Extract

Crabbe’s poetic style stands between the Augustan and the Romantic. His affinity with the central Augustan tradition and neo-classical poets such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson is apparent in his predominant use of heroic couplets, paired end-rhyming lines in iambic pentameter, his balanced poetic organisation and reasoned precision. Ian Gregor (1955) considered Crabbe as “the Last Augustan”, and F. R. Leavis (1936) regarded Crabbe’s “peculiarly eighteenth-century strength” as “that of a novelist and of an eighteenth-century poet who is positively in sympathy with the Augustan tradition”. “The Augustan form, as he adapts it, is perfectly suited to his matter and to his outlook.” Concerning Crabbe’s Augustan verse style and manner, Frank Whitehead (1955) stressed that “if Augustan, he was an Augustan who lived and wrote throughout the period of the Romantic Revival”. […]

Crabbe’s literary influence and legacy spread far and wide. Jane Austen’s writing of Mansfield Park (1814) was heavily inspired by the works of Crabbe. There is also a presence of Crabbe in Austen’s Persuasion (1817). Charles Lamb’s “The Wife’s Trial; or, The Intruding Widow” (written in 1827; published in 1828) is a comedy in blank verse founded upon Crabbe’s “The Confidant”. Another Aldeburgh resident, Benjamin Britten, based his opera Peter Grimes (1945) on one of Crabbe’s grim verse tales in The Borough. Broader influence of Crabbe include Sainte-Beuve’s early modelling of “La Plaine” on Crabbe, and Russian writers Wilhelm Karlovich Kyukhel’beker’s and Nekrassov’s interests in Crabbe’s emphasis on faithful realism and rural sufferings. Crabbe’s works were translated into Dutch by Sijbrandi in 1858 and into German by Carl Abel in 1856. Philarète Chasles and Amedée Pichot, most notably amongst others, translated Crabbe’s poems into French. […]