SOURCE: Whitehead, Frank. “Crabbe, ‘Realism’, and Poetic Truth.” Essays in Criticism 39, no. 1 (January 1989): 29-46.

In the following essay, Whitehead responds to Gavin Edwards's ideas about realism in Crabbe's poetry, presenting his own interpretation of the relationship between realism, the truth, Crabbe's poetry, and the environment in which it was created.

It was pleasing to find Gavin Edwards's essay ‘Crabbe's So-Called Realism’ in the pages of E in C¹, despite its preoccupation with the post-structuralist project of demolishing ‘realism’ both as a critical term and as an authorial practice. Less agreeable to me personally, however, was his misrepresentation of some of the views I put forward more than 30 years ago in the introduction to my selection of Crabbe's poetry.

Edwards clearly implies that my critical comments on the poem ‘Advice’ belong among those he describes as ‘dominated and depressed’ by the concept of ‘realism’. In fact I did not...