Abstract
This chapter examines the poetry of land and labor produced by laboring-class poets, from Stephen Duck's The Thresher's Labour (1730) to Robert Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy (1800). It considers how conditions of labor, and patronage, presentation and publication, nuanced the way labor is portrayed. It investigates the gendering of roles, and the difficulties and insecurities as well as more confident and positive aspects of these portrayals. The genres used to present rural labor, including georgic, satire and verse-epistle, are considered, and this chapter argues for greater attentiveness to the richness of this verse as poetry and social history.