Closely observed pains.

Outside the groves of academe few people today read George Crabbe's trenchant rhymed couplets describing the life and landscape of his native Suffolk in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is a pity because Crabbe is a real original: an unpoetical poet who believed that it was his duty to instruct his readers as accurately as possible about the painful realities ofhuman life, however disagreeable. Painful realities were the stuff of Crabbe's own life from an early age because he worked for years as an impoverished medical student and country doctor before he managed, after a bitter struggle, to become a comfortably successful poet and parson. He disliked his first profession, but it strongly influenced his second. On his rounds of the grim workhouses, asylums, prisons, and slums of his period the sights he saw and the sad, strange tales he heard affected him deeply and provided the raw material for many of his poems. Apart from his natural sympathy for the underdog, Crabbe had an excellent memory and acute powers of observation, including an almost photographic eye for detail. Writers wishing for verism to colour a dry account of the workings of the poor laws often trawl through his pages for a picture or two of what a parish poorhouse, for example, actually looked like. Here is one: