John Clare
John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864) was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and sorrows at its disruption.[1] His work underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th century; he is now often seen as a major 19th-century poet.[2] His biographer Jonathan Bate called Clare "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."[3]
For other people with the same name, see John Clare (disambiguation).
John Clare
13 July 1793
Helpston, Northamptonshire, England
20 May 1864 (aged 70)
Northampton, Northamptonshire, England
Rural
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery
Life[edit]
Early life[edit]
Clare was born in Helpston, 6 miles (10 km) to the north of the city of Peterborough.[4] In his lifetime, the village was in the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire and his memorial calls him "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Helpston is now part of the City of Peterborough unitary authority.
Clare became an agricultural labourer while still a child, but attended school in Glinton church until he was 12. In his early adult years, Clare became a potboy in The Blue Bell public house and fell in love with Mary Joyce, but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade them to meet. Later, Clare was a gardener at Burghley House.[5] He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth, Rutland, as a lime burner in 1817. In the following year, he was obliged to accept parish relief.[6][7] Malnutrition stemming from childhood may have been the main factor behind his five-foot (1.5 m) stature and contributed to his poor physical health in later life.
Early poems[edit]
Clare had bought a copy of James Thomson's The Seasons and began to write poems and sonnets. In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller, Edward Drury, who sent them to his cousin, John Taylor of the Taylor & Hessey firm, which had published the work of John Keats. Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. The book was highly praised and the next year his Village Minstrel and Other Poems appeared.[6] "There was no limit to the applause bestowed upon Clare, unanimous in their admiration of a poetical genius coming before them in the humble garb of a farm labourer."[8]
Essays[edit]
The only Clare essay to appear in his lifetime was "Popularity of Authorship", which described anonymously his predicament in 1824.[29][30] Other essays by Clare to appear posthumously were "Essays on Landscape", "Essays on Criticism and Fashion", "Recollections on a Journey from Essex", "Excursions with an Angler", "For Essay on Modesty and Mock Morals", "For Essay on Industry", "Keats", "Byron", "The Dream", "House or Window Flies" and "Dewdrops".[31]
Revived interest[edit]
Clare was relatively forgotten in the later 19th century, but interest in his work was revived by Arthur Symons in 1908, Edmund Blunden in 1920 and John and Anne Tibble in their ground-breaking 1935 two-volume edition, while in 1949 Geoffrey Grigson edited Poems of John Clare's Madness (published by Routledge and Kegan Paul). Benjamin Britten set some of "May" from A Shepherd's Calendar in his Spring Symphony of 1948 and included a setting of The Evening Primrose in his Five Flower Songs.
Copyright on much of his work was claimed after 1965 by Professor Eric Robinson, the editor of the Complete Poetry,[32] but this has been contested. Some publishers such as Faber and Carcanet Press refused to acknowledge it.[33][34] Robinson died in 2019 and neither his widow nor his literary agent maintain his claim to own the copyright.[35]
The largest collection of original Clare manuscripts is held at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, where items are available to view by appointment. Other Clare papers are in public libraries in Northampton and New York.[35]
Altering what Clare actually wrote continued into the later 20th century. Helen Gardner, for instance, amended both the punctuation and the spelling and grammar when editing the New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950 (1972).
Since 1993, the John Clare Society of North America has organised an annual session of scholarly papers concerning John Clare at the annual Convention of the Modern Language Association of America.[36] In 2003 the scholar Jonathan Bate published the first major critical biography of Clare, which helped to keep up the revival in popular and academic interest.[37]
In chronological order:
