Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jonathan Lawson

Critical Essay by Jonathan Lawson

SOURCE: Lawson, Jonathan. “The Later Works: Continued Awareness and Final Decline” and “Bloomfield and the Rural Tradition: Its Value and Values.” In Robert Bloomfield, pp. 94-154. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

In the following excerpt, Lawson discusses some of Bloomfield's later works, including his poem on the smallpox epidemic, and evaluates the poet's rural identity and influences.

The Later Works: Continued Awareness and Final Decline

I Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs

If there is a unified critical opinion of Bloomfield's works, it is that the first are the best. One modern critic finds that the first poetry, The Farmer's Boy, was surely his best;¹ another finds Bloomfield's next work, Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs, full of “undistinguished poems.”² More recently, Graham Reed observed that in his later works Bloomfield “succumbed to gentility; he allowed a stilted formalism to suffuse his verse,” and that his “most ambitious works were in a characteristically eighteenth-century style.”³ In this there is just enough truth to want correcting. Even Edmund...
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