A World Perhaps: New & Selected Poems - Softcover

Lucas, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0954324803 ISBN 13: 9780954324803

Publisher: Sow's Ear, 2002

Synopsis

Physical description: 158 pages ; 22 cm. Subjects: Poetry; English Poetry.

About this title

From the Publisher

Edited by John Goodridge and John Lucas, Intro. by John Lucas.

Robert Bloomfield (1766-1823), was the most successful of the self-taught 'peasant poets' of the Romantic period, a prolific and popular writer whose first book The Farmer's Boy (1800), sold an unprecedented 26,000 copies in three years, and won the praise of Wordsworth, and John Clare, who called him the 'English Theocritus'. In our own century Edmund Blunden, among others, was a great admirer of Bloomfield.

Nevertheless Bloomfield is now unfamiliar to all except specialists, and this is the first scholarly edition of his poems ever published. It includes the whole text of The Farmer's Boy, and generous selections from Bloomfield's narrative, lyrical, meditative, and didactic poetry, enabling readers to re-assess the full range of his achievement. An introductory essay by John Lucas puts Bloomfield into his historical and literary context, and argues for the quality of his work and its importance to our understanding of the Romantic period.

Bloomfield is a unique voice in our literature, capturing the story-telling and the feast-days as well as the hardship and deprivation of the rural world of his Suffolk upbringing. His poetry is technically adroit and, like Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, pioneers in drawing together the oral and literary traditions in English poetry.

This edition includes a selection of Bloomfield's prose prefaces, as well as explanatory notes, a chronology of Bloomfield's life and a list of further reading.

From the Back Cover

John Lucas is Professor of English and John Goodridge is a Senior Lecturer in English, at The Nottingham Trent University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sow's Ear
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0954324803
• ISBN 13: 9780954324803
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 158