John Clare

by John Clare

These volumes represent the third and fourth of five volumes devoted to Clare's "middle period," between 1822 and 1837, arguably the years of his finest creativity. They range from examples of Clare's satirical and political verse, in "The Summons" and "The Hue and Cry," to a telling
expression of his philosophy of nature, in "The Eternity of Nature," and probably the most important statement of Clare's poetic objectives in "To the Rural Muse."

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Nonfiction, Literature, Romanticism, 19th Century, British Literature

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

John Clare was an English poet, in his time commonly known as "the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet", born the son of a farm labourer at Helpston (which, at the time of his birth, was in the Soke of Peterborough, which itself was part of Northamptonshire) near Peterborough. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be one of the most important 19th-century poets.

For other authors with this name see: psychotherapist and artist John Clare, history educator John D. Clare and John Clare.

Reviews

[Sean Barrs · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Clare wrote some wonderful poems, but he also wrote some terribly basic ones. If you compare him to the other canonical poets of British Romanticism, then he can easily be criticised. He didn’t have the flair of Byron or such control over sensuous imagery like Wordsworth and Shelley; he didn’t have the imagination of Coleridge or the stylistic qualities of Keats. He didn’t even have the lyricism of Blake. But what he did have was persistence, and a real awareness of himself and his surroundings. For me he stands in the shadows of his more developed brothers.

Does that make his poetry any better? No it doesn’t. But it does mean that he can be appreciated more. Clare taught himself to read; he wasn’t educated like the rest of the Romantics. He had a massive disadvantage. He learnt to write poetry by copying the style of his peers; he adapted it and made it his own, and eventually he developed his own poetic voice. Is this not something to admire? Clare was a shepherd, not a scholar or a literary critic or a pompous Lord. The early Romantics advocated oneness with nature; surely, out of the crowd Clare is the one with the most experience. He lived the rural life from the beginning, and his poetry reflects it so blatantly.



I have a great deal of respect for John Clare. To pull his poetry almost up to the exalted heights of such names I mentioned is a massive achievement for one who started like he did. I’ve seen his actual handwriting, and some of his early manuscripts. His penmanship is terrible and full of misspelt words and local colloquialisms. To be able change something like that into the final forms that were published is rather astonishing. I suppose if anything it shows what persistence can achieve, that and a good editor.

Now I’ve spoken a lot about Clare’s hindrances but, don’t mistake me, I think some of his poetry is really powerful. My favourite is “I am”. I’ve copied it full here:

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.



This is a great reading of it, even though it misses the second stanza; it is very much worth hearing. It’s very touching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDgEq...

Isn't Penny Dreadful just great?

One thing Clare did do better than the other Romantics was really explore the animal kingdom. He didn’t just write about Nightingales; he used so many birds and woodland life. He was a real advocate of nature. Had he been alive today he would have been an activist or an animal rights campaigner. In this, he was ahead of his time; yes, many in the early nineteenth century shared these views, Robert Burns included, but Clare really explored them in real depth in his poetry.

Some of his other poems that I thought were worthy of note are “What is life?” “The Wren” and “Remembrances.” Reembraces has some of my favourite Clare lines in it. It really shows the effects of big laws on the little man:

By Langley bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill
On cowper green I stray tis a desert strange and chill
And spreading lea close oak ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler and self interest fell a prey
And cross berry way and old round oaks narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again
Enclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors - though the brook is running still
It runs a naked brook cold and chill

Such wonderful stuff. I may have preferred the poetry of the other Romantics, but I enjoyed studying Clare the most. He has a real human story, one that’s reflected in his poetry. For me, he was the most relatable of the literary figures of his age. Maybe it’s because I come from the same part of England or perhaps it’s because “I am” is a poem I feel a great affinity with. Either way, Clare is a man I admire. I respect people who aren’t naturally intelligent, or haven’t had the opportunities afforded to others, but yet they still succeed through their own willpower.

I hope you enjoyed my review, and the poems I picked out. I enjoyed writing this more than most of the things I post. I’ve decided that I simply must write reviews for the works of the other Romantics, and perhaps more poetry in general. Personally, I don’t think there’s enough reviews of poetry on goodreads.

[Leila · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved John Clare's poems about nature.

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I savoured reading this – I can never read poetry quickly.

Geoffrey Summerfield's selection and notes and faithful reproduction of the poems enhanced the experience. The selection covers all poetically active periods of Clare's life, including his long incarceration in the asylum at Northampton where he died. His “mad” period included a number of poems where he assumed the Byronic persona. Some are very graphic in content and must have done wonders for Victorian sensibilities! Many poems are devoted to his early love, Mary, to whom he believed he was married (he wasn't) Some of these are very powerful.

His observations of nature and the seasons when working as a farm labourer and shepherd in rural Northants form some of my favourite poems. There are many words local to Northamptonshire and the dialect of Clare's particular area which he uses in his poems which enrich and interest. I suspect that many have now disappeared from everyday use.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a pleasant surprise. I only became aware of Clare through Iain Sinclair. Discovering that Clare was a naturalist gave me a certain pause. Then Tuesday saw me heading to a somewhat irrelevant workshop just outside of Indianapolis and I tossed it into my bag. Winter still has a hold on that area and the location of my meeting was adjacent to a lake. How fitting then the rolling descriptions of birds and plants, even there under the brittle grip of a February frost. I have come to realize how Wendell Berry while embodying so many of my values and aspirations is still a very average poet. Clare is likewise remarkable; his descriptions of country folk at the holidays are amazing, human and touching.

[Jude Brigley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have been reading Clare's poems throughout the year and reminding myself how much I like them.
'The girning winds bit sharp and thin
And made the early riser blow his nails,
and crizzling frost shot needles in the dyke
and crumpt beneath the feet down grassy vales.'

I love 'crizzling', 'crumpt' and 'girning'.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rustic poetry, detailed, the poetry of the rural dweller, intimate in its knowledge of seasons, bird song, animal habits, etc. occasionally lacking something? Simplicity at the cost soul?

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this almost straight through as soon as I purchased it. This is the true country voice of the English Romantics...Wordsworth wished he could draw on the enormous rural knowledge that John Clare possessed. I can return to this time and time again.

[Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps not the right book I've read as the one I read on my book app is just titled "Clare's poems".
I was going through a real though reading time today, after trying to change my reading habits and speed and I just got to a point where I struggled a lot with reading. I was in terrible mood but then I saw a wonderful review on my feed about John Clare's works and I decided to give him a try. But I never usually read poems. But to my delight I was mesmerized by his poems, they where so lyrical and such a great read. It really bring my mood up. Sadly there was only that one work on the app and I have to look elsewhere

[Jonathan Honnor]

I suppose one of the most striking aspects of Clare's style and what he seems to have inspired in other poets is his style of what Lawrence calls the "living present" and what Heaney in turn calls "inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world" (a phrase I feel that could also come from translations of Heidegger and certainly invokes him, as perhaps all poetry of nature does if you are foolish enough to have read and think about Heidegger). Perhaps he also exemplified Heaney's own projected journey "into the heartland of the ordinary" or that most excellent self-summation of Heaney's art: "the music of what happens". For Clare the poet's job seemed to be only to describe with very vivid impressions what the world and what nature is actually like. Which is to say that his poetry is very different from the kind of poetry which is abstract and/or symbolic, and you can draw an immediate contrast between Keats and Clare who shared the same publisher. Clare will never have a "Nightingale" which is an "immortal Bird" because, unlike in mythology, nothing in nature is immortal and Clare is tied always to what actually is, a nightingale does not represent anything unless it happens to be tinged with the feeling (usually sadness) it invokes in the describer. Or alternatively this difference can be demonstrated through the so different treatments of Shelley's and Clare's poems on skylarks, Shelley saying "blithe Spirit/ Bird thou never wert" because what the bird becomes in the poem and for the poet is ultimately beyond bird-like, whereas Clare, perhaps with more of a sense of a conceit than usual, mostly allows the bird to be a skylark and rather metamorphoses the boys in the scene to skylarks ("O were they but a bird" [ital. mine]).

There's an argument thus to be made that Clare out-Romantics most of the Romantics in truly being a spirit of nature, which the surrounding mythology around Clare being an actual peasant poet as opposed to the rest of the urbane city boys supports. Bate, in his introduction to this volume, writes on this theme in comparing Clare to Keats, where Clare found fault with Keats for his constant allusions/illusions to classical Mythology, while Keats found fault with Clare because "the Description too much prevailed over the Sentiment". Essentially in this argument of whether we should use quite extraneous or unusual symbolism to describe the natural world or not, both parties are accusing each other of being too left hemispheric (in modern terms), Keats for supposedly not grasping the actuality of what there is, the haecceity as opposed to the quiddity of nature, and Clare for supposedly not emotionally responding enough, which we usually see in poetry through conceits or metaphors or symbols, not imbuing the natural world with the poet's imagination. Jonathan Bate responds to this argument with the synthesis that "[f]or Clare, though, description is sentiment [ital. mine]" and this is absolutely correct and where the sentiment and enjoyment of Clare, I feel, is most to be found -- in the use of language merely to record aptly the thisness of what is around him and thus to fulfil very superbly the Heideggerian task of showing us the nature of being in the world. (How sad and how ironic it is that Clare's two later poems titled 'I Am' are such superbly desolate recordings of utter self-alienation from a poet who earlier seemed to express so deeply the homeliness of his Umwelt -- the supreme poet of "dwelling and alienation".)

Nevertheless I also cannot help but feel that even Sir Bate does not appear wholly aware at this moment of his introduction of the radical consequences of the collapse of poetic sentiment into description, for clearly even such a deep thinker about poetry as Keats found a need to separate these concepts and pit them against each other. For if description is wholly sentiment in itself, and does not have a conceit or sentiment to guide where it is going, then it can appear as formless and endless as life itself. Sense can be its own logic certainly, but then why need we the poet, whose job previously was to order and interpret this sense of experience into logic, language and conceit? I completely agree with Bate that the "formlessness" and "endlessness" is in some ways the qualities of his best and most surprising poetry -- the "rambling" quality where it feels we are merely strolling beside Clare and seeing what he sees without beginning or end, as explicitly shown in the title of 'A Ramble' or so effectively in 'The Pettichap's Nest', where the subject of the poem appears entirely to surprise of the speaker ("Well, I declare, it is the pettichap! [...] never did I dream until today/ A spot like this would be her chosen home") and that wonderful poem on the Field-Mouse's Nest, where the sense of a poetic structure or conceit or a general theme or subject or even, strangely, the one-ness and integrality of the narratorial speaker defers instead to the mere logic of what actually happens in nature, the mere "one-thing-after-anotherness" of description. But if there is nothing but description for its own sake, the question becomes to a certain extent why and how we should write in this vein and where is the end to it: poets need conceits and mythology sometimes to provide a kind of artistic teleology. For Clare, to a certain extent there simply does not seem to have been an end to writing at all, to which the endless profuseness of over three and a half thousand poems in his output seems to attest. One would almost be tempted to say that such a poetic project ('you merely need to describe and you have sentiment and poetry') would be enough to turn anyone mad especially if taken whole-heartedly as Clare did. (No wonder so many poets are mad when with such easy access to such a godly power!)

Yet Bate then perhaps rather overstates the case of Clare's poetic revolution of sentiment into description at one moment of his introduction, even if this quality is, at the same time, exactly where Clare is most surprising and successful. For rather another element that is also surprising about Clare -- and surprise or astonishment, is, as Bate said "the mood of many of his best poems" -- is a paradoxical unawareness or even despising of the elements that made his poetry so great. While one might theorise that it was perhaps Clare's rustic effusiveness and deference to the logic of sense experience and the animacy of nature that jarred so awkwardly with the increasingly industrialised and autistic world which straitjacketed him into an asylum and turned him neurotic, if one is completely certain that Clare was completely sane throughout his life, I think it is more likely quite mad in his later work (not speaking medically) because Clare was schizophrenic in the sense of being "split-minded". This is most strongly attested in his attitude towards Byron and the production of probably by far the worst, but most psychologically revealing, poem of this volume: 'Don Juan'.

To learn that Clare was overawed by Byron's genius is so surprising because Byron seems to represent all the aspects of the Romantics that Clare was furthest from: the aristocratic birth, Byron's classicism and love of Pope, Byron's global, both European and "Oriental", eclecticism against Clare's rustic miniaturism, 'peasant poetry'. He is a similar or worse offender than Keats, surely in invoking too much of the "Grecian Mythology". Yet Clare wrote poetry when he was quite 'sane' calling him a "mighty genius" and then in an asylum believed himself, apparently, actually to be Lord Byron, or at least, he writes: "Though laurel wreaths my brow did ne'er environ/ I think myself as great a bard as Byron". In 'Don Juan: A Poem', the attitude perhaps is far more outwardly hostile and envious and perhaps not in the sublimated sense that according to Harold Bloom is the genesis of all great poetry. He is overawed by Byron and commits a kind of kamikaze kenosis of self-destruction: believing himself to be a kind of Byron, he writes an awful parody of Byron's Don Juan which reveals all the comic tricks that Byron plays to be facile and puerile. However, what this proves poetically ultimately is only that Clare was a bad parodist, at least especially at this most psychologically stressed moment.

What this reveals psychologically more generally nevertheless is a surprising and very sad insecurity in Clare's self about the kind of poetry that he was writing. "'Poets are born' -- and so are whores -- the trade is/ Grown universal" he begins, and there reveals the insecurity about his peasant birth against everything that Byron's aristocratic approach to poetry represents. Although the prejudice is nowadays reversed, Clare tragically seems surprisingly insecure over his more rustic, dialect, 'peasant' style and anxious over his newfound status as a poet. Furthermore, this distressed poem appears to be a meditation on Clare's deathly obsession with his dead childhood love of Mary Joyce, who becomes Clare's "lost Muse" in a way that so contrasts with the Byronic (ultimately more "classical", 'healthy', promiscuous) attitude towards women. (One cannot help but feel a comparison with the psychological distress of Kierkegaard here, who also self-identified with the 'Don Juan' character in a torturous and self-flagellating way, despite or because of his extreme sensitivity and guilt that really was nothing close to a real Don Juan at all.) I do not think this mental breakdown -- which seems to have been caused by a number of causes, not least his moving away from the earlier landscape he loved so well to Northborough and thus his alienation from his Umwelt -- introduced new insecurities but is rather evidence of the insecurities that probably runs through and plague all his poetry. Clare writes very truly when he writes in his other Byron-parody, 'Child Harold':

My life hath been one love--no, blot it out--
My life hath been one chain of contradictions

And this is also where he, ironically, most accords with Byron's self-division between the classical and the Romantic. Clare's poetry is not an unobscured, simplistic "voice of Nature", even though at times he truly does out-Romantic the Romantics, but it is a long story of self-contradictions as all poetic lives tend to be, and at least part of this is the contradiction between his own individualistic spirit against how "others" write poetry, how you are "meant" [according to 'das Man'] to write poetry, between the Romantic and the classical, and at times between the descriptive and the sentimental. Or, to take this back to one of the primary oppositions of Clare's poetry, between the naturalness of an open landscape and enclosure, the enclosure which unfortunately also gives poetry its limits and form -- that helps give poetry, as Clare's poetry so superbly achieved, "a local habitation and a name."

[In a mild coincidence, which one hopes provides some poetic cosmic justice, due to the organisation of my bookshelf I have slotted this book right against Byron's Don Juan.]

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

A pastoral Romantic & rival of Keats though it's apparent he doesn't have anything like the intricate virtuosity of JK. That's not to make a minor poet of Clare. I enjoyed this though I also felt it was as long as it needed to be my favourite parts were his words:

soodles
blealy
sarv'd
bawks
elting
proggling/progs/proggled/progged
sweeing
craiking
sprents
frit
gingle
rawky
grubbling
crizzled
scrowed
suthy

he's exciting aware of the writing/wilderness overlap & the putting-down on the pageness of poetry.

The rich brown-umber hue the oaks unfold
When spring's young sunshine bathes their trunks in gold
So rich, so beautiful, so past the power
Of words to paint - my heart aches for the dower
The pencil gives to soften and infuse
This brown luxuriance of unfolding hues...

[Sarah]

I cant wait for this book, I am in love with John Clare and his deep relationship with nature, Ive knew him by coincidence from reading some poems in a classic poetry book.

[Aneece · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s troubling that his poetry improved as he went mad.

[Kelly Furniss · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful varied collection of poetry focusing on nature, the flora/ fauna, sights & sounds. So hard to believe that Clare wrote many of these whilst being institutionalised.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's strange to me how certain poets are famous the world around and others not so. John Clare is in the not so group but he is amazing. He looks at nature and the natural world in such a bright, wonderful and descriptive way that I don't think I've read poetry like his even. He takes the minute and writes verse that makes it sound brave, dangerous, beautiful and interesting. Some of my favourites:
- The Lamentations of Round Oak Waters
- The Gypsies Evening Blaze
- From Childhood
- The Landrail
- Flittings: On Leaving the Cottage of My Birth
- Lament of Swordy Well (by far my outrifht favourite. He personifies the land so we hear it narrate the poem - so clever and so moving)
- Autumn

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

(This is my first review, so pardon me if it's utter crap)

I read this for my English literature coursework and I have to say that I was quite impressed by it. The biography by Summerfield is succinct but eloquently informative, offering a perfectly summarised background of John Clare and a detailed analysis of his work. Following this brief but helpful biography is a selection of poetry that resonates very deeply for me. Known as "The Peasant Poet", Clare is nothing but a visionary as he imbues a sharp catharsis - a silver-tongued poignancy - into his perceptions of a harsh, brutal and near-apocalyptic world. This is perhaps realised best in his most famous poem "I AM", a poem lamenting the limitations and circumscriptions of physical existence (and in my opinion, though it's unfortunately not in this selection, "An Invite to Eternity").

"The Vanities of Life" and "Death" are also poems which resonate for me - though, to be honest, most of Clare's poems (bar one or two exceptions - I was quite impartial to "Don Juan", for example) bear a semblance of the red-hot eloquent poignancy of "I Am". Clare is certainly one of the most interesting poets I've come across, and I can't help but share in some of his supposed -for want of a better word - 'unconventional' views on life.

That's all I'm going to say for the moment as I don't want to spoil his poetry for any of you. I highly recommend him as a romantic poet - even though his poetry may project the crisis of "a mind in conflict in itself", it's easy to see how Clare yet endeavoured to effect change in his materialistic late-Edwardian/early-Victorian society with his idyllic celebration of the natural world and all its blessings (pardon the sappiness).

A word of advice: do not read his poetry if you're in a bad mood or if you lack the means to read/watch something happy and uplifting afterwards. Trust me, you'll regret it.

Otherwise, 4.5 stars for both the biography and Clare's work.

[T.E. Shepherd · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been a perrennial ambition of mine to read more poetry. Unlike last year when I fulfilled an aim to read Tolstoy's War & Peace, poetry is much more of a struggle for me, and that pains me. I wonder whether that my aspergers and the way I 'read' things literally causes me an added problem with poetry where it is is, 'all' metaphor?

So why this volume of John Clare? And why now? I've been reading some nature writing recently, principally Melissa Harrison's Autumn and found myself exposed to his work. I also work with Simon Kövesi - one of the leading experts on John Clare - an instigator in the biopic, By Ourselves and I have found myself drawn to find out more about the man and his poetry.

This volume, edited by Jonathan Bate, is an excellent primer to one of our finest working class, romantic poets. Obstensivly it's just a collection of his poetry, but I found it to be so much more than that. In the way that it's collected together it reads like an autobiography - an autobiography of verse and song. Starting with the innocence of the countryside and the village traditions, it moves through a period of 'fame' and into a more political phase, and then, a wayward abandom of directly critiquing society and the ruling classes, to a quiet reflection and introspection.

This is a volume of poetry that makes you realise how much we have lost of our heritage and our ways of doing things. Farming back then, was hard, backbreaking work but we were so more connected with nature and the natural rhythms of the seasons that we have lost by now. This makes me sad. At the same time, some of the most poignant of John Clare's poetry succeeds in giving optomism for the future.

[Nimue Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

A broad selection of poems, some prose writing, a brief biography and a very good and useful introduction. As a place to start reading Clare, it's worked well for me, I can certainly recommend it. I'm not in the habit of reading entire poetry books beginning to end, but the presence of longer works, and the overall flow of the collection coupled with the very readable nature of the poetry made it possible to read this much as I would a prose text.

Clare is a fascinating poet in terms of his relationship with landscape, I found his troubled emotional life resonant, and he occupies a key moment in British landscape history - namely the coming of enclosures. The sense of loss in his work I found almost unbearable at times, and it makes for an uneasy parallel with our modern abuse of the land for fracking and the ongoing industrialisation of the landscape.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a complete townie, I have very little in common with John Clare, who sought the "quiet joys" of rural life and took his inspiration from nature - "I found the poems in the fields, and only wrote them down." However, I really enjoyed his work and found much of it quite moving. His life was touched by some form of depression and his work is often melancholy, but his delight in the landscape, flora and fauna is touching.

[matilda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a huge fan of poetry and John Clare is by far one of my favourite poets. This book contains most of his best sonnets and poems and includes a small timeline of his life.
My only criticism is that it does not contain all of his poems however it was perfect for when I had a little spare time to pick up a poetry book and enjoying a poem or two.

[Suzammah · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are only so many sonnets about different British birds I can appreciate. He had a great poem about a badger getting revenge on some nasty country folk though, that was fun. Of course, when he's being a thoroughly miserable bastard and writing about inner turmoil rather than a lesser spotted sparrow, he's one of the best.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of poems I studied for my AS English Lit, some poems are truly brilliant (I Am, To John Clare, some of the nature ones) however some are just plain boring. He needed an editor, for example 'The Parish' could be three pages shorter and much better.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can you say if you like poetry you just have to love John Clare I particularly like the poems to Mary ( Romantic In me I guess ) When i first read this copy, the words I sleep with you I wake with you and yet you are not there, just kept going through my mind over and over.

[James Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

A true romantic poet, based on the ideals of Coleridge and Wordsworth.

[Jenni · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most ignored of the romantics and ten times better than Wordsworth (gag).

[Grady Ormsby · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Clare: Poems Selected by Paul Farley is a volume from the series of books from Faber and Faber featuring poems of notable poets selected by contemporary poets. John Clare, known by many as the “peasant poet,” was born into a peasant family in Helpston, England in 1793. He was the son of a farm laborer, and became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and his despair over its disruption. Characteristically his poems have rural settings that describe the bio-diverse nature of the Northamptonshire countryside. There is a general use of the English country vernacular. There is even a glossary at the back of the volume to define the many colloquial terms and expressions. The poems are written in an assortment of styles, rhythms and rhyme patterns. There are quatrains, couplets and many sonnets often with rhymed iambic pentameter octaves and sextets. Though his poems are usually written following a formal pattern of some sort, there are always elements that are surprising and unorthodox. The mood of most of the poems is nostalgic and romantic. Clare was a keen observer with a sharp eye for detail. There is frequent use of personification as Clare directly addresses the animals, birds, flowers, weather, water, crops, animals, insects, seasons and even locations. He often uses a narrative form with natural elements as characters. He was perhaps the first environmental poet. He descried the damage and degradation of the Enclosure Movement of the early Nineteenth Century which allowed rich farmers to buy up land, enclose the fields, heaths and woods with fences, deforest the woodlands, drain the lowlands, canalize the rivers and streams, displace the peasants and alter the environment in order to maximize agricultural profit. (Imagine that! We didn’t invent environmental savagery. We just seem to be perfecting it.) As he witnessed this degradation, his personal life and mental health began to suffer parallel erosion. Though very popular at first, his poetry began to lose favor with the public and there was a consequent loss of revenue. He suffered bouts of depression and alcoholism. He spent the final 23 years of his life at St. Andrew’s Asylum in Northampton writing, ironically enough, some of his best poetry. He died penniless in 1864. His “rediscovery” in the 20th Century brought about re-evaluation of his work and often he is now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self." All you tree huggers will like this one.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have felt I've "known" Clare for decades, but really only knew a few poems ("The Badger," and the bird poems, for instance). I knew he was the "peasant poet" and I knew he went mad. But I had never seen the brilliance.

Yes, he was a laborer and he had the poetic education of a brilliant autodidact. But now I see he had an almost twentieth century attention to detail. He didn't need to put his observations or enthusiasms of the natural world into a classical context, even though he clearly could have. He knew enough about the things themselves that he could have the poem centered on exact observation. It really is a modern way of dealing with the world, the "thisness" of it. He was much more involved in the world than the better known Romantics, who always felt they had to contextualize what "is" in terms of what "has been."

But in addition to writing prolifically, Clare must have been a deep reader of whatever came his way. He internalized forms, both the "folk" forms like the ballads, but also the more complex stanzaic forms of the English tradition. Those forms clearly helped him write poems as he walked and as he worked in the fields.

I also think that a reading of Clare, both of this big selected and of the gigantic Bate biography that I read at the same time, has led me to finally understand the force, the brutality of the Enclosure Act. I glibly summarized it as the movement from Commons, shared pastures, to fields that were owned. But in Clare I see the implications of it. The move from "poor" although sufficient, to "poverty." And Clare lived through it all. Here are some lines from his poem "Enclosure":

Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours,
Free as spring clouds and wild as forest flowers,
Is faded all--a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once as it no more shall be.
Enclosure came, and trampled on the grave
of labour's rights, and left the poor a slave.

Also getting more of a sense of Clare's madness. It might be centered in the all-absorbing presence of his talent with words, something that he clearly recognized was unique, and the conditions of his place in the world. His "class," with all of the weight of that in preVictorian England. It must have heightened his sense of exclusion from both worlds. On his grave is written the English of that old Latin phrase -- "A poet is born, not made." That's too easy to summarize all that goes on with Clare, but there is some truth in it for this amazing writer.

[Brendan Newport · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Clare (1793-1864) is I reckon, Britain's greatest, yet unrecognised rural poet.

Born into a life of poverty, he remained so yet employed a vision and vocabulary which elevated him well above his station in life. Some wealthy benefactors assisted on occasions, but Clare, trapped in a life of back-breaking work as a farm labourer, suffered frequent breakdowns and mental-health issues.

Before he passed away though, Clare left the world with a body of work few could match (and that includes the likes of Wordsworth). I Am might be his most famous work, and its included in this collection. For me though Clare's poems and prose on the subject of the imposition of enclosures, when England's Common Land was acquired by wealthy landowners for their exclusive use, changing the landscape of England forever, that are his greatest work.

From The Moors
Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed spring’s blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds

[Harry Laban ♫︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took six months, most of which was read on the back foot behind other books. I started reading it on holiday somewhere in the North of England in the summer and concluded it as spring began to coax itself into the world again. Basically, I witnessed all four seasons pass as I read the work of Clare. And I feel it needs to be mentioned that this is completely transformative of his work. His verse is perceptive, cherishing and downright beautiful at times - his worship of nature is arguably untouched by any other Romantic poet, perhaps any other in the English language.

Maybe I have a bias, for he lived about an hour away from where I live, and having visited that village (Helpston, a rather lovely place especially in the summer) my adoration of his work only augmented.

I could spend ages talking about how his focus developed and verse changed over time and its political reflections and so on, but I'm not going to because I'd like to spend the next few minutes thinking about my favourite poems from the collection :)

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Clare has a very special place in my heart.
From my first encounter years ago with his heart-wrenching poem, 'I Am', I was eager to explore more of his work.
After doing so, I can safely say, to me, Clare is one of the most tender and tragic poets of the Romantic era.
His innocent observations of the natural world around him are superb.
He does occasionally boarder on the repetitive in his bird poems (of which there are MANY), but generally, he brings a new delicate perspective to each small sunbeam of a poem.
To watch this shift to the bleak voice of his later tormented poetry is deeply upsetting. However, even within his despair there is humanity and hope as he reaches through the asylum bars, clawing for the woodlands and flowers of his youth.

[Jim Puskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s much to enjoy in this slim volume. In his Introduction, R.K.R. Thornton observes that “Clare is rather like Hardy in having a mass of poems from which few stand out but which all have value. I heartily agree. There’s a mellow, easy-going regularity to his work, no rockets flaring into the sky but each poem having something that’s engaging, workmanlike. Homely, in the best sense of that term.
I particularly love Clare’s comfortable use of the vernacular of his Northamptonshire countryside in poems such as “Winter Fields”:
O for a pleasant book to cheat the sway
Of winter — where rich mirth and hearty laugh
Listens and rubs his legs on corner seat.
For fields and mire and sludge — and badly off
Are those who on their pudgy paths delay.
There striding shepherd seeking driest way,
Fearing night’s wetshod feet and hacking cough
That keeps him waken till the peep of day,
Goes shouldering onward and with ready hook
Progs off to ford the sloughs that nearly meet
Across the lands — croodling and thin to view
His loath dog follows — stops and quakes and looks
for better roads — till whistled to pursue,
Then on with frequent jumps he hirkles through.
Isn’t that delightful?
In “Sighing for Retirement, John Clare wrote:
I found the poems in the fields,
And only wrote them down.
Of course, he did nothing of the sort; he studied long and diligently to acquire his seemingly simple craft and each of his rustic rhymes were painstakingly worked out, not to a luxurious polish but to a rich glow of authenticity.
I will be returning to this collection many times.