Poetry and Fin de Siècle Socialism

Abstract

Poetry was a major cultural genre of the so-called ‘socialist revival’ in late 19th-century Britain. Poems were sung at meetings and Labour Church services, published in socialist newspapers and periodicals, and gathered together in collections and anthologies. Socialist activists took to verse to make social, political and ideological interventions, and looked back through the literature of the 19th century to construct a democratic canon of verse which seemed to have the ‘Socialist passion for man,’ as one socialist commentator described it, at its heart. In a mixed socialist movement, engaged in heated internal debate over its aims and strategies, discussions about the nature and purpose of socialist poetry fed into wider discussions about the nature and purpose of fin de siecle socialism itself. There has been a burgeoning of scholarly interest in this field in the early 21st century, and this article explores this small but growing body of work, suggesting directions for future research.