John Clare and Community

"John Clare (1793-1864) is one of the most sensitive poetic observers of the natural world. Born into a rural laboring 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 unrivaled 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." "This book considers some of the ways in which John Clare perceived and represented two communities, that of his native village, whose cul- ture, ecology and natural environment it was his life’s principal work to record in poetry, and the community of poets who inspired him and gave him many of the resources needed to do the job. It shows how these two communities are intimately linked in his poetry: how, for example, the death of Ophelia in Hamlet might enrich Clare’s portrayal of an old woman’s storytelling (Chapter 8) or – to stay with the same text for a moment, since Shakespeare was one of Clare’s favourite authors – how a remembrance of Osric’s absurd bonnet from the same play could give a comic edge to the description of lapwing chicks emerging from their nest (Chapter 6). Labouring-class poets like Clare are often described as ‘self-taught’, as in the sub-title of Brian Maidment’s pioneering anthology The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (1987), and they have in the past been termed ‘uneducated’, as in Robert Southey’s Lives of the Uneducated Poets (1832). The two condi- tions ought not to be confused, although they often are. In this study, the way Clare reads poets like Chatterton, Gray, Keats and Bloomfield shows just how intense and vital was the process of self-education, how very far he was from being ‘uneducated’. The first part of the book is concerned with the ways Clare absorbed and responded to his reading of other poets; the second part shows how he combined this reading with materials from the oral folk-culture he was steeped in, to create an unrivalled poetic record of rural culture during the period of enclosure and agricultural intensification, during the painful transition to the modern world."