| dc.description.abstract | This study depends on the premise that rural poetry in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries provides more reliable evidence of
contemporary assumptions about poetry than of contemporary knowledge
of the rural poor. According to the concept of neoclassical decorum,
poetry was expected to achieve a balance between the probable and the
morally admirable. As the ideals of poetry's major audience became more
urban and middle-class (if the reviewers may be taken as representative),
what was regarded as probable by the poet and recognized as admirable by
the reader began to diverge. Consequently the poet's role, as dramatized
in his poetry by his persona, began to change, from commentator to
mediator to seeker after uncertain values. Early nineteenth-century
reviewers tended to interpret poetry in such a way as to confirm their
sense of the centrality of the urban middle classes. They would approve
poetry which presented their milieu as the repository of values, the
pivot of consensus, and were less responsive to poetry which defined
their interests as peripheral, requiring mediation with other sets of
values. Decorum began to be interpreted as a harmony not of social
relations but of more private and less holistic moral values. Correspondingly it became less common for poetry to refer, by means
of abstractions (the 'poetic diction' rejected by Wordsworth), to the
implicit context of consensual beliefs provided by decorum. The
increasing emphasis on sentiment and particularity of description in
poetry suggests a weakening of decorum. It indicates a growing effort
to determine the response of the reader by means of a context created by
the individual poem alone. Moreover, the experimental techniques of the major
poets discussed in this study point to a dissatisfaction with conventional
notions of decorum. Their experiments stemmed, in part, from their concern
with the rural poor and their consequent detachment from the increasingly
assertive urban literary milieu. Goldsmith, for instance, attempted to
amalgamate the older kind of poetry of social relations with the newer
kind of poetry of individual sensibility in order to advocate a social
order based on values which were less mercantile and more familial. Crabbe
emphasized the irregularity and discord of contemporary society in order
to expose the unreality of the ideals of harmony and uniformity basic to
decorum. Similarly Cowper concentrated on apparently insignificant
details in order to challenge accepted proprieties. Burns made use of
the ironic and dramatic qualities of the Scots vernacular tradition to
present a moral and social relativity which threatened the hierarchical
assumptions of his readers. Wordsworth's poetry embodies the most
thoroughgoing rejection of the implicit contract of decorum connecting
the proprieties of the poem with social proprieties -r he attempted to
recreate a consensus on the basis of unmediated individual experience.
Although the risk of isolating idiosyncrasies led to compromises in the
work of all of these poets, it was their common effort to forge a new
consensus between poet and reader (rather than the celebration of the
individual sensibility more commonly associated with Romanticism) which
enabled them to escape the divisions which rend the poetry of Clare. | en |
