Robert Bloomfield is perhaps the best of England's rural or "uneducated" poets, as Robert Southey termed them. Certainly his first and best work, The Farmer's Boy, struck an amazingly resonant chord with English readers, who bought some twenty-six thousand copies of the poem--there were fourteen separate editions during Bloomfield's lifetime--for the most part during the three years following its publication in 1800. An unmatched chronicler of rural life, its people, traditions, and landscapes, Bloomfield described country life in Suffolk at the close of the eighteenth century, providing a sympathetic yet realistic view of a culture and its values. While his romantic themes and subjects are often set forth in conventional verse that is constantly in danger of succumbing to an excess of nostalgia, something of the authentic voice of the countryman, his humor, and the accurate details of his portraits allow his poetry to stand with a respectability that...