New Essays On John Clare

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

Critics including Seamus Heaney provide a welcome reappraisal in the wake of Clare's bicentenary.

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. 2017.

The marginalization of John Clare's poetry, despite renewed interest in Romanticism and the literature of madness, is still an enigma. This important collection of new critical essays provides a welcome reappraisal in the wake of Clare's bicentenary, and will be a landmark in the history of his reception. It includes chapters on landscape and botany, Clare's politics, his madness, Clare and the critics, and a remarkable essay by Seamus Heaney on Clare's importance as a poetic precursor.

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.

This collection gathers together an exciting new series of critical essays on the Romantic- and Victorian-period poet John Clare, which each take a rigorous approach to both persistent and emergent themes in his life and work. Designed to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Clare’s first volume of poetry, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, the scholarship collected here both affirms Clare’s importance as a major nineteenth-century poet and reveals how his verse continually provokes fresh areas of enquiry. Offering new archival, theoretical, and sometimes corrective insights into Clare’s world and work, the essays in this volume cover a multitude of topics, including Clare’s immersion in song and print culture, his formal ingenuity, his environmental and ecological imagination, his mental and physical health, and his experience of asylums. This book gives students a range of imaginative avenues into Clare’s work, and offers both new readers and experienced Clare scholars a vital set of contributions to ongoing critical debates.

This book offers a major reassessment of John Clare’s poetry and his position in the Romantic canon. Alert to Clare’s knowledge of the work of his Romantic contemporaries and near contemporaries, it puts forward the first extended series of comparisons of Clare’s poetry with texts we now think of as defining the period – in particular poems by Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats. It makes fully evident Clare’s original contribution to the aesthetic culture of the age by analysing how he explores a wide range of concerns and preoccupations which are central to, and especially privileged in, Romantic-period poetics, including ‘fancy’, the sublime, childhood, ruins, joy, ‘poesy’, and a love lyric marked by a peculiar self-consciousness about sincere expression. At the heart of this book is the claim that the hitherto under-scrutinised subjective stances, transcendent modes, and abstract qualities of Clare’s lyric poetry situate him firmly within, and as fundamentally part of, Romanticism, at the same time as his writing constitutes a distinctive contribution to one of the most fascinating eras of English literature.