Robert Bloomfield, Romanticism and the Poetry of Community (The Nineteenth Century Series)

"Until now, no modern critic has undertaken a full-length study of Robert Bloomfield's poetry and its contexts. Simon J. White considers the relationship between Bloomfield's poetry and that of other Romantic poets." "White considers Bloomfield's emphasis on the importance of local tradition and community in the lives of labouring people. In challenging the idea that the formal and rhetorical innovation of Wordsworth and Coleridge was principally responsible for the emergence of a new kind of poetry at the turn of the eighteenth century, he also shows that it is impossible to understand how the lyric and the literary ballad evolved during the Romantic period without considering Bloomfield's poetry."--Jacket.