Form and Deformity in George Crabbe’s The Borough

Abstract

Abstract Much has been said about Romantic writers’ experimentation with form, with new forms—or deviations from old ones—working to parallel a need for social re-form. This makes it even more remarkable that George Crabbe, who explores poverty, pollution, disability, and other variants of aesthetic deformity in his 1810 The Borough, nonetheless refers to and often writes in traditional forms, including the epic, the country house poem, the eclogue, and evolving modes like the Gothic and the confessional poem. This essay argues that this dissonance between form and content is intentional: that Crabbe writes in traditional forms to illustrate that traditional forms, especially physical environments, can easily become physically and morally polluted.