Burns wasn't the first agriculturist to put pen to paper, but he did set a standard in poetry for self-taught writers describing the landscape from an embedded perspective. There's a great distinction between these poets, who, because their survival depends on it, have a far more intimate relationship with the land, and those who describe it while looking at it from their firesides on the other side of the window. Chief among the latter are the (largely classically educated) Romantics, who, though drawing inspiration from the landscape, romanticised it in a way a farmer never would. (Wordsworth at least had the gumption to recognise this gulf between romance and reality in The Leech-Gatherer).
Of the former, perhaps the best-known example after Burns is John Clare, a farm-labourer by profession who, though patronised at various points in his life, had no choice but to keep returning to work the land. Clare's work, though celebrated for displaying an understanding of the metaphysical on a par with his more acclaimed academic contemporaries, captured the small details of farming life with a lack of sentimentality that would have been impossible had he spent his formative years at, say, Eton, rather than in the Northamptonshire fields. (Ironically, Clare found it hard to commune with many of his farming neighbours, who viewed him with suspicion, writing "they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it".)
Another fine example of a body of nature poetry that could only have been written by a man of the land is that of Patrick Kavanagh, who spent 20 years living the farming life – a life which informed his 1936 debut The Ploughman and Other Poems and indeed his more famous later works, The Great Hunger and his novel Tarry Flynn (and which later, incidentally, led Brendan Behan to dismiss him as a backwoods yokel).
Such writers were a far cry from the world of academia and the literary high society – closed-off worlds to most cow-milking, kale-growing, dung-shovelling poets of yesteryear (though more recently Seamus Heaney, whose father was a farmer and cattle-dealer, has made the leap).
All of which begs the question: who are the true British poets of the land today? Well, I don't actually know, but was hoping you might be able to tell me. With farming changed beyond all recognition since the crofting days of Robert Burns, is the best emerging agricultural-inspired poetry more likely to come from small-holdings and organic farms and the emerging conservation and ecology movements? Does the new poetry reflect our changing understanding of farming and the land around us? I'd welcome any recommendations.