Late Crabbe in Relation to the Augustans and Romantics: The Temporal Labyrinth of his tales in Verse, 1812

Abstract

For the general reader, George Crabbe's reputation probably continues to be pretty much Village-bound. For the scholar-critic, however, Crabbe's late volumes of verse-tales present more substantial basis for appreciating Crabbe's poetic achievement.1 There is good deal of critical disagreement, though, about the precise nature and extent of Crabbe's achievement in those verse-tales. Some commentators see late Crabbe as sort of vestigial Augustan, anxiously but stubbornly holding to old ways of thinking in the brave new world of Ancient Mariners and Clouds of Glory. Others see him as standing somewhere between the Augustans and Romantics, or even verging upon becoming Romantic himself A few take great leap forward, arguing that he transcends both the Augustan and Romantic camps, becoming, for example, a naturalistic poet far ahead of his time.2 The Crabbe of the late verse-tales has proven hard figure to place in relation to his literary contemporaries. Like number of other readers, I think Crabbe's Tales in Verse, 1812 is the most complex and distinctively interesting among his late volumes of verse. It stands as our best test for measuring the extent to which Crabbe's artistic vision developed beyond his early Augustanism. It seems to me, however, that the common conception of what is going on in that 1812 volume needs reconsideration. Readers commonly suppose that Crabbe's fundamental impulse in the verse-tales is in some manner or degree moral-didactic one. Incautious commentators discover in the poems pretty simple lessons about how to live.3 Without much soul-searching, these readers are given to pronouncing that Crabbe remains clearly Augustan poet. More cautious commentators have recognized that Crabbe's verse-tales are more complex than this: they exert resistance against one's attempt to reap morals from them. As Professor Sale pointed out some years ago, the poems contain balance of many motives and sympathies which preclude, as in real life, easy and absolute