English Men of Letters: Crabbe

The biography sketches the poet's upbringing in a decaying coastal town, his struggle with poverty and early education, his move to the metropolis and patronage networks, and his long friendships and visits that shaped his career. It examines his poetic methods—an adherence to heroic couplets balanced by direct observation of rural and urban poor—reviews individual works and their publication histories, considers the fluctuation of his reputation, and concludes with an account of his later domestic life and the documentary sources the biographer used to reconstruct these episodes.