ABSTRACT
The lyric has been central to our understanding of Romanticism, indeed ‘defining the mode once meant, in effect, defining Romanticism’. One of the principal reasons for the tendency in criticism has been the influence of M. H. Abrams’ seminal essay ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric’, first published in 1965. New historicism has critiqued the ideological implications of the poetics of interiority and transcendence identified by Abrams, but the terms of that critique have ironically reinforced the equation of the extended Romantic lyric with these extra-formal qualities. For the labouring poor in the countryside, the possession of a clock or watch to measure time might not have been so important anyway. Capel Lofft argues that the opportunity to glean the harvest field is of particular importance to individuals within rural communities ‘who are not of strength or habit to the more profitable labours of the field’ – people like Robert Bloomfield’s widow.
