Bloomfield as Occasional Poet, by Bridget Keegan
This is a slightly abridged version of the talk given by Professor Keegan at the 2012 Annual Bloomfield Day.
In a forthcoming essay (from which the following is adapted), I discuss the role of occasional poetry in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century labouring class poetry. Because labouring-class writers were more limited than middle and upper-class authors by pressing constraints on their time, occasional verse was a welcoming mode. It is safe to say that almost every labourer poet stressed that he or she could only occasionally be a poet. Indeed, scholars of the field have remarked upon the fact that a significant percentage of the volumes produced by labouring-class poets are entitled Poems on Several Occasions or Poems on Various Occasions. These collections, moreover, contain poems describing and celebrating those times when the artist was liberated from manual labour and could attend to creative work. A large number of Bloomfield’s poems – in particular his major locodescriptive work, The Banks of Wye – are written about or during times when he is away from home and work, visiting scenic spots for health or pleasure. Thus, although all poets write occasional verse, it is my contention that occasional poetry provides unique insights into what distinguishes labouring-class writers. Bloomfield’s relationship to occasional poetry is interesting for how he deviates from predominant patterns as much as for how he exemplifies them.
Occasional poems deal with a particular moment or event. They do not rely on invention or imagination solely; the most basic definition of the form stipulates that it ‘relies on a verifiable external event as its genesis’. [1] Eighteenth-century labouring-class occasional poetry tends to focus on explicitly literary occasions: poems on receiving books, on being published, on reading the works of another poet, and on being asked to write. These meta-literary occasions allow labouring-class poets to reflect on the paradoxes of their identity and to experiment in self-fashioning. What is most intriguing about Bloomfield is the relative dearth of occasional poetry in the volumes published in his lifetime. While there is an ample selection of occasional verse to be found in the Remains, that verse is rarely what I am calling meta-literary. The occasional verse he writes is nonetheless useful to understanding Bloomfield’s sense of his identity as a poet from a labouring-class background.
Writing a longer, sustained poetic work, something that did more than just respond to an occasion, involved time – as we know from reading in his letters about the challenges Bloomfield faced in putting his tour of the Wye into verse. The labourer’s time was a commodity whose value was renegotiated during the eighteenth century. It’s no surprise that E.P. Thompson’s classic essay ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’ explicitly draws upon the poetry of Stephen Duck and Mary Collier to illustrate the tensions surrounding changing perceptions of a labourer’s time. [2] Thompson and later John Goodridge show how The Thresher’s Labour illustrates the clash of seasonally-driven agricultural rhythms and industrial clock time, and how The Woman’s Labour reveals the added pressures on women’s time due to housework and childcare. [3] In the earlier part of the eighteenth-century, poets followed Duck and Collier and attempted to address limits of time and material by making their labour the topic of poetry. Unsurprisingly, the three most poetically productive occupations were those which were largely unsupervised and where workers had the most control over their time: weavers, shoemakers, and shepherds. Bloomfield’s work as an apprentice shoemaker may have actually given him the time for poetry, as one of his tasks in the garret where he worked was to read the newspaper aloud, and this is how he discovered the Poet’s Corner to which he would contribute his earliest pieces.
Labouring-class poets, like any poet of the period, composed poetry on a wide variety of events including weddings, birthdays, and other festive occasions (here we can note Bloomfield’s song ‘at the anniversary of Dr. Jenner’s birthday, 1803’). They penned poems about military victories or other issues of national and international concern (most notably the slave trade). [4] Bloomfield has his ‘On seeing the launch of the Boyne’ or the poem prefacing 1802’s Rural Tales, ‘Peace,’ commemorating the Treaty of Amiens. But plebeian poets wrote most about the circumstances allowing them to write and the occasions for coming to writing.
Because of the need to authenticate that a labourer could indeed write, volumes of labouring-class poetry often appear with elaborate enframing: typically an introduction penned by an authoritative figure, an apology from the author, and a list of subscribers who collectively validate the artist’s endeavours. Rare was the labouring-class poet who published without the aid of a patron or patrons, although patronage relationships varied greatly. [5] Bloomfield’s relationships with the Duke of Grafton and Capel Lofft show his involvement with both the more residual modes of aristocratic patronage as well as what was throughout the eighteenth century the more emergent type, namely a politicized patronage by bourgeois backers. While poets continued to write poems of gratitude to those who assisted their publication financially, intellectual rather than monetary assistance was more frequently and more interestingly commemorated. The role of women as supporters of labouring-class poets, from Queen Caroline in the 1730s, to Clare’s advocate Eliza Emmerson in the 1830s, is a story that has yet to be told in full, though younger scholars like Emma Trehane are beginning to tell this fascinating tale. Bloomfield’s relationship with Mary Lloyd Baker and her sister Catherine should most certainly be included in any such future study.
While Bloomfield is careful gratefully to acknowledge his supporters in the prose prefaces to his work, it seems noteworthy that poetic praise for them is tellingly absent; I was somewhat caught by surprise that a poet remembered for his great humility and deference so rarely makes his debt to the great the subject of his verse. We see something of an acknowledgement of the more generic ‘Benevolence’ and ‘Greatness’ which affords him the opportunity to return home in the poem ‘On Revisiting the Place of My Nativity’, which introduces later editions of The Farmer’s Boy. How to read this absence is a question worth considering. To my mind, such a dearth of this particular kind of poetry seems to suggest Bloomfield’s innate, well-founded, if tacit, confidence in his gifts.
Physical hardships were frequently recorded in poetry, but the social hardships were more painful. That poems in this category appear both early and late in the century suggests that despite the growing number of labouring-class poets, public acceptance remained elusive. Labouring-class poets’ desire for acceptance and literary community, whether imagined or real, was profound, particularly given the isolation many of the authors felt. Poets such as Mary Leapor describe poignantly how their double identity as labourer and poet estranged them from the literary community they aspired to join and the plebeian community in which they lived. Her ‘An Epistle to Artemesia. On Fame’ shows her struggle for polite acceptance, while her ‘Epistle to Deborah Dough’ shows her alienation from her labouring-class relatives.
Later in the century Robert Burns predominates as the subject of many an occasional poem. Burns’s death spurred a flood of poems in his memory, the majority by Scottish poets, appearing well into the nineteenth century. While Bloomfield did not write a separate homage to Burns, the episodic structure of The Banks of Wye could allow us to read his celebration of Burns’s memory, in Book 3, as a discrete occasional piece, one that enables us a glimpse of his sense of his own identity as a landscape poet in particular. Addressing the ‘Spirit of Burns,’ Bloomfield remembers not just the poet, but the poet’s countryside: ‘How have I wept o’er all thy ills, / How blest thy Caledonian hills! / How almost worshipp’d in my dreams / Thy mountain haunts, – thy classic streams!’ Burns’s ‘giant strength’ as a poet is mirrored by the majesty of the Scottish mountains and Bloomfield wonders whether the less grand but still majestic elevated prospects he is enjoying along the Wye ‘were nought to thee.’ Comparing Scottish and Welsh mountains provides a vehicle for Bloomfield to negotiate his relationship to the far more celebrated fellow poet of the plough, and although he muses whether Pen-Y-Vale and the other peaks are ‘For thy northern lyre too mean,’ his ensuing celebration of Blorenge, Skyrid, Plynlimon and Cader Idris commemorates their equally rich literary heritage, dating back to the Welsh bard Taliesin. That he should use the space of this poem to assert his admiration for but independence from Burns shows us his humility as much as his confidence in his poetic abilities.
Such confidence is not unfounded. While Bloomfield may certainly have claimed his achievement ostensibly lesser than Burns’s, it’s worth remembering too, as Tim Fulford has noted in the introduction to his and Lynda Pratt’s edition of Bloomfield’s letters, that for a period in the early nineteenth century, Bloomfield was a major not a minor poet. Thus we should not be surprised that he is more often the recipient of occasional poems of praise from other poets, and a good example is given in the Remains, though other poets names might be added to the list of those writing fondly of Bloomfield, most notably John Clare and fellow shoemaker poet Charles Crocker who has a poem entitled ‘Bloomfield’s Grave. Occasioned by Reading in a Newspaper that the place where that poet was buried was not distinguished by a common grave stone.’
The need to explain the ‘wonder’ of a cobbler (or a bricklayer or a thresher) writing is often the basis for the most occasional of occasional verse, detailing the often trivial circumstances of a poem’s composition. Some of the verse in this category might also be categorized as performances in so far as there was an expectation of immediate remuneration for the effort. One cannot blame writers for wanting to be paid and perhaps eventually being able to trade their day job for creative work. As John Dolan observes, occasional poems frequently give poets the space to address their ambitions explicitly. Milton’s Lycidas is the most celebrated example. Duck’s ‘To a Gentleman who requested a copy of verses from the author,’ humbly apologizes for the author’s want of skill and for the want of a topic. Even with more humble ambitions the conclusion of the poem sees Duck relinquishing this momentary time of writing and returning to the scene of his primary occupation, whose immediate demands take precedence.
But why stand I my Fate accusing so?
The Field calls me to Labour; I must go:
The Kine low after Meat; the hungry Steed,
Neighing, complains he wants his usual Feed.
Then, Sir, adieu: Accept what you did crave,
And be propitious to your humble Slave. (47-52)
The work of animal husbandry trumps the occasions for poetry, and in the struggle between competing occupations the thresher prevails over the poet. It was Bloomfield’s genius, however, in 1800 to find a way for the work of the farm and the farmer’s boy to regain their proper place in poetry.
Bloomfield was less inclined to use occasional verse as a place to perform struggles with his artistic vocation. Only a few occasional pieces are scattered throughout the published work. In many respects, because so many of Bloomfield’s published poems are in the form of songs or tales – writing about others and not himself – he avoids both the dangers and the opportunities that writing about his craft directly could create. The Remains, however, includes a wealth of occasional poems, although these are, again, not predominantly meta-literary. Rather, on the whole, they are concerned with linking family relationships to the genesis of the poem. An early poem, included in the ‘Poetical Fragments’ of the Remains makes this clear. It is entitled: ‘To His Mother, With a Copy of ‘The Farmer’s Boy’:
‘To peace and virtue still be true;’
An anxious Mother ever cries,
Who needs no present to renew
Parental love—which never dies.
Yet, when to know, and see and hear
All that the GREAT and GOOD have done,
This present will be doubly dear ....
‘Your favour'd poet is - MY son.’
Likewise the poem ‘To His Wife’ which has the poet revisiting the place celebrated in the published poem ‘Lines Occasioned by A Visit to Whittlebury Forest, Northamptonshire, in August 1800. Addressed to my Children.’ In a manner that strikes me as Wordsworthian (and by 1804 Bloomfield may have read ‘Tintern Abbey’), we see Bloomfield’s commemoration of the natural scene made all the more poignant for being overlaid with his sense of longing for the feminine presence of his wife to enjoy it with him. Other occasional poems to family include Bloomfield’s very early ‘Elegy,’ one of his earliest compositions, penned in memory of his half-brother Isaac Glover; the aforementioned poem on the launch of the Boyne was written for his father-in-law, a shipwright; and the last occasional poem included in the Remains is ‘On the death of his infant son Robert.’ The intimate quality of many of these pieces, their emphasis on family, underscore the typical association of occasional poetry with ‘unimportant poetry’ (for lack of a more precise term) – poetry that speaks to circumstances significant only to few or for a minor moment in time (even if they deal with serious topics like a child’s death). Yet as we know now from the letters, Bloomfield’s sense of family was absolutely essential to his identity. While it is true, as Fulford notes, that Bloomfield’s ‘chief delight…was to escape London and literary correspondents, and take to the hills’ – the kind of excursions and visits to picturesque places that are the fodder for occasional verse – it is also very clear that Bloomfield’s other major delight – as well as his major care – was his family. Bloomfield is, as John Goodridge has argued, a remarkable poet of community and of family. Goodridge has discussed how this is manifest in the tales and songs of rural life, poems that are at once nostalgic (as is the late May Day with the Muses) but that also give voice to a rich imaginative world whose continued vitality Bloomfield strove to represent. We cannot fully understand or appreciate Bloomfield as a writer without seeing him in the fullness of the many and very intense personal relationships he formed and about which he wrote occasional poetry. In this respect, Bloomfield breaks something of the mould of the alienated and isolated natural genius that is elsewhere evidenced in some of the broad swathes of labouring-class occasional verse. While we know the last years of his life were not happy ones, it is precisely because of the strong support of his children, first and foremost of his daughter, Hannah, that we have access in the Remains to the poetry and other writings that represent his later and earlier unpublished work, including many occasional poems. Bloomfield’s engagement (or lack thereof) with the meta-literary occasional verse that occupied many of his ‘brother [and sister!] bards and fellow labourers’ demonstrate, I believe, a confidence in his abilities as a writer that make him exemplary – in both senses of the term – of the labouring-class tradition. His occasional writing is private and intimate. His published collections reveal a quiet confidence – and a justified confidence! – in his gifts and vision. Indeed, now that we have the benefit of reading his correspondence in full, we can be confirmed in our vision of a writer with a secure sense of himself and his artistic vision, something of a rarity among labouring-class poets.
[1] John Dolan, Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 2. BACK
[2] E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,’ Past and Present 38.1 (1967), 56-97. BACK
[3] John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). BACK
[4] See James Basker’s Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660-1810 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Labouring-class poets from Duck and beyond are well represented in this collection. BACK
[5] Of only a handful of poets with no apparent support networks to facilitate their publication are John Bancks in the early part of the century and John Freeth near the end. BACK