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Introduction The formal composition of settings of a poet provides an interesting measure of the reputation of a poet and the reception history of his oeuvre. It does not seem to link in a simple manner to qualities of musicality or melodiousness in the verse being set. Indeed, the example of Schubert (despite his Goethe,…

Bloomfield’s ‘Walter and Jane’ (Rural Tales, 1802) concerns a lover journeying to meet a beloved, which perhaps inevitably brings to mind Crabbe’s verse Tale ‘A Lover’s Journey’ (Tale 10, Tales in Verse, 1812). The two poets were roughly contemporary: George Crabbe, the elder of the two born in 1754, Robert Bloomfield 12 years later, though…

Despite the publication over the last decade or so of an unprecedented number of academic publications concerning the labouring-class poet as well as several annotated editions of his writings, Robert Bloomfield’s position in Romantic scholarship over the last two decades has remained a tentative one. Although not awarded an entry of his own, in an…

This is a slightly abridged version of the talk given by Professor Keegan at the 2012 Annual Bloomfield Day. In a forthcoming essay (from which the following is adapted), I discuss the role of occasional poetry in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century labouring class poetry. Because labouring-class writers were more limited than middle and…

Bloomfield is familiar to us chiefly for his poetry of rural life and labour, but his long and exceptional poem ‘To Immagination’ shows him as a poet tackling what at the time were regarded as more ambitious subjects: the operation of the human imagination and the sublime. Bloomfield composed the poem in 1800 but it…

It[i] is well established that both the context and many elements of the content of Robert Bloomfield’s poem The Farmer’s Boy (completed April 1798) derive from the poet’s own boyhood experiences two decades earlier: the five years spent working as a labourer on his maternal uncle William Austin’s farm at Sapiston, North Suffolk from the…

On 5 October 1800 Robert wrote to his brother George as follows: Sunday Night, October 5 Dear George, One of the enclosed papers is a discontinued journal, it may contain some information. The other paper your good sence will teach you to Burn. My portrait was taken some time ago by a miniature painter named…

The birds of England’s eastern shires have been well served by poets. Quite apart from Clare, there is Crabbe, whose observation of Suffolk’s shorebirds and waders, while they don’t match in detail his studies of its flora, are memorably acute; there is Lincolnshire’s Tennyson, who, after modernized plumbing had been introduced to his house, apparently…

In the spring of 1812 Robert Bloomfield and his family left London and rented a house in the Bedfordshire town of Shefford, opposite the Green Man in Bedford Street.[i] We currently know little of Bloomfield’s final eleven years there. Although initially enthusiastic about the move to Shefford, by the 1820s he appears to have become…

Here is a quiz question: what is the connection between the following nursery rhyme or popular song and Robert Bloomfield? Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. That’s the way the money goes, Pop goes the weasel. Up and down the City road, In and out the Eagle, That’s the way…