Generally speaking, the verses do not establish or create a sense of context accessible to those outside of the discursive circle. Luddism has, of course, its own vocabulary, but, more importantly, it also permits its verse to begin without preface or introduction. The dominant mode of Luddite verse is exhortation. More precisely, narratization of past events is absent. For the most part, anything resembling narrative appears within exhortation as a projected configuration of present threat, present recognition, and future action.
Past threat is less important than present recognition and action in the immediate future.
Furthermore, the nature of the past is especially significant, and demonstrates an alignment of Luddite poets with pre-Romantic and early Romantic poets. At this very promising time, when cultural materialism and research into plebeian culture is discovering and making accessible texts that permit Romantic-period writers of the working classes to speak for themselves rather than be spoken about from above, attending to the collective and internally aesthetic nature of closed circle plebeian writing might enable Romantics scholars to question the aesthetic presupposition underlying the Romantic canon. It might be possible to look beyond the doggerel and find an alternative conception of poetic craft. Back To Program . Canonization or anthologizing women's poetry from the nineteenth century may also perform the same aesthetic discrimination against men solely based on gender.