BLOOMINGTON, Ill.—It has been called poetry of the uneducated, the peasant class or the laboring class. Yet these terms demean what a group of poets from the 1700s produced, said Julie Prandi, a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University. “Their work has meaning and life that we can see even today, but it has often been dismissed as lower class or second rate,” she said.
In Prandi’s latest book, The Poetry of the Self-Taught: An Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon (Peter Lang Publishing, May 2008), she adopts the term “self-taught poets” for those who did not have formal educations through universities. The book is one of the first real attempts to compare the works of self-taught poets in Germany and the United Kingdom during the eighteenth century. “Many people have studied these poets individually, and found what they thought were idiosyncrasies, or just charming elements of their writing,” said Prandi, “when in fact they were characteristics these poets shared with other self-taught poets.”
Prandi, a professor of German who has written a book and several articles on the poet Goethe, discovered the self-taught poet Anna Louise Karsch in the 1990s when working with Women in German, a scholarly organization devoted to research on female, German authors. “I found her work exciting, and I had never seen it in any anthology,” said Prandi. “I thought, ‘this has to be a mistake that she was left out.’” Through her research, Prandi uncovered that few self-taught poets were included in anthologies or textbooks. “Many of them enjoyed fame in their lifetimes, but scholars dismissed them because their work did not follow the standards of what was being taught at universities at the time,” said Prandi.
Because of this bias, much of the work of the self-taught poets vanished as centuries passed. “We assume that poetry disappears from literary history because it was bad, and did not stand the test of time,”’ said Prandi. “But sometimes scholars make mistakes.”