Stephen Duck
Stephen Duck (c. 1705 – 21 March 1756) was an English poet whose career reflected both Augustan interest in "naturals" (natural geniuses) and its resistance to classlessness.
Biography
Duck was born at
Around 1724, he married as his first wife Ann, and began to attempt to better himself in order to escape the toil and poverty of agricultural work. Encouraged by the village squire, schoolmaster and rector, he read
Rise in popularity
He was "discovered" by
In 1730, Duck combined some of the poetic pieces he had been writing into The Thresher's Labour, a poem that described the difficulty of field work. The poem was celebrated throughout London society, and he soon wrote The Shunammite, which reflected Duck's piety and religious imagination. The poet was taken to meet Queen Caroline, and, while he was there, word came of the death of his wife, but Clarke kept the news from Duck until after the interview with the queen. For her part, she was pleased and gave Duck an annuity and a small house in Richmond Park.
Duck continued to write and to be seen as both a paradigm of self-improvement and the
Reception
Swift and Pope both made disparaging remarks or outright satires on Duck. Between 1731 and 1733, Swift satirized the poverty of Duck's rhymes in several pieces.
More charitably, George Crabbe rhetorically asks "Save honest DUCK, what son of verse could share/ The poet's rapture and the peasant's care?" in his poem The Village (1783), itself a critique of the rustic idyll.
When Queen Caroline died in 1737, Duck was left without a patron and without direct inspiration. He wrote eight very long poems after her death. In 1744, his wife Sarah died, and Stephen married again, although this wife's name is unknown. Duck was
On 21 March 1756 Duck, apparently overwhelmed by the strain caused by his change in social status, committed suicide by drowning.[1]
An annual commemorative feast, the Duck Feast, is held at the Charlton Cat inn in the village of his birth. It is funded by the revenue from a field ("Duck's Acre") presented by Lord Palmerston, to whom Duck had dedicated a volume of poetry.[5] Duck presided at the first feast, writing:[1]
All eat enough and many drink too much.
Full twenty threshers quaff around the board.
No cares, no toils, no troubles now appear,
For troubles, toils and cares are drowned in Beer ...
Thus shall Tradition keep my fame alive;
The Bard may die, the Thresher still survive.
Since the 1990s, Duck and his work have generated renewed interest among
Works
- The Thresher's Labour (1730)
- Poems on Several Occasions (1736), reprinted ISBN 9780854178933.
See also
References
- ^ a b c "What is the Duck Feast in the village of Charlton in the Vale of Pewsey?". Wiltshire Community History. Wiltshire Council. 4 July 2011. Retrieved 26 May 2023.
- )
- ^ "Local History Notes 'Merlin's Cave' and 'The Hermitage'" (PDF). London Borough of Richmond. Retrieved 7 August 2018.
- ^ The Times was later to deride Duck's verse, in comparison to that of Swift, as a "[j]ingling train" : "Era of good prose-writing". The Times. London: 2. 27 June 1788.
... a kind of [j]ingling train ["sequence"] that even Stephen Duck, in the days of Swift, ... would have blushed to own
- ISBN 978-0-7475-8872-6.
- .
Further reading
- Batt, Jennifer (2007). "From the Field to the Coffeehouse: Changing Representations of Stephen Duck". Criticism. 47 (4): 451–70. S2CID 162289143.
- Davis, Rosemary. Stephen Duck, The Thresher Poet. Second series, number eight. Orono: University of Maine Studies, 1926.
- Robert DeMaria's headnote and text of The Thresher's Labour via Google Books
- Landry, Donna (1987). "The Resignation of Mary Collier". The New Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge: 99–120.
- Stephen, Leslie, revised by William R. Jones. "Stephen Duck" in Matthew, H.C.G. and Brian Harrison, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. vol. 17, 33–34. London: OUP, 2004.
- Van Hagen, S. "Literary Technique, the Aestheticization of Laboring Experience, and Generic Experimentation in Stephen Duck's The Thresher's Labour". Criticism. 47 (4): 421–50.
External links
- Lee, Sidney (1888). Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 16. London: Smith, Elder & Co. . In
- Stephen Duck at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA)
- Portraits of Stephen Duck at the National Portrait Gallery, London