Robert Bloomfield

Robert Bloomfield (born Dec. 3, 1766, Honington, Suffolk, Eng.—died Aug. 19, 1823, Shefford, Bedfordshire) was a shoemaker-poet who achieved brief fame with poems describing the English countryside. Born in rural Suffolk but thought too frail to work on the land, Bloomfield was sent to London at age 15 to be apprenticed to a shoemaker. His poem The Farmer’s Boy (1800), written in couplets, owed its popularity to its blend of late 18th-century pastoralism with an...