Robert Bloomfield, object poet: the topographical and the tangible in Bloomfield’s works

Abstract

This article reconsiders Robert Bloomfield as a writer of object poems. It focuses on the year 1806, when Bloomfield's third collection, Wild Flowers, was published. This contains the poem, “My Old Oak Table,” that rivals The Farmer's Boy in its widespread popular association with the poet. 1806 was also the year that James Sargant Storer and John Greig published their Views in Suffolk, Norfolk, and Northamptonshire; illustrative of the Works of Robert Bloomfield, with a life by Edward Wedlake Brayley. This volume uses the spatial medium of the picturesque to repackage the poet for polite consumption, in effect recasting Bloomfield topographically as Capel Lofft's editorship recast Bloomfield typographically. I argue that object poems such as “My Old Oak Table,” “To a Spindle,” and “The Broken Crutch”, by contrast, poetically ground the dignified independence that marked much of Bloomfield's work in tangible, time-worn, rugged, artisanal objects, which emerge as bulwarks or talismans of solidity and innate worth. Bloomfield should be taken seriously as an object poet, I argue, just as his poetics of the working-class object should be seen as a key to understanding his struggle for control over his creative project.