SOURCE: “Farming on Foot: Tracking Georgic in Clare and Wordsworth,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 34, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 509-40.

In the following essay, Wallace compares Clare and William Wordsworth with regard to their individual renderings of rural/pastoral subjects in their poetry.

In “The Landscape of Labor: Transformations of the Georgic,” John Murdoch comments on how changes in English landscapes, visual and literary, mark complex, shifting ideological uses of pastoral and georgic. By the mid-eighteenth century, Murdoch argues,

the absorption of the Georgic into the collective cultural consciousness, into a region almost beyond consciousness and therefore beyond question, requires that it should become practically invisible. … Its origins in political revolt require concealment; its dependence on hard, unremitting labor requires it as well. So various things happen: the Georgic is assimilated to the Pastoral, so that in literature and painting they are often almost indistinguishable.¹

In...