May Day With the Muses

Robert Bloomfield (1766-1823), was an English poet. He was born of a poor family in the village of Honington, Suffolk. He apprenticed at the age of eleven to a farmer, but he was too small and frail for field labour, and four years later he went to London to work for a shoemaker under an elder brother, enduring extreme poverty. The poem that made his reputation was The Farmer's Boy: A Rural Poem (1800). The success of the poem was remarkable, over 25,000 copies being sold in the next two years.