Controversial Crabbe: A “ Namby-Pamby Mandeville”

Abstract

READERS TODAY HAVE ALL BUT FORGOTTEN THAT THE POETRY OF GEORGE Crabbe was once central in most important debates shaping British literature. At end of twentieth century, critics referred to Crabbe as the last Augustan, poet who [wavered] between Augustan explicitness and nineteenth-century complexity, (1) anachronism, (2) an unpoetical poet, (3) and a somewhat neglected figure, (4) but these designations overlook urgent response characteristic of Crabbe's contemporaries. (5) One review of Tales (1812), for example, opens with bracing claim that the names of Voltaire and Crebillon never divided critics of Paris into contrary parties more effectually than this world of ours is now set at variance by disputed merits of Mr. Crabbe. (6) In 1819, another reviewer claims, We know no poet more generally read, or made more frequently topic of interesting and animated conversation. But when we listen to remarks ... and when we look into pages of our brother critics ... [we] find so many persons literally writhing under horrors of song, and gasping after terms to express their shocked and severely pained feelings. (7) Like more famous project of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Crabbe's elicited his own eddy of which underscores pervasive tensions and unresolved confusions accompanying changes in taste and criticism in early nineteenth century. (8) When review in 1810 names Crabbe the poet of is not immediately clear whether that is term of approbation or censure. reviewer claims, The peculiarity of [Crabbe] is, that he wishes to discard everything like from He is poet of reality, and of in low life. (9) Crabbe's poems, according to review, are missing transporting force of illusion, and review considers discarding detrimental to poetry, defending illusion and imagination in poetry on basis that it is precisely to from world as is, that we fly to poetry. (10) Other reviewers, on contrary, found Crabbe's poetry praiseworthy because refuses to escape from world. One of most famous instances of such praise is Lord Byron's commemoration of Crabbe as Nature's sternest painter, yet best. (11) By early nineteenth century, Crabbe's reception was polarized by debates hinging upon positive or negative associations of reality in literary art. But Crabbe himself was not always so controversial among critics; rather was his poems that were viewed as pleasantly strident. Village (1783) initiated Crabbe's first claim to literary fame, admired by Burke, edited by Johnson, and largely praised for depicting what calls real pain of rural life and working conditions. In its most widely-known passages, poem asserts that describing reality poses special problems for poetic tradition's language and tropic reservoir, and offers as solution its jarring, localized observations and long passages of gruesome, unpleasant details. In Village, irresolution and discomfiting mode of signifying become poet's best options for getting social reality into his poem. Many eighteenth-century critics recognized and appreciated Crabbe's project as new contribution to poetic tradition. Much like work of William Cowper, Crabbe's was perceived as artistic intervention in debates that had been stirred by Enlightenment interest in Sciences of Man and continued to be relevant to discussions of social changes underway immediately after American and French Revolutions. It was at outset of his second literary career in 1807 (the precise circumstances of which I will say more about below) that critics began to take noticeably different point of view about Crabbe's project. scandalous implications of poetic content founded on social reality and poetic form that refused overarching order of tidy narratives and moralistic conclusions made Crabbe especially controversial poet. …