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    "Mild health I seek thee": Clare and Bloomfield at the limits of pastoral

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    Name:
    LAFFORD Clare and Bloomfield ...
    Embargo:
    2022-03-24
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    589.5Kb
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    Authors
    Lafford, Erin
    Affiliation
    University of Derby
    Issue Date
    2020
    
    Metadata
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    Abstract
    In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams dismantled the “pastoral assumption” that the rural laboring class were pictures of health and vitality, uncovering instead the reality of embodied suffering in laboring-class poetry. This essay considers how Robert Bloomfield and John Clare interrogated this “pastoral assumption” of rural health, suggesting that to claim they merely rejected it risks losing sight of their subtle forms of poetic critique. The body, mind, and verse of laboring-class poets were subject to simultaneous cultural narratives of robust health and sickly weakness, within which Bloomfield and Clare had to forge their own distinctive poetic voices. They wrote poems, I argue, that ostensibly upheld a pastoral ideal of health emanating from the natural world, but also critiqued this ideal through an artful hesitancy, especially in their use of apostrophe. I consider the influence of Bloomfield’s “To My Old Oak Table” (1806), and “Shooter’s Hill” (1806) on Clare’s early poem “To Health” (1821) and one of his middle-period sonnets in particular. Far from being uncomfortable or under-confident in the pastoral mode, Bloomfield and Clare brought their own aesthetic experiments and experiences of precarious health to bear on some of its key tropes.
    Citation
    Lafford, E. (2020). "Mild health I seek thee": Clare and Bloomfield at the limits of pastoral'. European Romantic Review, 31(5), pp. 1-23.
    Publisher
    Taylor & Francis
    Journal
    European Romantic Review
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/10545/625012
    DOI
    10.1080/10509585.2020.1803547
    Additional Links
    https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gerr20/current
    Type
    Article
    Language
    en
    ISSN
    1050-9585
    EISSN
    1740-4657
    ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
    10.1080/10509585.2020.1803547
    Scopus Count
    Collections
    Department of Humanities

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