Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700-1830

Rachel Crawford examines the intriguing, often problematic, relationship between poetry and landscape in eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain. Crawford discusses the highly fraught parliamentary enclosure movement which closed off the last of England's open fields between 1760 and 1815. She takes enclosure as a prevailing metaphor for a reconceptualization of the aesthetics of space in which enclosed and confined sites became associated with productivity, and sets explicit...
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Rachel Crawford examines the intriguing, often problematic, relationship between poetry and landscape in eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain. Crawford discusses the highly fraught parliamentary enclosure movement which closed off the last of England's open fields between 1760 and 1815. She takes enclosure as a prevailing metaphor for a reconceptualization of the aesthetics of space in which enclosed and confined sites became associated with productivity, and sets explicit images, such as the apple, the iron industry, and the kitchen garden within the context of georgic and minor lyric poetry.