Page 680 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK
P. 680
25 June 2022
‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in
May 1941, but few people today talk about this Suffolk-born poet or indeed read him. This
makes Frances Gibb’s slender but thorough account of George Crabbe’s life and work all the
more welcome.
In his time he was considered a leading, though controversial, figure, who wrote with stark
realism about the spiritually and morally impoverished lives of East Anglian villagers and
townspeople, in particular the inhabitants of the ‘little venal borough’ of Aldeburgh, where he
was born in 1754 and spent an unhappy youth. After failing in his first career as an
