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COPYRIGHT 2001 Rice University
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat
Ben Jonson
No early-eighteenth-century poet sweated more, both in and about his poetry, than Stephen Duck. [1] A glance at "The Thresher's Labour" reveals five descriptions of sweating in this 283-line poem. This perspiration was a necessary by-product of the arduous manual labor that forms the text's central subject. Moreover, such sweat has typically been read as a sign of authenticity of experience, a category which has allowed critics to classify Duck as a minor poet and the poem as a paraliterary phenomenon. Although even Raymond Williams has tried to rescue Duck's name from its "'limiting' associations," Williams's strategy is ultimately similar to those who have been responsible for the initial limiting of Duck's relevance. [2] Williams argues for the poem's "simple power" heard behind "the strain of this labourer's voice." [3] As such, Williams marshals the same standard of documentary accuracy that has impeded sustained analyses of the poem's literary (and not just historical) attributes and achievements. Beca use he was involved in manual labor, critics for nearly three centuries have found themselves profoundly uneasy in approaching seriously Duck's poetic labors.
Although "The Thresher's Labour" is typically mentioned in most standard literary histories of the period, when it is discussed in any detail, it is assessed and occasionally praised for its historical veracity. How might an understanding of the poem's relevance be altered if it were read as more than the "realistic" representation of sweating agricultural laborers? What if it was to be interpreted as the product of an intellectual effort, the invention of a self-conscious creative agent--a poet who worked as a thresher and not a thresher who also happened to be a poet? My purpose in this essay is to move beyond the conventional justifications for Duck's marginal importance, as merely an interesting literary anecdote (primarily owing to his having been the target of ample Scriblerian scorn) or as evidence for a nascent "working-class" consciousness. Instead, Duck should be seen as a key contributor to the significant experimentations with the form of the georgic underway in the first half of the eighteenth c entury. To date, only John Goodridge has examined in detail the specifically literary dimensions of Duck's poem, such as its use of voice, imagery, or the meeting or innovating of generic conventions. [4] Goodridge's reading is exemplary; however, Duck's poem is complex enough to sustain more than one such analysis. [5]
My contention is that in the poem Duck is just as concerned with engaging the debate about the formal nature and purpose of the georgic (particularly as it was articulated by Joseph Addison in his preface to John Dryden's Virgil), as he was in describing the act of threshing. After reviewing some of the poem's critical reception, I wish to test the limits of the "'limiting' associations" surrounding Duck's status as a poet in order to demonstrate that he is deliberately responding to, and often challenging, early-eighteenth-century theories of georgic. in "The Thresher's Labour," Duck speaks to the debate primarily through careful stylistic innovations at the level of voice. The layering of voices within "The Thresher's Labour" reveals Duck's poetic craftsmanship and the complexity and importance of his contribution to the development of the georgic form.
Gustav Klaus is one of the first twentieth-century critics to initiate more ambitious claims for "The Thresher's Labour." Klaus asserts that Duck's "greatest merit is his intuitive recognition that work is a theme worthy of literary treatment." [6] Klaus locates the poem's value in its accuracy: "Never before had there been such a truthful description of workaday routine in verse. " [7] Klaus does claim that there is some importance to Duck's use of voice, in particular to his unique use of the collective pronoun "we." Yet this innovation is explained in terms of that voice's relationship to what Klaus sees as the poem's political agenda. For Klaus, it suggests Duck's (largely unsubstantiated) status as spokesperson for the oppressed. Such a position is less easy to defend upon close reading. Klaus is correct to point out Duck's influence on subsequent laboring-class and artisan poets, but he unnecessarily politicizes the inspiration Duck provides. Thus, Klaus downplays the poem's stylistic nuances in favor of locating larger political implications; Klaus overreaches in his effort to ascertain proletarian solidarity in the text without fully developing his provocative claims about the poem's language. By anachronistically putting Duck's experiments with voice in the service of a Marxist agenda, and not of a generic one, Klaus ignores crucial dimensions of the poem.
Other critics tend toward similar elisions. Morag Shiach accounts for the work of Duck and his successors as mediated by factors representative of the hegemonic culture, including patronage trends and shifting ideologies of the nature and value of rural life. Shiach does discuss the odd generic status of "The Thresher's Labour": "The form of this poem is difficult to specify." Shiach labels it "anti-georgic" because of the layering of voice: "Its use of the collective pronoun, 'we' also signals its problematic relation to lyric traditions of poetic writing." [8] Regrettably, this observation goes undeveloped. Richard Greene confronts the question of genre more explicitly and originally. Greene classifies "The Thresher's Labour" as "counter-pastoral" [9] and suggestively sees its similarities to John Gay's Shepherd's Week. Nevertheless, although he settles upon a generic category, he is quick to remind us of James Sambrook's assertion of Duck's inventiveness in matters of form. Sambrook writes: "The Thresher' s Labour is 'one of the earliest eighteenth-century poems to belong to no recognized literary kind.'" [10] Pastoral, anti-pastoral, counter-pastoral, georgic, anti-georgic, or plebeian georgic, "The Thresher's Labour" has been called all of these, but still there remains no critical consensus. [11] Yet, making a generic classification is essential to understanding the formal accomplishments of Duck's poem. According to Greene, Duck "altered by degree the conditions of public discourse." [12] "The Thresher's Labour" not only invited laboring-class speakers to enter into public discourse; it also, as Goodridge has revealed, affected one of the most important georgic poems of the century, James Thomson's The Seasons. [13]
Arguing contrary to Greene is Linda Zionkowski, who states unequivocally that Duck had little impact on the English canon. [14] She claims that Duck, and other laborer poets after him, were not proof of a political "democratization" of print culture: "Rather than disrupting the norms of polite literary practice, Duck's and [Ann] Yearsley's incursion into print reaffirmed and validated those norms; and their poetry never presented an audience with anything unfamiliar or strange. Indeed, their knowledge of verse and aesthetic 'taste' mirrored that of their refined readers who derived a concept of literature from the classic texts of Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, which were among the staples of the book trade." [15] What...
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