SOURCE: Blunden, Edmund. “The Farmer's Boy: Duck, Bloomfield.” In Nature in English Literature, pp. 106-131. London: The Hogarth Press, 1929.

In the following excerpt, Blunden examines Bloomfield's contribution to the genre of “earth-born poetry.”

The conversation of the men who work on the land, when their topic is their life and experience, is full of translated colour and significant sound; it is with little difficulty that I have sometimes fancied, as I listened to three or four hearty haymakers, that there grew the true poem of Nature. Their whole sense seemed peculiarly trained to answer all that Nature in this country has to say or do, from the grasshopper's rustle to the assembly of the thunderstorm; their verbs seemed of the earth earthy, of the flowers flowery, and their illustrations of meaning simply added other depths of weather-beaten stoicism. We may define poetry as we will, but in the...