The Ballad of English Literature

By Terry Eagleton / 03 December 2012

[Sung to the tune of "Land of Hope and Glory"]

Chaucer was a class traitor
Shakespeare hated the mob
Donne sold out a bit later
Sidney was a nob

Marlowe was an elitist
Ben Jonson was much the same
Bunyan was a defeatist
Dryden played the game


There's a sniff of reaction
About Alexander Pope
Sam Johnson was a Tory
And Walter Scott a dope

Coleridge was a right winger
Keats was lower middle class
Wordsworth was a cringer
But William Blake was a gas

Dickens was a reformist
Tennyson was a blue
Disraeli was mostly pissed
And nothing that Trollope said was true

Willy Yeats was a fascist
So were Eliot and Pound
Lawrence was a sexist
Virginia Woolf was unsound

There are only three names
To be plucked from this dismal set
Milton Blake and Shelley
Will smash the ruling class yet

Milton Blake and Shelley
Will smash the ruling class yet.

--

in Against the Grain, Essays by Terry Eagleton, Verso Books.

4 comments

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I should think we can confidently add the name of William Morris to Milton, Blake and Shelley at the end of Terry's poem—Morris being 'the first great English man of letters to declare himself a Communist', in Norman Talbot's apt words.  Tony Pinkney, http://williammorrisunbound.blogspot.com/
Tony Pinkney / 03 December 2012 0 people think so
I should think we can confidently add the name of William Morris to Milton, Blake and Shelley at the end of Terry's poem - Morris being 'the first great English man of letters to declare himself a Communist', in Norman Talbot's apt words.  Tony Pinkney, http://williammorrisunbound.blogspot.com/
Tony Pinkney / 03 December 2012 0 people think so
Not all that much cop, frankly, as verse or song. Stick to the criticism, Terry.
Andrew Roberts / 07 December 2012 0 people think so

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