The Industrial Muse: The Industrial Revolution in English Poetry

"Soon shall they arm, UNCONQUER'D STEAM! afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear They flying-chariots through the fields of air. --Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above, Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move; Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping crowd, And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud." These prophetic, if incongruous, lines of Erasmus Darwin's verse were published in 1792, when, as Mr. Warburg's stimulating anthology makes clear, the great mass of industrial data was already exerting that force of attraction which it has exerted on poets ever since. Of course, this was the beginning of a thermodynamic, and ours is the beginning of a thermonuclear age. But the human problems are still essentially the same. It is, for example, still customary to blame on the machine the evils which men do; to think rather in therms of limiting the boundaries of technical endeavor, than of extending the boundaries of man's humanity. It is with these and with many other aspects of our society -- both the boyd and soul of our industrial civilization -- that the poets represented in this anthology (poets such as Black, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Lawrence and Auden) were concerned. And, as Mr. Warburg concludes in the lively and informative introduction which is one of the many pleasures of the anthology.