Nineteenth-Century Poetic Tributes and Elegies to Robert Bloomfield

Abstract

ABSTRACT Even as the recovery of Robert Bloomfield’s career has accelerated over the past decade, a fully-textured understanding of his contemporary influence remains surprisingly elusive. This article offers a new perspective on the scope of that influence by looking at a specific group of contemporary accounts: memorial poems, tribute poems, and elegies. While the 1824 volume The Remains of Robert Bloomfield contained fifteen such poems, all told there are at least thirty-five others that fall into these categories, though several pre-date Bloomfield's death. This essay identifies several poetic groupings: appreciations and effusions; devotional poems; pastoral elegies; and protest poems about England’s neglect of its poets. Although Bloomfield’s reputation for piety, simplicity, and moral decency is a dominant thread in this body of work, I also identify several poems in which his seemingly spotless public persona makes him usable as a kind of token to be flexibly employed in the service of a grievance or cause. The essay looks in detail at two writers who use Bloomfield in this way: the English temperance writer Jabez Inwards and the American Joseph Dennie, editor of an important early American periodical, the Port Folio, that aggressively advocated for Federalism as against Jeffersonian democracy.