John Clare And Community

John Clare (1793-1864) is one of the most sensitive poetic observers of the natural world. Born into a rural labouring family, he felt connected to two communities: his native village and the Romantic and earlier poets who inspired him. The first part of this study of Clare and community shows how Clare absorbed and responded to his reading of a selection of poets including Chatterton, Bloomfield, Gray and Keats, revealing just how serious the process of self-education was to his development. The second part shows how he combined this reading with the oral folk-culture he was steeped in, to create an unrivalled poetic record of a rural culture during the period of enclosure, and the painful transition to the modern world. In his lifelong engagement with rural and literary life, Clare understood the limitations as well as the strengths in communities, the pleasures as well as the horrors of isolation.

John Clare (1793-1864) has long been recognized as one of England's foremost poets of nature, landscape and rural life. Scholars and general readers alike regard his tremendous creative output as a testament to a probing and powerful intellect. Clare was that rare amalgam ‒ a poet who wrote from a working-class, impoverished background, who was steeped in folk and ballad culture, and who yet, against all social expectations and prejudices, read and wrote himself into a grand literary tradition. All the while he maintained a determined sense of his own commitments to the poor, to natural history and to the local. Through the diverse approaches of ten scholars, this collection shows how Clare's many angles of critical vision illuminate current understandings of environmental ethics, aesthetics, Romantic and Victorian literary history, and the nature of work.

Essays by leading scholars offer new insights into a remarkable poet and early advocate of environmental ethics and aesthetics.

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

Examining how labouring-class poets constructed themselves and were constructed by critics as part of a canon, and how they situated their work in relation to contemporaries and poets from earlier periods, this book highlights the complexities of labouring-class poetic identities in the period from Burns to mid-late century Victorian dialect poets.

Lunatic, lover, poet: this is the definitive biography of John Clare. John Clare was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth or Shelley, and a life that was possibly the most extraordinary, and certainly the most moving, of them all. From rural Northamptonshire to literary London, from first love to delusions, depression and incarceration, Clare was haunted by ghosts from the past. In this, the first major biography of Clare, Jonathan Bate explores both the man and his madness, his work and his writing - poems, letters, even part of an autobiography - all of which show a mind plagued by demons and doubts, constantly questioning issues of identity, memory and, above all, loss.