tradition

The thesis argues that poets throughout the eighteenth-century (initially from the labouring classes and latterly from other backgrounds) poeticised labouring experiences and even mimetically evoked them in verse. It is argued that this experiential, narrative mode results from a growing awareness that there was a rural subject matter emerging unavailable in pastoral (or georgic) verse, and that a crucial early manifestation of this ‘new’ way of writing about labour is found in Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1730). It is argued that this poem functioned as a catalyst, encouraging others to poeticise their own labouring experiences, and that numerous of the works in which this poetic medium initially appeared allowed labourers to claim poetic identities for themselves as labourers and to represent their experiences and those of their workmates as worthy of respect and dignity. Exploring the ways in which the poets of labour are influenced by, but also simultaneously react to canonical models of the age, the thesis then examines the work of subsequent poets throughout the century compelled by the same or similar impulses to aestheticise labour, focusing on the techniques employed to mingle labouring experiences with existing verse conventions, up to and including Robert Bloomfield and James Woodhouse. Alongside the above considerations, the thesis conceptualises the simultaneous co-existence of complicity and critique in the work of labouring poets by applying both Zizek’s work on individual collusion with ideology and Nietzsche’s work on religion to the poets whose work it discusses. It subsequently argues for the recurrent presence of a levelling theology in the beliefs and works of a number of poets considered that both licenses a belief in greater social and political equality yet that, because of its adherence to what Nietzsche would later term ‘slave morality’, also precludes the overt taking of this greater equality by force. It then plots the evolution of this levelling theology throughout the century, culminating in its sponsorship of radical (though not revolutionary) political beliefs in Woodhouse’s work.