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Simon J. White When Robert Bloomfield published his long poem The Farmer’s Boy in March 1800 he included, as an appendix, an account of Otaheite from what he thought was Cook’s journal of his voyage to the South Seas. He prefaced the extract with a very short citation from ‘Summer’: ‘Destroys life’s intercourse; the social…

Yet poverty is his, and mental pains. (Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy) Darkness o’er hangs thy origins and mine. (Bloomfield, ‘To My Old Oak Table’) …piety, sensibility and the most engaging and artless simplicity breathe throughout the whole, and irresistibly attack the feelings of the reader. (Nathan Drake, Literary Hours, 1800)[1] ‘Not inspiration, but a mind…

‘The very principal light, a capital feature of my journey was the river Wye, which I descended in a boat for near forty miles, from Ross to Chepstow. Its banks are a succession of nameless beauties.’ (Thomas Gray (1770)). 1. From Dursley to Chepstow. ‘Upon the Sparkling Stream’On Monday 17th August 1807, Robert Bloomfield and…

The gander was and still is renowned for its truculence and aggression. Bloomfield’s account of his confrontations with other farmyard animals is mock-heroic: At the colt’s footlock [he] takes his daring hold:There, serpent like, escapes a dreadful blow;And straight attacks a poor defenceless cow;Each booby Goose th’unworthy strife enjoys,And hails his prowess with redoubled noise.Then…

Although John Clare’s admiration for Robert Bloomfield is well known, his most detailed comments on Bloomfield’s passing date from a year after the event.[1] In letters to Thomas Inskip – on whom see Philip Hoskins’s article in Newsletter No. 8 (Autumn, 2004) – and Allan Cunningham Clare expressed his high regard for Bloomfield’s writing describing…

I want to begin by quoting John Goodridge in his essay ‘”Now Wenches, Listen, and Let Lovers Lie”: Women’s Storytelling in Bloomfield and Clare’. ‘Clare and Bloomfield,’ he says, ‘focus on women’s skills as story-tellers able to command an audience, construct and dramatise a story, control pace and timing, character and speech, humour and pathos.’[1]…

Over the past twenty years, ‘ecocritical’ approaches to literature have been offering new and powerful ways of reading the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, particularly, Clare [see Further Reading, below]. But, to date, environmental readings of Romantic poetry have neglected Bloomfield’s compelling writing about nature. It is the contention of this essay that such neglect…

To read Bloomfield’s poems is to enter a world strikingly unconcerned with friendship and sociability. Addresses to, descriptions of, or narratives about friends are not readily found in his published works, and friendship as an abstract principle is hardly ever invoked. Although the title of Bloomfield’s 1802 collection, Rural Tales, would seem to imply both…

‘The Bard whom Nature greets as all her own…. artless is, like thine, his song’.[1] For the later eighteenth-century, ‘Nature’s Music’ or ‘The Music of Nature’ were phrases to conjure with. They engage a clutch of the period’s intellectual and imaginative preoccupations, and in evolving ways the adjective ‘Aeolian’, and imagery associated with the Wind…

WINTER SONG I. Dear Boy, throw that Icicle down, And sweep this deep snow from the door: Old Winter comes on with a frown; A terrible frown for the poor. In a Season so rude and forlorn, How can age, how can infancy bear The silent neglect and the scorn Of those who have plenty…