BLOOMFIELD, ROBERT

born Dec. 3, 1766, Honington, Suffolk, Eng. died Aug. 9, 1823, Shefford, Bedfordshire shoemaker-poet who achieved brief fame with poems describing the English countryside. His first poem, The Farmer's Boy (1800), written after he had left the land to become a London shoemaker, owed its popularity to its blend of late 18th-century pastoralism with an early Romantic feeling for nature. The works that followed, from Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (1802) to The Banks of Wye (1811), were almost equally successful.