By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Work is a big part of our lives – like sleep, and love, and eating – yet it doesn’t strike us, perhaps, as immediately ‘ripe’ material for poetry, perhaps because we like to view poetry itself (wrongly, in the main) not as ‘work’ but as a ‘calling’ or a ‘hobby’. Yet many of the great and the good from English-language poetry have treated the subject of work in their poems – below are ten of the best.