SOURCE: Lucas, John. “Bloomfield and Clare.” In The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, edited by John Goodridge, pp. 55-68. Helpston: John Clare Society and the Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994.

In the following essay, Lucas argues that Bloomfield's “poetry was a means of securing a social identity at odds with his own origins.” He also interprets Clare's praise for Bloomfield's poetry as praise for the depiction of an ideal, uncorrupted rural life.

[John] Clare's intense admiration for Bloomfield is well known. ‘The English Theocritus & the first of the Rural Bards in this country’, he called him. He also said that in his opinion Bloomfield was ‘our best Pastoral poet’. Johanne Clare rather questions Clare's motives in piling up such exaggerated praise, as she thinks it to be. Clare, she says, ‘must have recognized that by rallying to Bloomfield's reputation he was to some extent helping to...