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SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 41.3 (2001) 545-562



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Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck's "The Thresher's Labour"

Bridget Keegan


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. Because he was involved in manual labor, critics for nearly three centuries have found themselves profoundly uneasy in approaching seriously Duck's poetic labors. [End Page 545]

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 century. 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...

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