The “Other” Robert Bloomfield: “To Immagination” (1800) and the Quest for an Authentic Poetic Voice

Abstract

ANDREW RUDD The “Other” Robert Bloomfield: “To Immagination” (1800) and the Quest for an Authentic Poetic Voice T he opening of robert Bloomfield’s the farmer’s boy: a rural poem (1800) tells the reader very emphatically what sort of poem it is not: No deeds of arms my humble lines rehearse; No Alpine wonders thunder through my verse, The roaring cataract, the snow-topt hill, Inspiring awe, till breath itself stands still; Nature’s sublime scenes ne’er charm’d mine eyes, Nor Science led me through the boundless skies[.] Instead, it promises to depict “meaner objects” and “retrace the paths of wild obscurity,” positioning its author as someone whose principal con­ cerns are rural life and labor, who has not traveled to witness exotic natural wonders, who is not well educated and who, in both senses of the term, knows his place. This is the image of Bloomfield that Wordsworth and Coleridge responded to so enthusiastically when they read parts of the poem in the Summer of 1800.1 It is still the received idea ofBloomfield for An earlier version of this essay was delivered as a talk at the Robert Bloomfield Society and subsequently published in the Robert Bloomfield Society Newsletter, Spring 2012. I am grateful to the Society for their initial invitation and for permission to republish the material in expanded form. 1. Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy; a Rural Poem (London: Vernor & Hood, 1800), 95. For Wordsworth and Coleridge’s reaction to The Farmer’s Boy (in a letter from Coleridge to James Webbe Tobin), see Simon White, Robert Bloomfield, Romanticism and the Poetry of Com­ munity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1. SiR, 55 (Summer 2016) 239 240 ANDREW RUDD many of his readers and not unreasonably so, given that, at first glance, ru­ ral themes underpin the majority of his poetic output, from Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (1802), Good News; or, Tidingsfrom the Farm (1804), Wild Flowers (1806) to The Banks of Wye (1811) and May-Day with the Muses (1822), his last published collection. Insofar as Bloomfield is known to the general reader at all, he is still likely to be categorized as a “rustic” versifier of the English countryside. Yet a very different Bloomfield emerges in “To Inimagination,” a roughly contemporaneous but unpublished poem brought to light and ana­ lyzed in 2009 by Tim Fulford.2 Here, Bloomfield seemingly goes out of his way to include all the elements he chose to reject from The Farmer’s Boy: “To Immagination” does describe scenes of conquest and deeds of arms; it does depict mountainous wonders; and, at its climax, it does transport the reader to the “sublime scenes” of Niagara Falls. The reader may well ask: was Bloomfield the poet interested in such grandiose spectacles or was he not? Which poem represents the “real” Bloomfield? These are increasingly important questions given the valuable recovery work that has taken place in relation to the laboring-class literary tradition by John Goodndge, Bridget Keegan, William Christmas, and numerous others.1 Where once laboring-class authors might have been regarded as writing with a broadly cohesive sense of purpose on the basis of their shared social backgrounds, recent scholarship emphasizes the individual differences between authors and the multiplicity of ways in which laboring-class writers could engage with, vary, or reject established canons of polite taste; as Goodridge writes in the introduction to the seminal anthology Eighteenth-Century English Laboring-Class Poets (2003), “one thing these writers have rarely been al­ lowed is simply to be poets.”'1 In “To Immagination,” a close reading ofwhich will form the main sub2 . Fulford, “To ‘crown with glory the romantick scene’: Robert Bloomfield’s 'To Immagination’ and the Discourse of Romanticism,” Romanticism 15, no. 2 (July 2009): 181200 . The poem appears in “Poems and Papers of Robert Bloomfield, of Honington, the shoemaker poet, and of Charles, his eldest son; 1791-1825,” BL Add. MS 30809 tf. 1-7. “Market Night” follows on If. 8—9. Subsequent references to the poem will be from this edi­ tion and cited in the text. The original spelling and punctuation from the MS have been re­ tained. 3. Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century...