Robert Bloomfield, whom John Clare described as 'the most original poet of the age,' was a widely read and critically acclaimed poet throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century, and remained popular until the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet until now, no modern critic has undertaken a full-length study of his poetry and its contexts. Simon J. White considers the relationship between Bloomfield's poetry and that of other Romantic poets. For example, her argues that Wordsworth's poetics of rural life was in some respects a response to Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy. White considers Bloomfield's emphasis on the importance of local tradition and community in the lives of labouring people. In challenging the idea that the formal and rhetorical innovation of Wordsworth and Coleridge was principally responsible for the emergence of a new kind of poetry at the turn of the eighteenth century, he also shows that it is impossible to understand how the lyric and the literary ballad evolved during the Romantic period without considering Bloomfield's poetry. White's authoritative study demonstrates that, on the contrary, Bloomfield's poetry was pivotal in the development of Romanticism.

John Clare (1793-1864) is one of the most sensitive poetic observers of the natural world. Born into a rural labouring family, he felt connected to two communities: his native village and the Romantic and earlier poets who inspired him. The first part of this study of Clare and community shows how Clare absorbed and responded to his reading of a selection of poets including Chatterton, Bloomfield, Gray and Keats, revealing just how serious the process of self-education was to his development. The second part shows how he combined this reading with the oral folk-culture he was steeped in, to create an unrivalled poetic record of a rural culture during the period of enclosure, and the painful transition to the modern world. In his lifelong engagement with rural and literary life, Clare understood the limitations as well as the strengths in communities, the pleasures as well as the horrors of isolation.

Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy was the most successful poem of the “Romantic” period, selling 100,000 copies between 1800 and 1830. However, what was marketed was not the poem which the working-class Bloomfield had written, but a highly polished, politely spelled and punctuated re-write, prepared by the local squire, who deliberately covered up the fact that Bloomfield had written originally for a Suffolk voice, with Suffolk vowel-sounds and Suffolk idioms. This edition prints Bloomfield’s first manuscript, and then has a parallel text of the “polished” first edition, opposite Bloomfield’s second manuscript, made for his own use and for that of his family, in which he changes the poem back to the form in which he wrote, heard, and read it. Thus Bloomfield’s intentions appear for the first time, edited in detail from the original manuscripts at Harvard. Also included are the two eighteenth-century poems The Thresher’s Labour by Stephen Duck, and The Woman’s Labour by Mary Collier.

This collection includes essays that consider how Bloomfield's poetry contributes to an understanding of the predominant issues, forms, and themes of literary Romanticism.

This book explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. It examines authors’ interactions with publishers; the challenges of literary sociability; the vexed construction of enduring careers; the factors that prevented most aspiring writers (particularly the less privileged) from accruing significant rewards; the rhetorical professionalisation of periodicals; and the manners in which emerging paradigms and technologies catalysed a belated transformation in how literary writing was consumed and perceived.

The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. Comprises over 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes Written by an international cast of leading and emerging scholars Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities

This book offers a major reassessment of John Clare’s poetry and his position in the Romantic canon. Alert to Clare’s knowledge of the work of his Romantic contemporaries and near contemporaries, it puts forward the first extended series of comparisons of Clare’s poetry with texts we now think of as defining the period – in particular poems by Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats. It makes fully evident Clare’s original contribution to the aesthetic culture of the age by analysing how he explores a wide range of concerns and preoccupations which are central to, and especially privileged in, Romantic-period poetics, including ‘fancy’, the sublime, childhood, ruins, joy, ‘poesy’, and a love lyric marked by a peculiar self-consciousness about sincere expression. At the heart of this book is the claim that the hitherto under-scrutinised subjective stances, transcendent modes, and abstract qualities of Clare’s lyric poetry situate him firmly within, and as fundamentally part of, Romanticism, at the same time as his writing constitutes a distinctive contribution to one of the most fascinating eras of English literature.