Farmers’ Boys and Doomed Youths: Producing the Poet in the Print Culture of the Romantic Era

Abstract

ABSTRACT Two of the ten bestselling poets of the nineteenth century were almost completely excluded from the twentieth-century canon. Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823) and Henry Kirke White (1785–1806) were huge successes in the expanding print culture of the Romantic era. Their publications were influential on many of the poets who were admitted to the canon. Nevertheless, they have become so obscure that their influence—powerful on Clare, Keats, and Shelley for example— has been almost entirely forgotten. So has their role in shaping the cultural figure of the Romantic poet and their impact upon the publishing of poetry in a period when bookselling was transforming into a sales-driven mass market. Both were from the laboring class; each was publicized commercially because it was, supposedly, amazing that they had become poets at all, considering their social origins. They happened to be excellent poets but, in an early manifestation of PR, they were as much branded as phenomena as they were advertised for excellence. In this article I shall explore how this packaging worked and what it shows about the selling of books, the construction of a cultural image of the poet, and the influence of their poetry on aspiring poets.