John Clare

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John Clare (1793 - 1864), dubbed the Peasant Poet of Northamptonshire when he created a sensation in early 1820s London, was a noted poet of the Romantic era, often concerned with the natural world he came to know well while living on a small English farm.

Long ranked among the minor English poets, Clare experienced a critical and even a popular resurgence beginning in the 1990s. This resurgence had roots both in Clare's work and in his biography. Clare, who grew up in a household with a father who could barely read and a mother who was illiterate, was a powerful user of the English language but one who was never comfortable with its grammatical conventions. In a modern society increasingly comfortable with spoken poetry rather than words on a printed page, Clare's work seemed newly significant. Public fascination likewise resulted from the fact that Clare was institutionalized in an asylum in later years. The precise nature of his illness is elusive, and his madness seems at least to have begun with his realization that he was at fundamental odds with the artistic culture in which he worked, and that life, as a result, was beginning to twist its way around him.

Had Hard, Rustic Upbringing

Clare was born on July 13, 1793, in Helpston (or Helpstone, as it was sometimes spelled at the time), a village in the English region of Northamptonshire. His father Parker Clare was a farm worker and, Clare wrote in an autobiographical sketch quoted in John Clare in Context, "one of fate's chance-lings who drop into the world without the honor of matrimony." Two of Clare's three siblings, including a twin sister, died in infancy, and Clare grew up in grinding rural poverty. He was working in the fields with his father by age 10. Clare's mother, despite her own illiterate state, was a believer in education, and Clare went to school with local tutors for about three months of the year - scanty by modern standards or by those of a noble youth in his own time, but enough to open a new world that was unknown to his peers. His early reading exercises consisted of working his way through the family Bible and prayer books.

When Clare was 13 he got a job as a potboy - a server of "pots" of liquor in a local tavern. For much of his life he would be a heavy drinker, with debatable results for his overall health. In his teens Clare did hard labor, much of it connected with enclosure - the fencing and hedging of common pasture land that over several centuries transformed the English countryside into something less free and more restricted by property rights. Clare dug ditches and cut hedges, and scholars believe that the enclosure process had a subtle but definite effect on his later poetry. While he was working, however, he was also composing poems in his head. Clare liked poetry from the start, and an uncle gave him a book of poems by John Pomfret when he was 11. Two years later he acquired a copy of a long and well-known nature poem cycle, James Thomson's The Seasons of 1730. The poem, he said (as quoted on the John Clare Page website), made his heart "twitter with joy." He dove over a wall at a local estate, Burghley House, and hid in a forested area so that he could read it undisturbed, and on his way home he composed his first poem, "The Morning Walk."

Clare worked as a gardener at Burghley house beginning around 1807, dodging his supervisors as he read and wrote poetry on the sly. He also wrote poetry on Sundays, skipping church to practice what he called the religion of the fields. Clare tried out his poems on his parents, at first claiming that they had been written by someone else but gradually gaining confidence. Clare's material circumstances did not improve during this period. He spent several years in the Northamptonshire Militia and worked as a limeburner, a filthy, dangerous job involving the incineration of limestone to produce a variety of useful agricultural and industrial chemicals. Clare fell in love twice, once with a farm girl named Mary Joyce, and then, in 1820, with Martha "Patty" Turner, who became his wife.

By that time, Clare had accumulated a collection of poems and spread his literary wings. In the town of Stamford he met a bookstore owner named Edward Drury and a local editor, Octavius Gilchrist. Drury sent him to London to meet a publisher cousin, John Taylor, who had issued some of John Keats's poetry. In 1820, Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. On the title page of the book he was billed as a Northamptonshire Peasant. The billing was an astute one, for the modern fascination middle-class audiences have for "roots" cultures is traceable to the early 19th century. With the Scottish dialect poems of Robert Burns and the Irish songs of Thomas Moore in the air, prospects looked bright for a talented young writer from rural England.

Found Admirers in London

Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery sold more than 3,000 copies in its first year, an astounding total for an unknown poet, and it was soon reprinted three times. Clare traveled to London and for the first time he encountered famous creative artists. He met the painter Edward Rippingille, and on subsequent trips the poet John Keats, the critic William Hazlitt, and the opium-eating essayist Thomas De Quincey, among others. Clare acquired several noble patrons who would later stick with him through difficult times. He quickly followed up his first book with The Village Minstrel and Other Poems, published in 1821. It was well received but did not become the sensation of the moment as his first book had.

Through the 1820s, Clare worked energetically on a variety of projects, most of which were never published. They are notable for their variety and their sheer quantity; Clare's lifetime output, even as he spent half his adult life in institutions, ran to thousands of pages. Much of what is known of his early life comes from his autobiographical Sketches in the Life of John Clare, which he began in 1821 but which remained unfinished. Clare also started a book called A Natural History of Helpstone and wrote a long satirical poem, The Parish, which cast a critical eye on small-town life. He began collecting the songs of ballad singers in the Helpston area, making him one of the very first close observers of what would now be known as folk music. Clare was also interested in the music of the gypsy or Romany people who moved through the area.

Indeed, Clare's father was a reasonably good tavern singer, and Clare felt close to musicians who passed down their songs by ear rather than writing them down. He often referred to traditional ballads or even adapted their words in his poetry. And his notebooks reveal a creative process more oriented toward his own thoughts than toward the model of the printed page. He rarely used punctuation, paid little attention to spelling, and used verbal patterns drawn from the local Northamptonshire dialect. Since so much of Clare's work was never published, modern editors have wrestled with the question of whether to standardize his writing when readying it for inclusion in new collections.

One Clare book that was published was The Shepherd's Calendar; with Village Stories and Other Poems, in 1827. That book, a sort of country calendar with poems, sold only 400 copies, which spelled financial trouble for Clare since he and his wife by that time had seven children. Clare became moody, wrangled with his publisher, and sometimes went on drinking binges. In 1828, frustrated by his prospects, he returned to farming.

Settled in Cottage

A cottage and a small plot of land on an estate in nearby Northborough, provided in 1832 by one of Clare's aristocratic admirers, gave him a temporary fresh start. Clare threw himself into writing a new set of poems, to be called The Midsummer Cushion, which he hoped would be judged on its merits rather than as the freakish product of an uneducated farmer. Soon, however, Clare's difficulties returned. His new farm was undercapitalized, and expenditures kept pace with or exceeded income. Orders for Clare's new book lagged, and it was finally published in 1835, after what Hugh Haughton and Adam Phillips in John Clare in Context called "mutually soul-destroying negotiations" with John Taylor, as The Rural Muse, in a heavily cut form.

Clare complained of writer's block and memory loss, and friends who visited him were disturbed to find him muttering incoherently. In 1837 Taylor led an intervention in which Clare was taken to the High Beech Asylum, a progressive institution that bore little resemblance to the hellholes to which the mentally ill were usually consigned. Clare had free run of the grounds and surrounding woods, and was able to write. Other signs, however, were less encouraging: he began to develop multiple personalities, sometimes saying that he was the poet Lord Byron or a boxer named Jack Randall. He began to describe Mary Joyce as his first wife, although the two had never been married.

Modern observers have disagreed as to the precise nature of Clare's illness; speculation about schizophrenia gave way to those involving more contemporary maladies. Some argued that Clare was not mentally ill at all. They found support in the fact that even Clare's most deranged communications seemed to make a kind of symbolic sense; Clare's illusion of being a boxer might have been intended as a way of saying he felt at odds with the world. It is also significant that Clare's poetry, although he wrote less while institutionalized, showed no decline in creativity. One of his most often anthologized poems, "I Am," dated from 1841, the last year of his first term in the asylum. "I am: yet what I am none cares or knows," Clare wrote. "My friends forsake me like a memory lost; I am the self-consumer of my woes."

In the summer of that year, Clare escaped from the asylum and walked the approximately one hundred miles to Northborough, recording his experiences in a manuscript titled Journey Out of Essex. He spent about five months with his family and was then taken to the Northamptonshire General Lunatic Asylum, where he spent the rest of his life. Clare wrote nearly 1,000 pages of poetry between 1861 and his death on May 20, 1864, and some of it filtered out to literary magazines and was published. Clare complained bitterly about his incarceration, and one often-quoted visitor (as for example by Haughton and Phillips) recorded that he said "they have cut off my head, and picked out all the letters of the alphabet - all the vowels and consonants - and brought them out through my ears; and then they want me to write poetry! I can't do it." Before his death, however, he wrote another famous poem, the quizzical "To John Clare."

Clare's poetry exerted an increasing fascination as the 20th century went on, especially as society in general began to wrestle with the nature of mental illness. Poet Theodore Roethke, who himself wrestled with mental demons, admired Clare, as did radio host and poetry anthology editor Garrison Keillor. Indeed, suggested Jeredith Merrin in The Southern Review, "the American audience may be especially primed now to enjoy Clare's poetry," which was subjective, rather undisciplined, and sometimes very sexy ("Lay by thy woollen vest. / Drape no cloak o'er thy breast: / Where my hand oft hath pressed / Pin nothing there: / Where my head droops to rest, / leave its bed bare," Clare wrote in one poem quoted by Merrin). Most important of all, Merrin argued, was the semi-oral nature of Clare's poetry in a time when spoken poetry, thanks to hip-hop music and poetry slams, was on the rise. Whatever the reason, Clare was the focus of numerous new editions and scholarly studies from the 1980s onward.

Books

Bate, Jonathan, John Clare: A Biography, Picador, 2003.

Haughton, Hugh, et al., ed., John Clare in Context, Cambridge, 1994.

Periodicals

Contemporary Review, October 1997.

Southern Review, Autumn 2004.

Online

Contemporary Authors Online. Gale, 2006. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale. 2006. http://galenet.galegroup.com.servlet/BioRC (January 23, 2006).

John Clare Page, http://www.johnclare.info (January 23, 2006).

Born in Helpston, Northamptonshire, the son of a farm labourer, he lived virtually all his life in his home county, although the last 20 years were spent in mental asylums. By dint of his own effort he became a well-known poet, with four collections published in his own lifetime. He drew heavily on his observations of nature and village life and custom for the matter of his poems, and his work is thus an excellent source of information on early 19th-century customs and superstitions. His autobiographical writings (published in 1983) also contain much useful material. Clare was particularly interested in song and music, and collected items from his parents, neighbours, and local Gypsy families. His four collections were: Poems Descriptive of Rural Life (1820); The Village Minstrel (1821); The Shepherd's Calendar (1827); The Rural Muse (1835), and others have since been published from his manuscripts.

Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.

• George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (1983)
• Eric Robinson, John Clare's Autobiographical Writing (1983)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2009)

John Clare
Born	13 July 1793 (1793-07-13) Helpston, Soke of Peterborough, Northamptonshire, England
Died	20 May 1864 (1864-05-21) (aged 70) St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton, England
Influences James Thomson, Lord Byron, William Shakespeare
Influenced Edmund Blunden, Arthur Symons

John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864) was an English poet, born the son of a farm labourer who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption.^[1] His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets.

Contents 1 Life 1.1 Early life 1.2 Early Poems 1.3 Midlife 1.4 Later life and death 2 Poetry 3 Revival of Interest in the twentieth century 4 Poem Collections by Clare (chronological) 5 Works about Clare (chronological) 6 References 7 External links

Life

Early life

Clare was born in Helpstone (now Helpston) which, at the time of his birth, was in the Soke of Peterborough, Northamptonshire. He became an agricultural labourer while still a child, however he attended school in Glinton church until he was twelve.

In his early adult years, Clare became a pot-boy in the Blue Bell public house and fell in love with Mary Joyce; but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade her to meet him. Subsequently he was a gardener at Burghley House. He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth as a lime burner in 1817. In the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief. Malnutrition stemming from childhood may be the main culprit behind his 5-foot stature and may have contributed to his poor physical health in later life.

Early Poems

Clare had bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons and began to write poems. In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward Drury. Drury sent Clare's poetry to his cousin John Taylor of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hessey, who had published the work of John Keats. Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. This book was highly praised, and in the next year his Village Minstrel and other Poems were published.

Midlife

He had married Patty Turner in 1820. An annuity of 15 guineas from the Marquess of Exeter, in whose service he had been, was supplemented by subscription, so that Clare became possessed of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned. Soon, however, his income became insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again in the fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Earl FitzWilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home.

Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbours; between the need to write poetry and the need for money to feed and clothe his children. His health began to suffer, and he had bouts of severe depression, which became worse after his sixth child was born in 1830 and as his poetry sold less well. In 1832, his friends and his London patrons clubbed together to move the family to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston. However, he felt only more alienated.

His last work, the Rural Muse (1835), was noticed favorably by Christopher North and other reviewers, but this was not enough to support his wife and seven children. Clare's mental health began to worsen. As his alcohol consumption steadily increased along with his dissatisfaction with his own identity, Clare's behaviour became more erratic. A notable instance of this behaviour was demonstrated in his interruption of a performance of The Merchant of Venice, in which Clare verbally assaulted Shylock. He was becoming a burden to Patty and his family, and in July 1837, on the recommendation of his publishing friend, John Taylor, Clare went of his own volition (accompanied by a friend of Taylor's) to Dr Matthew Allen's High Beach Private Asylum near Loughton, in Epping Forest. Taylor had assured Clare that he would receive the best medical care.

Later life and death

During his first few asylum years in Essex (1837–1841), Clare re-wrote famous poems by Lord Byron. His own version of Child Harold became a lament for past lost love, and Don Juan, A Poem became an acerbic, misogynistic, sexualised rant redolent of an aging Regency dandy. Clare also took credit for Shakespeare's plays, claiming to be the Renaissance genius himself. "I'm John Clare now," the poet claimed to a newspaper editor, "I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly."

In 1841, Clare left the asylum in Essex, to walk home, believing that he was to meet his first love Mary Joyce; Clare was convinced that he was married with children to her and Martha as well. He did not believe her family when they told him she had died accidentally three years earlier in a house fire. He remained free, mostly at home in Northborough, for the five months following, but eventually Patty called the doctors in. Between Christmas and New Year in 1841, Clare was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (known since as St Andrew's Hospital). Upon Clare's arrival at the asylum, the accompanying doctor, Fenwick Skirmshire, completed the admission papers. To the enquiry "Was the insanity preceded by any severe or long-continued mental emotion or exertion?", Dr. Skirmshire entered: "After years of poetical prosing." He remained here for the rest of his life, encouraged and helped to write. Here he wrote possibly his most famous poem, I Am.

He died on 20 May, 1864, in his 71st year. His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph’s churchyard. Today, children at the John Clare School, Helpston's primary, parade through the village and place their 'midsummer cushions' around Clare's gravestone (which has the inscriptions "To the Memory of John Clare The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" and "A Poet is Born not Made") on his birthday, in honour of their most famous resident.^[2]

Poetry

In his time, Clare was commonly known as "the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Since his formal education was brief, Clare resisted the use of the increasingly-standardised English grammar and orthography in his poetry and prose. Many of his poems would come to incorporate terms used locally in his Northamptonshire dialect, such as 'pooty' (snail), 'lady-cow' (ladybird), 'crizzle' (to crisp) and 'throstle' (song thrush).

In his early life he struggled to find a place for his poetry in the changing literary fashions of the day. He also felt that he did not belong with other peasants. Clare once wrote

"I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seemes careless of having anything to do with—they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose."

It is common to see an absence of punctuation in many of Clare's original writings, although many publishers felt the need to remedy this practice in the majority of his work. Clare argued with his editors about how it should be presented to the public.

Clare grew up during a period of massive changes in both town and countryside as the Industrial Revolution swept Europe. Many former agricultural workers, including children, moved away from the countryside to over-crowded cities, following factory work. The Agricultural Revolution saw pastures ploughed up, trees and hedges uprooted, the fens drained and the common land enclosed. This destruction of a centuries-old way of life distressed Clare deeply.

His early work delights both in nature and the cycle of the rural year. Poems such as Winter Evening, Haymaking and Wood Pictures in Summer celebrate the beauty of the world and the certainties of rural life, where animals must be fed and crops harvested. Poems such as Little Trotty Wagtail show his sharp observation of wildlife, though The Badger shows his lack of sentiment about the place of animals in the countryside. At this time, he often used poetic forms such as the sonnet and the rhyming couplet. His later poetry tends to be more meditative and use forms similar to the folks songs and ballads of his youth. An example of this is Evening.

His knowledge of the natural world went far beyond that of the major Romantic poets. However, poems such as I Am show a metaphysical depth on a par with his contemporary poets and many of his pre-asylum poems deal with intricate play on the nature of linguistics. His 'bird's nest poems', it can be argued, illustrate the self-awareness, and obsession with the creative process that captivated the romantics. Clare was the most influential poet, aside from Wordsworth to practice in an older style.^[3]

Revival of Interest in the twentieth century

Clare was relatively forgotten during the later nineteenth 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 2-volume edition. Benjamin Britten set some of 'May' from A Shepherd's Calendar in his Spring Symphony of 1948.

Copyright to much of his work has been claimed since 1965 by the editor of the Complete Poetry (OUP, 9 vols., 1984–2003), Professor Eric Robinson, though these claims have been contested. With recent publishers refusing to acknowledge the claim (especially in recent editions from Faber and Carcanet), it seems the copyright is now defunct.^[4][5][6]

Today the largest collection of original Clare manuscripts are housed at Peterborough Museum, where they are available to view by appointment.

Poem Collections by Clare (chronological)

This section requires expansion.

• Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. London, 1820.
• The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems. London, 1821.
• The Shepherd's Calendar with Village Stories and Other Poems. London, 1827
• The Rural Muse. London, 1835.
• Sonnet. London 1841
• First Love.
• Snow Storm.
• The Firetail.
• The Badger – Time unknown

Works about Clare (chronological)

• Martin, Frederick. The Life of John Clare.' 1865.
• Cherry, J. L. Life and remains of John Clare. 1873.
• Gale, Norman. Clare's Poems. 1901.
• Bond, Edward. The Fool. 1975.
• Dendurent, H. O. John Clare: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.
• Storey, Edward. A Right to Song: The Life of John Clare. London: Methuen, 1982.
• Brownlow, Timothy. John Clare and Picturesque Landscape. 1983.
• Haughton, Hugh, Adam Phillips, and Geoffrey Summerfield. John Clare in Context. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Moore, Alan, Voice of the Fire (Chapter 10 only), Great Britain: Victor Gollancz.
• Goodridge, John, and Simon Kovesi, eds., John Clare: New Approaches John Clare Society, 2000.
• Bate, Jonathan. John Clare. London: Picador, 2003.
• Sinclair, Iain. Edge of The Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's "Journey Out of Essex" Hamish Hamilton, 2005.
• MacKay, John. Inscription and Modernity: From Wordsworth to Mandelstam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-253-34749-1

References

1. ^ Geoffrey Summerfield, in introduction to John Clare: Selected Poems, Penguin Books 1990, pp 13–22. ISBN 0-14-043724-X
2. ^ Festival celebrated poet's life and work; Rutland and Stamford Mercury
3. ^ Fowler, Alastair (1989). The History of English Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 250. ISBN 0-674-39664-2. 
4. ^ The John Clare Page website 'copyright' section: full list of recent reactions to the copyright dispute
5. ^ "Poor Clare" by John Goodridge, an article summarising the copyright issue
6. ^ Letter to the Guardian: Robinson's most recent public declaration of ownership of copyright, February 2003.

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: John Clare

• Works by John Clare via LibriVox (audio recordings)
• Works by John Clare at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• John Clare's poetry on English Literature on the Web
• The John Clare Page chronology, poems, images, essays, bibliography, press coverage, links etc.
• John Clare's family researching and challenging stigma
• Archival material relating to John Clare listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• Index entry for John Clare at Poets' Corner
• St Botolph's Barn page on John Clare

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