Post 2

So far in this course, we’ve discussed many of the racial, ethnic, and gender power dynamics that have included and excluded certain authors in the canon. But one thing that I think is worth interrogating is the extremely significant role that socioeconomic class has played in establishing the canon of published authors. Of course, socioeconomic class is deeply intertwined with racist and sexist power dynamics. Many of the women and African American authors that rose into the canon had forays into publication that coincided with their relatively higher socioeconomic status. Anne Bradstreet and Judith Sargent Murray, for example, were born into wealthy families (Poetry Foundation). This is why I think that there should be a place in the anthology of eighteenth century poetry for those who were unable to rise from the socioeconomic class they were born into during their lifetimes. Though there is probably a large number of such poets and authors whose work was simply not preserved due to their lack of public exposure, I think that it would be an important symbolic gesture to include such authors whose work we do have access to.

William Brimble is one such poet. Brimble was forced by his financial circumstances to leave his family and business in the countryside of England and find work in London. As part of his pursuit of financial stability, he wrote poems for alms (Christmas, 213-214). He did not consider himself to be a poet by trade, but simply a wielder of the “plebeian pen” (Christmas, 214), recognizing that someone in his social class had no chance of making a real living or gaining renown for his poetry (Keegan, 212). Bridget Keegan argues that the position of working-class poets was not only one of lack of access to publishing connections, but also one of perceived moral deviancy, as their time spent writing was considered to be taking away from time that could potentially be spent doing manual labor (Keegan, 212). Brimble’s poetry was, in fact, published in his lifetime in 1765, but was by no means a popular or canonical poet.

Although Brimble never went to America in his lifetime, I feel that his position as a working class, published poet in the 18th century is significant to the anthology we are building because of how the English social class structure shaped that of the colonized Americas. While it was considered to be a land of opportunity, the reality of emigration from Europe to the Americas was that the majority of people with access to such travel were of higher socioeconomic status. The early American social structure is often portrayed as less stratified than that which had been established in Europe for centuries, but the reality is that the wealthy were still the ruling class and remained dominant over the economy. As long as art and literature can be capitalized upon, that social power dynamic will be significant to who is included in the historical artistic and literary canons.

Poems, Attempted on Various Occasions