ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the origins of contemporary spoken word poetry in the Chartist and Lancashire dialect traditions of working-class poetic performance and discourse in the years from 1840 to 1870. It argues that, rather than merely being the product of a twentieth-century print culture aesthetic or the class-based prejudices of High Modernism, the modern division between print and spoken poetry emerges from the formation in the mid-nineteenth century of distinct literary populations amongst the urban working class, who developed writing and performance cultures out of pre-existing ballad lyric and song traditions. Though political and satirical tropes may have been inherited from working-class oral modes, these were blended with a heightened literary sense through interactions with Romantic and early Victorian poetry. In the face of the rise of the print novel as the dominant literary mode, the industrial poetry of the north of England, and the more widespread phenomenon of Chartist poetry flourished. However, both bodies of poetry were subject to contemporary and subsequent critical pigeon-holing and neglect which informs us about the way spoken word poetry has been viewed in recent times.
