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Unpublished Bloomfield Correspondence: George Bloomfield to W. Weston This is a transcript of a letter from George Bloomfield to a youthful recipient whose identity it has not so far been possible to confirm but who seems likely to have been the son of Robert’s Shefford friend and patron Joseph Weston. It is written after Robert’s…

The Society was inaugurated in 2001 and closed in 2017. It published regular newsletters, many containing valuable short articles on Bloomfield’s life, poetry and legacy. These are presented in chronological order below. Society officers President: Ronald Blythe Academic Advisors:      Professor John Barrell      Professor John Lucas Chair: Bridget Keegan Vice-Chair: Simon White Secretary: Philip…

In his 1809 poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, the young Lord Byron cut his satirical teeth on Robert Bloomfield, his brother Nathaniel, and their editor/patron Capel Lofft.  Mastering Pope’s techniques for inducing bathos, Byron targeted the fact that the Bloomfields’ poetry came from men whose trade was manual labour (Robert was a poor ladies’…

The huge sales of The Farmer’s Boy led to a brief vogue for labouring-class, juvenile poets and brought to the fore the role of editors who could bring on such poets and prepare them for  market.  Capel Lofft and Thomas Hill had – to use music business parlance – ‘discovered’ and ‘produced’ Bloomfield. His success…

PREFACE In the summer of 1807, a party of my good friends in Gloucestershire proposed to themselves a short excursion down the Wye, and through part of South Wales. While this plan was in agitation, the lines which I had composed on “Shooter’s Hill,” during ill health, and inserted in my last volume,obtained their particular…

As a poor artisan, Robert Bloomfield had little knowledge of how to get his poetry published.  Books cost too much for most of the labouring classes to own many, even if they could read well enough to enjoy them (although Bloomfield had himself benefitted by inheriting the tiny collection of a fellow shoemaker). Booksellers were…

Clare regarded Bloomfield as an inspiring figure – both for what he wrote and for the fact that, as a poor labourer, he had become a successful, best-selling poet.  He called him ‘the most original poet of the age & the greatest Pastoral Poet England ever gave birth too’ because he ‘not only lived among…

An ode to a piece of furniture might seem wooden, to say the least – but in Bloomfield’s 1803 poem the device of addressing the table on which he writes his poems is an unexpectedly successful way of reflecting on his and his family’s life since the day he acquired it. The table is an…

Bloomfield admired the poetry of the Welsh poet John Dyer, and borrowed from it in The Farmer’s Boy.  It was a formative influence on the poem he wrote after first visiting Dyer’s native land, The Banks of Wye (1811), as John Goodridge shows: In the rolling Cambrian hills for the first time, Bloomfield took upon…

Bloomfield’s Collected Letters show him as a writer of intimate prose—prose in which he reveals his inner feelings and deepest desires, prose in which he comes to understand what he stands for, as a poet and as a man.   Bloomfield’s letters, spanning the thirty and more years of his adult life, let us chart his…