Poetry and Class

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Sandie Byrne

   Pages 1-22

3. The Late Middle Ages

   • Sandie Byrne

   Pages 23-105

4. The Early Modern Period

   • Sandie Byrne

   Pages 107-147

5. The Eighteenth Century

   • Sandie Byrne

   Pages 149-211

6. The Late Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth Century

   • Sandie Byrne

   Pages 213-257

7. The Mid- to Late Nineteenth Century

   • Sandie Byrne

   Pages 259-309

8. The Twentieth Century: To the 1960s

   • Sandie Byrne

   Pages 311-356

9. The Twentieth Century: After the 1960s

   • Sandie Byrne

   Pages 357-431

10. Back Matter

    Pages 433-453

    PDF

This study discusses the representation of class in poetry in English from Britain and Ireland between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, and the effect of class on the production, dissemination, and reception of that poetry. It looks at the factors which enable and obstruct the production of poetry, such as literacy, education, patronage, prejudice, print, and the various alleged revivals of poetry in Britain, and the relationship between class and poetic form. Whilst this is a survey that cannot be comprehensive, it offers a number of case-studies of poets and poems from each period considered.

• Early modern poetry
• Chartist poetry
• First World War
• Second World War
• Modernist poetry
• Contemporary poetry
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

  Sandie Byrne

Dr Sandie Byrne is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. She is the author of a number of works on poetry, including Tony Harrison: Loiner (1997); H., v., & O: The Poetry of Tony Harrison (1999), and The Poetry of Ted Hughes (2014).

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