[Sung to the tune of "Land of Hope and Glory"]Chaucer was a class traitorShakespeare hated the mobDonne sold out a bit laterSidney was a nobMarlowe was an elitistBen Jonson was much the sameBunyan was a defeatistDryden played the game



There's a sniff of reaction

About Alexander Pope

Sam Johnson was a Tory

And Walter Scott a dope

Coleridge was a right winger

Keats was lower middle class

Wordsworth was a cringer

But William Blake was a gas

Dickens was a reformist

Tennyson was a blue

Disraeli was mostly pissed

And nothing that Trollope said was true

Willy Yeats was a fascist

So were Eliot and Pound

Lawrence was a sexist

Virginia Woolf was unsound

There are only three names

To be plucked from this dismal set

Milton Blake and Shelley

Will smash the ruling class yet

Milton Blake and Shelley

Will smash the ruling class yet.

--

in Against the Grain, Essays by Terry Eagleton, Verso Books.