British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730-1837, Bridget Keegan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
It’s a mark of how far ecocriticism has developed that Bridget Keegan can produce an assessment of mostly eighteenth-century labouring-class poetry largely based on environmentally critical criteria, confident that her argument will be appreciated by period specialists and ecocritics alike. And although this book is aimed at specialists I would recommend it as an interesting comment on modern poetic and ecocritical conventions as well as on eighteenth and nineteenth-century poetry. Keegan demonstrates that these poets can sustain the same sort of analysis applied by, for example, Jonathan Bate to Wordsworth, and effectively influence and expand the environmental literary canon.
Bridget Keegan has contributed significantly to this in her survey of a wide variety of poets, examining how non-human nature is experienced by labouring-class writers. She uses the elemental worlds of water, earth and wood as thematic structures for her discussion and elucidation of the labourerís relationship to poetic ambition, social order and political engagement. She has added to the evaluation of comparatively well known poets like Robert Bloomfield and John Clare, placing them continually in the poetic landscape familiar to us (that of Pope and Coleridge, for example), and has also introduced unfamiliar and interesting writers such as the Tees-side poet Anne Wilson, author of Teisa, and William Falconer, whose ‘popular epic’ The Shipwreck influenced ‘polite artists’, as Keegan calls them, as diverse as Byron and Turner. A thematic approach enables her to avoid the most obvious pitfalls of writing about labouring-class writing, namely that critics spend too long writing about the labouring and the class.
Her chosen writers are fairly fluidly grouped into elemental chapters, meaning that Keegan can reference Pope, Thomson or Cowper and still maintain the status of her nominated poet in that theme. Thus, the importance of rivers, ‘poetically and otherwise’ [98], as Keegan comments, can be illustrated by Pope’s Windsor Forest, but is amplified and argued by those closer to the water, Anne Wilson and John Clare among them. This technique permits a comprehensive discussion, drawing in the poets’ backgrounds, some detailed and fascinating analysis of their work in relation to the subject and establishing the poet in his or her contemporary niche, assuming they had one. Keegan can also engage present-day critical debate effectively because she can target the theme without having to be too writer-specific. So, although this is a small book – only about 200 pages – it is ambitious, covering the regional environments of these poets alongside ‘ways of thinking about the human place in nature’ [9], as she says, even hoping to deepen ‘our understanding of the history of environmental literature’ [192]. With sustainability and exploitation of human and non-human nature always in mind, Keegan can explore the more orthodox end of the debate, in her chapters on Bloomfield and eighteenth-century farming practices, or James Woodhouse’s resistance to garden elitism, in terms familiar to some readers: ‘engrossments and emparkments’ [39], and the moral imperative behind much eighteenth-century georgic, Christian stewardship; an ‘ethic of care and the compromises needed’ to make it work [23]. However, from Woodhouse onwards we begin to appreciate more closely how the thematic structure of the book – gardens, ‘prospects’, rivers and fens, the sea and woods – enables Keegan to emphasise the importance of experience in this poetry, which spoke to contemporary audiences and continues to impress us today with what she occasionally refers to as ‘modern’ environmental insight.
Keegan makes it clear that the proximity of ‘nature’ for a labouring poet didn’t make them any more environmentally minded than it would a middle-class poet [67-8]; however, proximity allowed these poets to demonstrate a different aesthetic response from the conventional ‘prospect’, pastoral/georgic, or nationalist/imperialist view. This is particularly obvious in the poetry of, for example, Ann Yearsley writing about her ‘prospects’ at Clifton Hill in Bristol, or Anne Wilson, who refuses locodescriptive convention in a ‘narrative of loss and disintegration of the feminine within the landscape’ [113]. Establishment poetry, much like other aesthetic responses to nature, privileged the visual over other senses. Keegan demonstrates how these poets were able, by virtue of their lack of any establishment, to evoke all the senses. Clare, especially, ‘engages sound, touch and even smell and taste’ [160], especially in his representation of an unstable landscape, the fens, ‘neither water nor earth’ [150], (and it could be argued that all labouring-class writing presents variations on a theme of stability). However, Keegan also offers poetic examples of the moral virtues of drainage – we are allowed to draw our own conclusions as she is always careful to point out how our ecocentric sensibilities would not let us dwell comfortably in early nineteenth-century farmland. In fact, if this book has a flaw it is that perhaps Keegan is too careful to remind us that we are no longer part of this poetic world, and frequently pulls up on some detail, especially with regard to the piety of a number of these poems, that might offend modern conventions. I’m inclined to wonder how much this matters – if we are to gain any insight, as Keegan has clearly demonstrated, and to apply that insight to our understanding of modern writing (and what is already becoming conventional in ecocriticism), then we need to be a bit more robust in our reading. Perhaps she is too kind to her readers: although she quotes Michael Branch’s encouragement to engage sympathetically with ‘those who came before us’ [5], Keegan doesn’t quite trust our willingness to do this – although her own passion and delight in this poetry shines through many pages. And although this is an ambitious and unusual approach to labouring-class poetry, Keegan’s humility is part of her delight – she is often in awe of their considerable achievements without any patronising. Her enthusiasm brings the writers to life, especially noticeable in those areas which cover the extreme and unfamiliar – the sea, ultimate instability for humankind, for example. She also manages, in this chapter, to link georgic ‘terms of art’ (nautical language) with Romantic sublimity and post-colonial politics – no mean feat. Bridget Keegan’s book is a thoughtful expression of considerable research, great love of the subject and sensitive critical insight, and should be required reading as a example of how environmental criticism can apply to any period, and probably any poet.
Sue Edney
Bath Spa University
