Blogs

One of the defining features of the Labouring-Class Poet tradition is the sense of community shared between these poets. Because they were so conscious of their sense of ‘place’, both in society and geographically, common bonds formed between those from similar areas. One of the first things the LCPO Database makes apparent is these specific links: it helps scholars to group the poets from Paisley together, those from Bristol, those from Tyneside.

Please check out the new John Clare Resource Page, put together by the same crack team behind this blog and the LCPO project!

It expands on the materials of another interesting John Clare Page managed by some of the same contributors. The new Clare Resource Page contains:

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What time the gales that morning’s freshness brings
When labour’s pleasant hour begins –
While on the cote the pigeon rests
Woman the world’s best wealth stirs.

Why did we come so far from home?

This is not a poem by John Clare. It is not a poem – or rather, not a poem in a proper sense.

It is a list of first lines that need to be properly formatted in HTML.

Today marks the inaugural post in what we plan to make a regular item: the featured poet. This week, I’ll actually discuss a pair of poets: George Linnaeus Banks and Isabella Varley Banks.

When we talk of someone dying too young, or dying before his/her time, what do we mean?

One interesting category of distinction highlighted in the Database of Laboring-Class Poets and illuminated on the new Omeka site [deprecated] through the use of tags is “tragic youth.” As we complete our data entry, we have the chance to reevaluate our use of terms like “tragic youth,” which can be problematic for a number of reasons.

One of the more interesting obstacles the team has faced so far in the process of transitioning to Omeka is settling on a controlled vocabulary for occupations. Early on, we decided to establish such a list as a separate field from occupations, which would allow us to narrow the range of terms describing poets’ jobs and thus make tagging and searching simpler. For example, all poets who did any kind of weaving would be called, simply, “weavers,” rather than defining them more specifically (e.g. handloom weaver, powerloom weaver).

A brief, recent history of Laboring-Class Poets Online, from the perspective of graduate assistant and online transition project manager.