Ecopoetics and Boyopoetics: Bloomfield, Clare and the Nature of Lyric

This article investigates the ecological lyrics of Robert Bloomfield and John Clare, suggesting that the elision of adult subject-positions in the latter was influenced by the pioneering poetry of the former. An alternative to the sublime egotism of William Wordsworth, and to the “Greater Romantic Lyric” as defined by twentieth-century criticism, Bloomfield’s and Clare’s eco-poetry is characterized by a delicate, intricate and valuable lyricism that does not use nature as a sounding-bound for a supposedly timeless, bourgeois male subjectivity. But it was shaped as much by the book market—by class-based restrictions on laboring-class men’s access to print—as by the poets’ exceptionally selfless environmentalism.