Chapter 12 - Rags and Tatters

Summary

This chapter provides an account of the georgic in modern and contemporary poetry. It begins by illuminating the georgic qualities, however implicit or accidental, in Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary, and proceeds to trace the influence of Hughes’s farming poems on the work of his literary contemporaries and successors, including poets such as Geoffrey Hill, Alice Oswald and Sean Borodale. Locating the georgic in the margins and tattered edges of poems – and the working landscapes they describe – it argues that the agricultural and horticultural poetry of these writers represents if not a georgic revival then at least evidence of its survival in the wake of profound changes in agriculture and the British countryside. The particular strain of the georgic that is sustained by these poets is characterised by a documentary style which remains alive to the haphazard circumstances of outdoor work – a style which is as adaptable as it is enduring.