The Peasant Poet
The Rural Muse: Studies in the Peasant Poetry of England. By Rayner Unwin. (George Allen & Unwin. 15s.) THE tenor of Mr. Unwin's book is an even one; there arc no surprises, but there are no excessive sillinesses. He is frankly concerned with a byway of English literature, he deals with no major figures except Crabbe and he offers no startling reassessments. Mr. Unwin doesn't define the peasant poet narrowly, but casts his nets wide enough to include such figures as Robert Bloomfield, peasant by birth and shoe- maker by trade, Alfred Williams, who lived in the country but worked in the railway factory at Swindon, and the peasant by negative 'capability, that is to say Barnes along with parts of Relph and Crabbe. It seems a pity that Hardy was left out of this survey—his fatalism, heaviness and naiveté are all peasant characteristics and he is surely the greatest of the English 'peasant poets.'
Dealing chiefly with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mr. Unwin' writes most informatively on individual figures and it is only with his more general remarks that one feels inclined to disagree. He ends with a rather simplified' Word for Today': 'Universal educa- tion and the widespread dissemination of the printed word have broken down some of the barriers that hindered genius in the past.' He fails to note that it was far easier for the self-educated man of the eighteenth century to enter at once, de4fite material difficulties, into his cultural heritage, than for our elementary school and news- paper-educated equivalent deluged by irrelevant printed matter. Beginning usually with the Authorised Version, Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost, he would proceed to the acknowledged classics of the day without any loss of time in finding his bearings. There is little need for Mr. Unwin to say of the serious books which Stephen Duck, the thresher poet, and his friend studied together, that they 'are an interesting reflection of the instinctive taste of an unsophisticated poet.' The emphasis should rather fall on the fact that such was the common fare of all self-educated men of the respectable poor, which argues the existence of a healthy literary culture (extending throughout the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth) into which the peasant, with his own organic culture of traditional lore, was able to enter once he could read. Mrs. Leavis in her Fiction and the Reading Public has told the same story of the reading of such self-educated men as James Lackington, William Hone, Samuel Bamford, William Cham- bers, Thomas Cooper and Samuel Drew. Mr. Unwin is aware that serious reading was widespread in the eighteenth century, but if in his rather sketchy introductory section he had tried to establish the cultural effects of puritanism, his account of the social context of the self-educated poet would have had more texture. It is a simplification of the literary context that also leads to his statements in the vein of To write from the heart requires no training' despite 'the complexity of the world today.' Even Alfred Williams, the last of Mr. Unwin's poets, born in 1877, was in touch with an eqpivalent fbr 'training' in a Wiltshire where folksong was still an Indigenous tradition. What clearly emerges from the book is that the peasant poet, like most minor poets in the eighteenth century, was both inspired and unfortunately influenced by Miltonics and by Pope's couplets, and that it is only with Clare, who had the achievements of the Romantic Revival behind him, that the peasant poet finds the proper form for his matter.
Despite a certain woolliness of style, Mr. Unwin has provided us with a sensible, informative and useful book.
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