CRABBE, GEORGE (1754-1832), English poet, was born at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, the son of a customs officer. His father wanted to make his clever boy a doctor, and Crabbe became an apothecary's assistant at Wickham Brook, near Newmarket, and then a surgeon's assistant at Woodbridge, where he met Sarah Elmy, his future wife and a good friend to him during the hard years ahead. For some time Crabbe worked as a day-labourer at Aldeburgh ; he then sought to establish a surgery, which, during his absence for nine months in London for the study of mid wifery, was not successful. A period of want followed, but in j780 a local magnate gave him 15 with which to seek his fortune in London. He had already published at Ipswich his first poem, Inebriety, in 1775, and he took with him to London many mss., none of which he was able to place except The Candidate. But in March '781 he was received by Edmund Burke, who read his mss., advised him, and helped him with the publication of The Library (1781), and sought the interest of others whereby he could enter the church. Crabbe was ordained in 1781 and became curate at Aldeburgh. The Aldeburgh parishioners were not dis posed to respect a curate whom they had known as a day-labourer, and in 1782 Burke persuaded the duke of Rutland to appoint Crabbe as his chaplain at Belvoir castle. The duke gave him two small livings in Dorsetshire. Crabbe then married Sarah Elmy (Dec. 1783). Earlier in the year was published The Village, which on Burke's advice had been completed and revised. The Village is a poem which has none of the romantic atmosphere of Gold smith's Deserted Village or Gray's Elegy. Crabbe had a passion for truth, naked and unashamed. If he laid more stress on the seamy side of village life, it was because that side of it was more familiar to him. His descriptions of nature revealed an intimate and concise knowledge of flora and fauna. The poem, written in heroic couplets, made a deep impression. Scott read it with such attention that ten years later he still knew it by heart.
For 20 years after the publication of The Village Crabbe pub lished nothing. He received various preferments, and in 1814, the year after his wife's death, the living of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, where the rest of his life was spent.
Those last years were the most prosperous of his life. He was a frequent visitor to London, and a friend of all the literary celebrities of the time. He proposed marriage to one of his parishioners, Charlotte Ridout, and was accepted in 1814, but broke off the engagement in 1816. He proposed to yet another friend, Elizabeth Charter, somewhat later. In his visits to London Crabbe was the guest of Samuel Rogers, in St. James's place, and was a frequent visitor to Holland House, where he met his brother poets Moore and Campbell. In 1817 his Tales of the Hall were completed, and John Murray offered £3,000 for the copyright, Crabbe's previous works, The Parish Register (1807), The Bor ough , and Tales in Verse (1812) being included. The offer, after much negotiation, was accepted, but Crabbe's popularity was then on the wane.
In 1822 Crabbe went to Edinburgh on a visit to Sir Walter Scott. The adventure, complicated as it was by the visit of George IV. about the same time, is most amusingly described in Lockhart's biography of Scott. Crabbe died at Trowbridge on Feb. 3, 1832, and was buried in Trowbridge church.
Never was any poet so great and continuous a favourite with the critics, and yet so conspicuously ignored by the public. The works of his contemporaries, such as Cowper, Scott, Byron, and Shelley in particular, had been reprinted again and again. With Crabbe it was for long quite otherwise. His works were collected into eight volumes in 1832, the first containing a biography by his son. It was also intended to publish some of his prose writings, but the reception of the eight volumes was not sufficiently en couraging. A reprint, however, in one volume was made in 1847, and it has been reproduced several times since. It was not until the end of the century that sundry volumes of "selections" from his poems appeared; one by Edward FitzGerald (privately printed, 1879), and others by Bernard Holland (1899), C. H. Herford 0902), and Deane (i903). The Complete Works were published by the Cambridge University Press in three volumes, edited by A. W. Ward, in 1906.
Crabbe's poems have been praised by many competent critics, by Edward FitzGerald in his Letters, by Cardinal Newman in his Apologia, and by Sir Leslie Stephen in his Hours in a Library most notably. His verses con soled the last hours of Charles James Fox and Sir Walter Scott, while Thomas Hardy has ac knowledged their influence on the realism of his novels. But Crabbe's works have ceased to command a wide public interest.
He just failed of being the artist in words who is able to make the same appeal in all ages. Yet his poems will well repay perusal.
His stories are profoundly poig nant and when once read live long in the memory. They re veal him as one of the great realists of English fiction and make fascinating reading. There is true poetry in Crabbe's works although his most distinctively lyric note was attained when he wrote under the influence of opium, to which he became much addicted in his later years.
See The Life of the Rev. George Crabbe, LL.B., by his son the Rev. George Crabbe, A.M. (1834) : George Crabbe and His Times, 1754 1832; A Critical and Biographical Study, by Rene Huchon, translated from the French by Frederick Clarke (1907) ; also the brief biographies by T. H. Kebbel ("Great Writers" series) and by Canon Ainger ("English Men of Letters" series) .
the name given in North America to various species of finger-grass (Syntherisma), especially to S. sanguinale, called large crab-grass, and S. Ischaemum, called small crab grass ; both natives of Europe now very widely naturalized in the United States and Canada as weeds. In the eastern United States the knotweed or doorweed (Polygonum aviculare) is sometimes called crab-grass.