"‘Ever plain is the mantle, the hues ever deep’. Edward Rushton: Poetics and Politics"

This paper reconsiders the unique combination of politics and poetics that typifies Edward Rushton’s biography and writing under the agenda of his connection with the reading practices of his time – as a polemical writer and a poet, as well as a bookseller, no less than as a blind person. Rushton’s case testifies to the relevance of reading as a politically conscious critical act in shaping the labouring-class poet’s intellectual self-construction as an intellectually independent subject.