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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2002
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
—Percy Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”
THESE WORDS, written in 1821, celebrate the figure of the poet as leader and prophet.1 By noting that this position is “unacknowledged,” however, Shelley intimates that the Industrial Revolution sweeping Britain threatens to shrink the political and social relevance of poets. While Shelley makes no mention of class distinctions in “A Defence of Poetry,” had he paused to consider the relative status of the poet in class terms, he would probably have admitted that his era’s working-class versifiers were, with a few exceptions, the most unacknowledged poets of all.