Editor's Note: Working class poet. Went to school to learn writing in Audchentoul, and copied poetry secretly. Began to compose her own poems at 14 when she went to work. Family difficulties ensued, and she developed consumption at 18. Married a ship's carpenter in 1796. Simple Poems earned her 100 pounds, which she later invested in a share of a ship. She had 8 children.

The mean Unletter'd--female Bard of Aberdeen!: The Complexities of Christian Milne's Simple Poems on Simple Subjects

By Bridget Keegan

Introduction

At the conclusion of her watershed study of eighteenth-century laboring-class women poets, The Muses of Resistance, Donna Landry asserts that: "By the end of the [eighteenth] century, the discourse of laboring-class women's verse seems to have played itself out, along with much of the radical democratic energy with which it may have often been allied" (273). It is certainly true that by 1805, when Christian Milne published Simple Poems on Simple Subjects, many of the conventions for plebeian poets who wished to be published were firmly established, and that these conventions were ideologically conservative. Expressions of patriotism, piety, and humility, all of which can be found in abundance in Simple Poems on Simple Subjects, were the guarantors of any favorable, although usually condescending notice. As such, Milne's work has been of little interest to the feminist or marxist critics engaged in recovering laboring-class and women's literature.

In the early nineteenth century, just as in the early twenty-first, it was also easy to dismiss Milne's work as insignificant. The collection's earliest critics went out of their way to emphasize the biography of the author over that of her productions as the source of the volume's small merit. That a woman in Milne's position could have written at all, let alone written well, was cause alone for the brief remarks her work was given when it first appeared. The Monthly Magazine 20 (1806) notes: "Mrs. Milne's 'Simple Poems on Simple Subjects' deserve particular encouragement; not so much, perhaps, for the extraordinary merit of her poetry, as on account of the singular circumstances under which it appears to have been written. The Muse is rarely auspicious to a life of manual labour" (614).

Although modern critics might not fall into the trap of biographical reductionism, current practices of assessing the works of British laboring class poets, and particularly laboring-class women poets of the early nineteenth-century, according to how the poetry can fulfill critical fantasies for proto-proletarian politics may be just as misleading as reading the poetry as a quaint byproduct of the poet's pursuit of knowledge under difficulties. The literary value of laboring-class women's poetry should be judged neither by the grimness of the author's life, nor by how well it fulfills an anachronistic marxist agenda. Indeed, in reading the poetry according to any particular political agenda, we risk missing a good deal of what the poetry might teach about the literary culture of the British laboring classes - a culture that, while always "political" was not always overtly "politicized." Milne's poetry is political, but in no simple way.

Thus, although at first glance Christian Milne's "minor" collection, Simple Poems on Simple Subjects, might appear to present little that could be read as original, compelling, or radical, on closer examination, Milne's work productively enhances our knowledge about the larger tradition of English and Scottish laboring-class poets with whom she self-consciously identifies. More significantly, there are dimensions to her seemingly "simple" works that also distinguish her within that tradition, making her more than a pale imitator of previous laboring-class geniuses. Milne's patriotic pacifism, as well as her readiness to adopt different personae in her poems, argues for the distinctiveness of her contribution to the tradition of laboring-class writing. To borrow Margaret Doody's term for characterizing eighteenth-century poetry (the poetry that most influenced Milne), Milne's poetry exhibits a double-voicedness. What Doody claims for eighteenth-century poetry applies equally to Milne:

"Not only does almost every poem include debate within itself, but also nearly every line speaks, as it were, two languages. Verses conduct a kind of quick debate internally, a debate that is rarely capable of quick resolution . . . within the one "style" characteristic of and personal to the poet, a number of styles play and confront each other, with complicated results" (211).

For every poem that offers a message of patient, pious acceptance of one's station or praise of British military might, there is another that satirizes class divisions or dramatizes the domestic, human costs of war. Reading any of Milne's poems in isolation creates a false critical impression, and, even within individual poems, Milne undermines our ability to identify an unequivocal political position. In order to appreciate the complexity of Simple Poems on Simple Subjects, the collection must be looked at holistically and read in the context of laboring-class writers of the long eighteenth century.

The very categories that Milne identifies for herself as sources of her exclusion are the same ones through which she might be reread most fruitfully. Her class, her "unletter'd" condition, her gender, her nationality, her life in an urban rather than a rural setting, her occupation, and, in several cases, her choice of topic place her in a variety of contexts which demonstrate that Simple Poems on Simple Subjects are anything but. Overall, there are four broad areas within which Milne's Simple Poems demonstrate their complexity. The first is Milne's self-presentation as a laboring-class natural genius. The second is her relation to other poetry written by servants and in particular women servants. The third is her poetry on war, which although patriotic and written with a British nationalist view, simultaneously criticizes such positions, primarily in the act of domesticating them. The final category, closely related to the third, is Milne's use of voice, particularly in her songs and ballads, most of which also pertain to the subjects of war and empire.

Genius and the Laboring-Class Tradition

Throughout the collection, Milne guides the reader to judge her work in the context of the British laboring-class tradition, a tradition that paradoxically derives its unity from individual poets' claims to uniqueness and singularity, predominantly through the aesthetic category of genius. In the opening lines of the poem which precedes the volume's "Preface," Milne deploys the same rhetorical strategies of alternating self-effacement and self-aggrandizement that can be traced back nearly a century to poets such as Robert Dodsley, Stephen Duck, and Mary Collier. Indeed, a survey of the hundreds of works produced by poets from the lower ranks of British society reveals that the majority begin, like Milne's, with prefaces and (auto)biographical narratives emphasizing the author's triumph over adversity, industriousness, piety, and humility.[1] Milne uses the opening lines of her poem to mark her exclusion from the world of polite letters, thereby impeding any reader who would judge her according to its standards. Milne's self-presentation triply removes her from refined, urban (London) literary society. She is "the mean / Unletter'd-female Bard of Aberdeen" (7-8). She is marginalized because of her class and education — "mean" and "unlettered." Such a condition is underscored by her adopting the title "Bard" rather than "Poet." She therefore places herself in a line of oral (and preliterate) artists. Moreover, she is female, and she hails from Aberdeen, a northern, provincial city.

Yet, as is common among laboring-class poets, her assertion of her humility is double-edged, or rather double-voiced. Although her humble background is meant to deflect criticism, it also links her to other laborer poets — other so-called "natural geniuses." She thus defines alternative standards according to which she should be judged, and according to which she will be far more successful. In lines 9-10, Milne invokes two male poets, Robert Burns and Robert Bloomfield, whose backgrounds were similar to her own, and who were also two of the more successful poets of the day. By 1805, Robert Burns had become the embodiment of the best of Scottish literature, and Robert Bloomfield's Farmer's Boy (1800) was one of the best-selling poems of the early nineteenth-century (far outselling an obscure little volume known as Lyrical Ballads). Milne strategically claims for Burns and Bloomfield a poetic propriety and accomplishment that she then purports to emulate. She notes that "'Tis only wondrous that, when criticis'd, / Their works should Nature's brightest charms display, / In verse correct as MILTON, POPE, or GAY" (10-12). Burns and Bloomfield produce work that is "natural," as it is the work of "natural geniuses," yet it is also polished, refined, and "correct." Milne's claim here is another signal to her double-voiced strategy. From the early eighteenth-century forward, when the concept began to be theorized by Joseph Addison, Mark Akenside, William Duff, and others, the notion of natural genius provided laboring-class poets with a philosophical justification for any deviation from Augustan decorum, indeed, privileging the raw "naturalness" of the poetic gifts as opposed to the artificiality of neoclassical erudition.[2] Genius, by definition, arose in distinction and deviation from established literary conventions. Yet what Milne claims for Burns and Bloomfield, and implicitly for herself, is simultaneously a genial naturalness as well as a refinement previously the domain solely of the more canonical of English poets.

However, Milne seems aware that simply identifying herself with these precursors is not enough to establish readerly interest in her work. As she may certainly have recognized, by the early nineteenth century there was no shortage of natural geniuses, particularly in Scotland.[3] Genius had become something of its own tradition. Milne thus quickly notes in her introductory poem that she, as a female, is still denied the male geniuses' success, the very the naturalness of which was often closely linked to a physical proximity to rural nature itself. Because Milne is a woman, living in an urban setting, and bound to domestic duties, she maintains her marginality and hence her tenuous uniqueness within this paradoxical tradition, as she notes in the prefatory poem:

But "menial maid," with no release from toil,
And quite estrang'd from Nature's 'witching smile,
Thro' lanes and dirty streets sent out to roam,
Or set, like "bottle in the smoke" at home; (17-20)

Milne manipulates her marginalization carefully. She presents herself as both similar to and different than other natural geniuses, using her disadvantages to her advantage.

Again, in "Introductory Verses" to the volume proper, Milne again signals her paradoxical singularity in that tradition of genial uniqueness. She asserts that "At six years old I felt my artless Muse" (11). As I have written elsewhere, genius is frequently associated with youthfulness, innocence, and hence the absence of contact with external cultural influences.[4] Genius, moreover, is often presented as a force beyond the poets' control. While the poet is thus denied a kind of agency over his or her creation, this aspect of genius provided laboring-class poets with a protection against accusations that they were writing to rise above their station. As Milne writes in "To A Lady, Who Did Me the Honour to Call at My House," apologizing for her "inappropriate" fervor for poetry, "But when my pen begins to run, / I try in vain to stop it" (27-28). However, it is important to note that while "natural," the products of genius were not necessarily crude or unpolished. Indeed, as Milne also notes in the prefatory poem, the works of natural laboring-class genius were frequently indistinguishable from that of refined, erudite writers. This often led laboring-class poets to be accused of plagiarism or forgery. In "Introductory Verses," Milne notes that "Yet Spite and Ignorance, with sneering looks, / Assert my songs are drawn from printed books" (43-44). Nonetheless, Milne clings to the innate sources of genius of her work in the lines immediately subsequent: "They're quite unfit to judge the simple flow, / The gift that Nature only can bestow" (45-6).

The accusations of plagiarism reveal one aspect of the class-based politics surrounding claims for "natural genius," for genius, by definition, ought to be unaffected by social categories such as rank. Milne is well aware of this aspect of the politics of genius, as she notes in the closing lines of the poem:

Sure Folly cannot think that Heav'n bestows
On Fortune's sons alone such gifts as those:
To rich and poor all mental gifts are free,
And mark the fruitful from the barren tree. (53-6)

Nature does not concern itself with a poet's social station. Genius is democratic. And Milne's assertions of her genius, humbly as she might make them, indicate a political message implicit in the very act of her writing, one that while not explicitly revolutionary nonetheless challenges Landry's summary dismissal of laboring-class women's poetry after the eighteenth century.

Muses in Servitude

In her prefatory poem, Milne troubles her own claims to genius through her gender and her place of origin. As Christine Battersby has argued, in its eighteenth-century theorization (and elsewhere), genius is gendered masculine, and Milne further reminds the reader that she is by no means close to "Nature," the wellspring of genius, residing as she does in a city. However, whether or not Milne was aware of it, she did have precursors among urban geniuses, fellow servant poets, and specifically fellow female servants, including Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Susannah Harrison, Ann Yearsley, and Elizabeth Hands. Although Stephen Duck is often identified as the first British laboring-class poet, one year prior to the appearance of Duck's agrarian georgic The Thresher's Labour in 1730, Robert Dodsley published a poetic conduct piece, Servitude, in 1729 and, in 1732 a collection entitled A Muse in Livery, or a Footman's Miscellany. Both the poem and the collection reflect Dodsley's experiences as a footman in aristocratic London households. Capitalizing upon the popularity of the georgic, Dodsley's poetry provides something of a "how-to" guide for servants. For Dodsley, as for later servant-poets, his service provides him with the initial acculturation that later might have given him the confidence to publish his poems. As he notes in "The Footman. An Epistle to My Friend Mr. Wright," it is while serving at the table of the great and genteel that he receives a his cultural education:

I hear, and mark the courtly Phrases,
And all the Elegance that passes;
Disputes maintain'd without Digression,
With ready Wit, and fine Expression;
The Laws of true Politeness stated,
And what Good-breeding is, debated: (46-51)

This passage highlights the problem of the use of appropriate language — something that was a concern to all laboring-class poets, for while genius may have sprung from nature, it still needed to speak within the socialized idiom of poetry. In this respect, servant poets had an advantage over rural laborers. Poets who were also domestic servants were more likely to have access education — to the libraries, conversation, and the patronage of their employers. Mary Leapor, for instance, was encouraged both intellectually, and later financially by her one-time employer, Susannah Jennings.[5] Like Leapor, Milne received early support for her writing because of her employment. As she writes in her "Introductory Verses":

But PROVIDENCE at last my footsteps led
To one fair Lady, who my bias fed;
She deign'd her favours on my verse to pour,
And told her friends she'd found a Bard obscure.
They, like herself, to generous acts inclin'd,
Drew forth the offspring of my untaught mind,
From where they long in embyro had dwelt,
Such fost'ring hands ne'er hoping to have felt. (35-42)

Milne also received essential material gifts - such as writing implements - from those whom she may have served, and like Ann Yearsley, composes a poem to a patron who donates a pen (compare Milne's "To A Gentleman, who sent me a Present of Pens" with Yearsley's "On Being Presented With A Silver Pen").

Although there were advantages to having proximity to refined culture, just as often this closeness discouraged rather than encouraged servant poets, as their literary attempts led to accusations of impudence. Milne, just as James Woodhouse and Leapor had, records these insults in her verse. Reading, as well as writing, could be interpreted by employers as a sign of irresponsibility, laziness, or worse, moral licentiousness (see, for instance, Milne's "To A Lady, Who Said it was Sinful to Read Novel"). A servant who had time to write poetry was one who had an excess of leisure, and as Milne describes in her poem "Written at Fourteen Years of Age," she had to be careful to demonstrate that her literary pursuits were not competing with her domestic duties. Describing a particularly strict mistress, Milne tells that:

When she engag'd me for her maid,
She valu'd not my work, she said;
If I could novels read, and play,
And printed news on paper days.
Nay I must knit the stockings too,
The book above, my hands below
The table, where I work'd and read,
'Till twelve o'clock I went to bed. (17-24)

Milne critiques the cruelty of her employer who, despite her claims to being "sister to a Lord," refuses to allow her maid rest or air. Thus, although she generalizes her critique, we do see Milne revealing herself to be less conciliatory than might first appear. Also, just as Mary Leapor, Milne uses humor in her poems to critique the snobbery and elitism of aristocratic reactions to a servant-woman poet, as is evident in "On A Lady, Who Spoke With Some Ill-Nature Of the Advertisement Of My Little Work In the 'Aberdeen Journal'"). Although these poems express a class-conscious critique, their potential incisiveness is partially counteracted their coexisting in the volume alongside of very proper conduct poems urging docile female behavior (see "To A Very Imprudent Young Woman" and "Advice to a Young Woman"). However, the same observation might be made about the work of Mary Leapor. Milne has much in common with Mary Leapor, and given Leapor's popularity in the late-eighteenth century, and the frequency of her poetry's being reprinted, it is entirely likely that Milne may have encountered Leapor's work (although Leapor's name is absent from the laboring-class precursors whom Milne cites, all of whom are male).[6]

Like Leapor, Milne was compelled into servitude to care for an aged father, and like Leapor and another immensely popular female servant poet, Susannah Harrison (whose Songs in the Night of 1780, saw at least 15 editions in as many years after its initial publication), Milne suffered recurrent ill-health perhaps as a result of harsh working conditions, as is evident in her poem "Painful Reflections When Sick" or "Written During a State of Illness." Like Harrison, Milne devotes a good portion of her verse to pious reflections (see, for instance, "Prayer," "Written on the Morning of the Communion Sabbath," or "Written on the Evening of the Communion Sabbath"). Because these poems are occasional as well as seemingly politically reactionary, they, along with the immense amount of religious verse penned by laboring-class poets, has tended to be almost entirely neglected by modern critics. Certainly, with Milne as with other poets who adopted religious themes and motifs, such poems seem to cancel out any other statements potentially critical of class politics. However, these poems especially require reading in context. Although many of the poems preach resignation, it was religion that often afforded the laboring-class poet his or her initial, empowering access to literacy, very often through their attendance of at Sunday schools or church-run charity schools. Religious texts, and primarily the Bible, were typically the first that any nascent laboring-class poet read, as they were usually the most readily and cheaply available to an impoverished reader. Although Milne's first school was secular, and although she does not engage in the more strictly eighteenth-century practice of versifying scripture, as Harrison does, the influence of Biblical style as well as Christian morality is evident throughout her work. Thus, while Milne's religious poetry may be her least interesting for the modern critic, it remains an important dimension of her identification as a laboring-class poet. In poems such as "On a Blank Leaf of the Bible," it is clear that her faith is an essential source of creative inspiration to her, and there remains an inherent though not always explicit democratic impulse in the religious dimensions of her verse.

Nationalism, Patriotism, and the Poetry of War

Milne's nationality is highlighted on the title page of her collection. In 1805, the vogue for rustic Scottish bards in the wake of Burns continued to be a powerful marketing force. However, Milne's Scottishness is not always explicitly or unproblematically highlighted in the body of her work. With one rather tame exception ("A Scotch Song") Milne eschews writing in dialect, even though a large number of poems entitled "Song" might seem to invite it. Moreover Milne is not an unambiguous admirer of Burns. Although poems addressed to Burns were de rigueur for Scottish poets of the early nineteenth-century, Milne's "Address to the Shade of Burns" shows that she, like Paisley weaver poet James Maxwell, is critical of Burns on religious grounds.[7] Burns is not the only laboring-class Scottish poet who is invoked directly or indirectly in Milne's work. The youthful genius, Michael Bruce, whose tragic death and subsequent cult-like following connects him with other dead boy geniuses such as Chatterton or Keats, is mentioned several times in Milne's collection. In her "Introductory Verses," Milne's youthful genius is identified with Bruce's through the fact that both were first inspired to write at the tender age of six. Milne further underscores the particular Scottishness of her natural genius with well-placed intertextual allusions to James Beattie's poem The Minstrel. Furthermore, in treating the subject of shipwrecks and catastrophes at sea as she does in several poems (such as "The Shipwreck," "Painful Anxiety," and "Written While My Husband Was at Sea"), it would have been apparent to an early nineteenth-century reader (as it is not likely to be for a reader today) that Milne is linking herself with one of the best-selling Scottish laboring-class poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: William Falconer. Falconer's long poem The Shipwreck (1762) was frequently reissued, well into the mid-nineteenth century. Although Falconer is not named directly, Milne surely knew his poem. In fact, her poem entitled "The Shipwreck" directly parallels the plot of Falconer's, both using the catastrophe as the vehicle and backdrop for a tragic love story. The frequency of shipwrecks in Milne's poetry (understandable given her husband's profession as a ship's carpenter) is one of its most recurrent and notable features.

Although Milne proudly indicates that she is Scottish, in a large number of her patriotic pieces it is evident that she very clearly sees herself as a British subject. Like Janet Hamilton after her, Milne often manifests her British patriotism through strong anti-Gallic sentiments (see "On Buonaparte's Coronation," for example). But at the same time that Milne's collection works to establish her as a loyal British subject, there is an equally strong and compelling countercurrent in her poetry that critiques British wars through domesticating its impact. She brings the war home to Scotland and demonstrates the painful costs that British military and imperial conquests force upon the Scottish poor. In so doing she cannily deploys the strategies of the literature of sensibility to articulate a domestically-based pacifism in the verse.

In her "Song. Tune-'Logan Water'" Milne uses a distinctly Scottish setting for a woman's lament over a lover lost at war: "How blest was I each cheerful morn, / Ere he from me by War was torn!" (5-6). Several subsequent poems, each entitled "Song" treat similar subjects, though from both male and female perspectives. The song "What shouts of rejoicing were heard from our crew" uses a male speaker who exclaims, "As Britons, we fear'd not to fall in his way: / Yet Fortune forsook us, and sided with Spain, / And I ne'er shall see ANNA or Scotland again!" (6-8). Her poem "The Inconstant Lover" takes an even stronger stance, and protests the practice of pressing, which took a strong toll upon laboring-class families:

When the shrill sounding trumpet was heard
In our valleys, late peaceful and bless'd,
All the youths of our village appear'd,
And to GEORGE's fam'd standard they press'd: (17-20)

As this poem and others illustrate, the martial claims of British imperialism in Milne's poems are contrasted with the agricultural and pastoral peace of Scotland. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in Milne's most strongly pacifist poem "To Peace":

Then come! angelic Peace!
Let war and carnage cease;
Then shall the sword the verdant glebe up tear;
The spear we then shall use
To prune luxuriant boughs;
War's horrid din no more shall grate the ear. (31-6)

Milne's anti-war politics are, however, simultaneously depoliticized, in that her opposition to Britain's war is framed in personal, sentimental, domestic terms. Placed in context with the more straightforwardly jingoistic pieces, Milne seems to contradict herself. Yet such contradictions ought be reread within the overall double-voicedness of Milne's poetry as a whole, a double-voicedness that is literally enacted by a number of the poems in the second half of the volume.

Ballads, Songs and Variations of Voice

Many of Milne's pacifist poems are recast as ballad tales, and often spoken by personae other than the author. While this might be dismissed as conventional, given the subject of the poems themselves, it is possible that there are other agendas in Milne's stylistic choices. One could suspect that by displacing her pacifist sentiments, Milne is able to protect herself from possible accusations of a lack of patriotism, for the ballads, sentimental though they often are, can be seen to express critical and political positions beyond pacifism. For example, the first and longest "Tale" in the collection, "William and Mira," for all its morality and piety (most notably a poor but perfect heroine) once again represents the selfishness and cruelty of the privileged classes. Although the wealthy William can look beyond class differences to appreciate the inner goodness of Mira, his father cannot, and sends his son to India rather than permit him to marry Mira. In such a gesture, there is, however subtly, a critique both of patriarchy and of British colonialism. The cruel, rich father uses the fact of British imperial expansion as a weapon against the poor female. William perishes in a shipwreck, and Mira goes mad, all as a result of class prejudices.

These tragic tales, involving mad women and the ravages of war have a distinctly Wordsworthian feel to them, and although it is uncertain whether Milne had read Lyrical Ballads, both poets were doubtless influenced by the ballad revival of the turn of the century. Much like "The Ruined Cottage," Milne's "The Wounded Soldier. A Tale" tells of a soldier's widow and of children reduced to begging by the loss of their father in service to the war. The poem presents another side to the patriotism displayed in the collection, again domesticating the painful impact of foreign, military conquests on the lives of a simple Scottish family. Again, much as "The Ruined Cottage," the story is narrated by a male speaker, one who is presumably financially secure (as the family in the poem ask charity of him). Milne writes several of others of her songs using male personae, most typically speaking as men who lament their separation from their beloveds most typically due to military service at sea. In "The Wounded Soldier," however, given the more strongly critical message latent in the poem, such displacement may have been a necessary device. The poem, here unlike Wordsworthian ballads, ends happily, seemingly canceling the critical commentary, but also furthering the two-tongued strategy behind Milne's composition.

Milne's narrative agenda in these ballads may be seen a more explicit instantiation of her double voicedness - a use of language that also resembles what Homi Bhabha has theorized as the speech of the subaltern. Certainly, as a Scottish female servant, Milne can make a claim to the status of the colonial subaltern. In her poems, read together and not in isolation, Milne might be said to write in a language that demonstrates what Bhabha has labeled "sly civility" - a language of the subject of colonization that is "splitting, doubling, turning into its opposite" (97) - but that is also the place of resistance, and the only way in which resistance to the colonizer might be written. Milne does not write in Scottish dialect, nor in direct protest to the demands that British colonialism and militarism have made on herself and women like her. She writes patriotic poems in proper English, her language mimicking that of her colonizer. But if we listen carefully to all that Milne says, and refuse accept her own (perhaps deceptively self-protective) claims to simplicity, we may begin see fissures, spaces where her imitation, her mimicry is purposefully imperfect. It is there we may begin to identify more subtle forms of resistance present in the work. As such, we will no longer be able to claim that Milne's Simple Poems on Simple Subjects lacks the political energy of earlier plebeian poetry. Rather, that energy is still present, though it has become more diffuse, less direct, and, ultimately much more complex.

Notes

1. The editors of British Labouring-Class Poetry, 1700-1900 have compiled a bibliography of nearly 1,000 poets of laboring-class origins who published during this 200-year period. The bibliography will be published electronically, in 2002, on the John Clare webpage http://human.ntu.ac.uk/clare/elsie.htm.

2. The canon of eighteenth-century treatises on genius includes Addison's Spectator 160 (3 September 1711), Mark Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Alexander Gerard's Essay on Taste (1759) and Essay on Genius (1774), and William Duff's An Essay on Original Genius (1767).

3. It was said of the town of Paisley, for example, that every fifth citizen was a poet. The number of entries in Robert Brown's late nineteenth-century two-volume collection, Paisley Poets, with Brief Memoirs of Them, and Selections from Their Poetry (1889-90) would seem to confirm that hypothesis.

4. "Boys, Marvellous Boys: John Clare's Natural Genius." John Clare: New Approaches. Ed. Simon Kovesi and John Goodridge. Helpston: The John Clare Society, 2000.

5. For a discussion of Leapor's relationship with her employers, see Richard Greene's Mary Leapor. A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women's Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993): 1-22.

6. Greene notes, for instance, that Leapor boasted 118 pages, more than any other writer, in the important eighteenth-century anthology Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755).

7. Paisley poet James Maxwell's Animadversions on Some Poets and Poetasters of The Present Age. Especially R-t B-s, and J-n L-k (1788) takes Burns and Lapraik to task for flaunting what the pious Maxwell sees as their loose morals.

Works Cited

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Akenside, Mark. The Pleasures of the Imagination. London, 1744.
Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius. Towards A Feminist Aesthetics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Beattie, James. The Minstrel, London, 1771 - 4.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Collier, Mary. The Woman's Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; In Answer to his late Poem, called The Thresher's Labour. London, 1739.
Dodsley, Robert. Servitude. A Poem. London, 1729.
—. A Muse in Livery: or, the Footman's Miscellany. London, 1732.
Duck, Stephen. Poems on Several Subjects: Written by Stephen Duck. London, 1730.
Duff, William. An Essay on Original Genius. London, 1767.
Gerard, Alexander. An Essay on Genius. London, 1774.
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Hamilton, Janet. Poems and essays of a miscellaneous character on subjects of general interest. Glasgow, 1863.
Hands, Elizabeth. The Death of Ammon. A Poem. With an Appendix Containing Pastorals and Other Poetical Pieces. Coventry, 1789.
Harrison, Susannah. Songs in the Night. By A Young Woman Under Deep Afflictions. London, 1780.
Keegan, Bridget. "Boys Marvelous Boys: John Clare's Natural Genius." John Clare: New Approaches. Eds. Simon Kovesi and John Goodridge. Helpston: The John Clare Society, 2000.
Landry, Donna. The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Leapor, Mary. Poems Upon Several Occasions. London, 1748-51.
Maxwell, James. Animadversions on Some Poets and Poetasters of The Present Age. Especially R-t B-s, and J-n L-k. Paisley, 1788.
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