"
Class-consciousness--a word often on the lips of our democratic leaders
of today--has held far too much sway over the minds of poets from the
Elizabethan age onwards. Spenser writes his 'Faerie Queene' "to fashion a
gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline," and Milton's
audience, fit but few, is composed of scholars whose ears have been
attuned to the harmonies of epic verse from their first lisping of
Virgilian hexameters, or of latter-day Puritans, like John Bright, who
overhear in 'Paradise Lost' the echoes of a faith that once was stalwart.
But what, it may be asked, of Crabbe, and what of Wordsworth? The former
by his own confession, paints
the cot,
As truth will paint it and as bards will not;
but as we listen to his verse tales we can never forget that it is the
Rev. George Crabbe who is instructing us, or that his pedestal is the
topmost story of his three-decker pulpit at Aldborough. Wordsworth's
sympathy with the lives of the Cumberland peasantry is profound, and the
time is surely not distant when such a poem as 'Michael' will win a place
in the hearts of working men; but it is to be feared that in his own
generation "Mr Wudsworth" served rather--as a warning than an
encouragement to his peasant neighbours.
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