Selected Poems

"Though nature's sternest painter yet the best" – Byron

George Crabbe (1754-1832) arrived late on the Augustan scene. Born in the same decade as Burns and Blake, he outlived Keats by more than ten years. His father was a warehouse-keeper in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Schooled in Bungay and Stowmarket, he was apprenticed to an apothecary. In 1779 he went to London as a literary adventurer, arriving without introductions. Edmund Burke became his patron and transformed his fortunes. "The Village" (1783),and after a silence "The Parish Register" (1807), "The Borough" (1810) and "Tales" (1812), his main works followed.

Crabbe wanted his readers to feel his writing – accounts of rural and provincial life, of individuals and communities, of landscapes – not only as narrative but in circumstantial detail – some of it harsh and shocking. Peter Grimes is his most famous character, one whom Benjamin Britten found irresistible. "It is worth registering from the outset", Jem Poster says, "the enduring intimacy of Crabbe's contact with the world, the sheer physicality of his grasp of things: the strengths of his poetry are more easily understood if we can visualise him actually grubbing at the slimy roots of the marshplants he so vividly described, delivering a neighbour's child, or assisting his father by piling butter-casks in a quayside warehouse".