SOURCE: Unwin, Rayner. “Robert Bloomfield.” In The Rural Muse: Studies in the Peasant Poetry of England, pp. 87-109. London: Goerge Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1954.

In the following excerpt, the author reviews the critical response of Bloomfield's contemporaries to his poetry as well as some of the salient features of the poet's biography. A close reading of The Farmer's Boy yields a discussion of Bloomfield's restraint from moralizing and of his conservative intellectual approach.

First made a Farmer's Boy, and then a snob, A poet he became, and here lies Bob. 

Robert Bloomfield: MS. scribble, April 1823

In 1781 Robert Bloomfield, a fourteen-year-old farm boy, threw his old hat in the horse-pond, sold his smock for a shilling, and set off to London to turn shoemaker. It was not without regret that he left the East-Anglian farm where he had been employed for the past three years, but his employer, Mr...