Nature As a Site of Balance and A Source of Poetic Material in Joseph Skipsey’s Poems

Victorian poetry, which developed under the influence of profound socio-economic transformations and in company with diverse literary voices and perspectives, includes the poems of the leading figures of the period as well as those of many little-known labouring poets from various professional groups. These poets, most of whom were self-educated, forged their literary perspectives under harsh working conditions, and although they could not write poems with high aesthetic value like the others, they reflected the world they lived in with an intense sensitivity and a sincere language. One of them was the Northumbrian collier Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903), who spent most of his life in the coal mines he entered at seven. In his poems, the traces of communal practices and cultural codes of his region are clearly seen. Even if his living in the country might evoke at first glance that Skipsey is quite close to nature, his relations with it surprisingly exist in a narrowed framework and remain within the confines of traditional narrative forms such as ballad and song. This study aims to reveal the essence of a collier poet’s relationship with nature in his poems within the socio-economic conditions of Victorian England. The main argument of the study is that Skipsey uses nature not as a glorified unity of beings, but as a site of balance and a source of poetic material he refers to in narrating individual emotions, human relations and the realities of miners’ life.