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the poor . They had acquired the tastes , habits , feelings , associations , modes of thought , of the more elevated classes ; and lost , at least in some degree , or modified thereby , those which peculiarly belong to their original condition . And this remark applies to poets generally , however proverbial may have been their poverty . What we desiderate as , in this sense , the poetry of the
poor , must emanate from men who remain surrounded by the scenery , partakers of the privations , subject to the wrongs , real or imaginary , and animated by the passions and hopes , which belong exclusively to poverty . This is rarely to be expected , because talent will infallibly educate itself , and will almost as infallibly rise in society . It has thus fallen into . the train or into the ranks of aristocracy . It has been taken from its den to be tamed , and trained , and domesticated in a mansion .. If
excellence has been attained , it has not been excellence bearing the peculiar stamp of the poet ' s native station ; all traces of that have been deemed blemishes and carefully obliterated . In former times , the poet was pensioned by some noble patron , —he has now the better patronage of a reading public ; but in either case , he ceases to be identified with those who are now commonly described , and who begin to glory in the name _ , with a portentous pride , as the working classes .
The author now before us has had but one predecessor , —r Robert Burns ; for we set no store by the twaddling verses of sundry rhyming laundresses , dairymaids , and butlers , who have been cockered into a very transitory reputation by the pious charity of some well-disposed and respectable persons , who found their milk-and-water effusions congenial with their own mental and moral mediocrity . When Apollo and the Muses sojourn , as they sometimes do , in the cells of poverty , it is certainly not that they may be sent to an adult Sunday school , be put into livery , and the whole inarched to church to sing a hymn of thanksgiving , composed expressly for the occasion by Mrs . Hannah More , in honour of the condescending benevolence towards them of the upper classes . From Taylor the water-poet , who was a very sponge , down to the latest concoction of rhyme in the pantry and the kitchen-garden , there is nothing of this description that can be read with patience , or rather that can be read
without patience . The productions of these people are usually the humble reflections of the tastes of their masters and mis tresses . Bloomfield and Clare are of a far better order , though not of the highest order ; they belong to a ' bold peasantry ; ' what they haye done , they have done well . But the genuine poverty of society does not live in the fields . Its horrors and its passions , in their sternest form , are city born . Let there be meadows and
mountains , but there must also be streets , alleys , workshops , and jails , to complete the scenery of . the poetry of poverty . By neglecting these , Bloomfield and Clare have lost the best subjecti *
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The Poor and their Poetry . 19 &
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JNo . t > 3 . P
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1832, page 193, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1808/page/49/
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