This book considers the lyric poems written by John Clare and three twentieth-century poets—Arthur Symons, Edmund Blunden, and John Ashbery—who turned to him at pivotal moments in their own ...development. These writers crafted a distinctive mode of lyric, ‘Clare’s lyric’, in which an embrace of mimesis goes hand in hand with a salient poetic medium. For these writers, accurate representation involves not only words that name objects, describe scenes, and create images pointing to a shared reality, but also patterns of sound, the syntactic organization of lines, and the shapes of whole poems and collections of poems. Chapters 1–3 explore Clare’s approach to accurate representation. In the late 1820s and 1830s, his experiments with the lyric subject, imagery, description, sound patterning, and poetic structure all bring his written words into close alignment with the world. In the 1840s and 1850s, he attempts to represent a world characterized by what it is missing, be it his beloved or his home. Chapters 4–6 examine how Symons, Blunden, and Ashbery each recreate ‘Clare’s lyric’ for themselves. Symons turns to Clare to integrate the fleeting details and resonant meanings of impressionism and symbolism with a genuine encounter with nature. Blunden takes from Clare a model for an ‘exact and complete nature-poetry’ that could represent the physical and psychic landscape destroyed by the First World War. Ashbery draws on Clare’s verse in his effort to translate the entire world in all its variety and multiplicity into a book of poems.
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.
For centuries, poets have been ensnared - as one of their number, Andrew Marvell put it - by the beauty of flowers. Then, from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, that enjoyment was enriched ...by a surge of popular interest in botany. Besides exploring the relationship between poetic and scientific responses to the green world within the context of humanity's changing concepts of its own place in the ecosphere, Molly Mahood considers the part that flowering plants played in the daily lives and therefore in the literary work of a number of writers who could all be called poet-botanists: Erasmus Darwin, George Crabbe, John Clare, John Ruskin and D. H. Lawrence. A concluding chapter looks closely at the meanings, old or new, that plants retained or obtained in the violent twentieth century.
Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) has been praised for its careful attention to the relationship between humans and their environment. Hardy traces the intricate relationship between ...local community, ecosystem, economy, and national political structures with surprising fluidity. This essay argues that his attention to detail provides an important account of the function of the wasteland in English historical development. In doing so, it also establishes the category of waste as a functional element of the character networks of narrative fiction. While Hardy's attention to waste emerges from a respect for the English rural laborer and a nostalgia for precapitalist modes of social and economic life, his valorization of English parsimony and imagination nonetheless subtend a form of nationalism coextensive with the production of British imperial ideology.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scientists discovered apposite similarities between how the nesting bird learns to sing and how the human child learns to speak. This article ...explores the parallels that John Clare observed between the ‘mutterings’ of the bird while learning to sing and his own processes of composition. By examining the deep connections between Clare's responsiveness to birdsong and the ways in which he conceived of the poetic voice, this article seeks to extend and, in certain respects, redefine some of the key terms which have framed responses to the writings of this so-called ‘peasant-poet’: ‘agency’, ‘craft’ and ‘self-consciousness’.
In particular, as Snediker says in "A Note on the Text," despite the volume title, James's New York Edition does not have the status of "some missing body of knowledge by which poetic meaning is ...completed" (81). The first, unexpectedly, invokes John Clare, the "Peasant Poet," a writer about as different from James as one might imagine; the second, even more surprisingly, names Lazzaro Spallanzani, an eighteenth-century Italian Catholic priest, celebrated professor, and pioneering biologist, whose experiments on bats, systematically destroying their senses, discovered their use of what was later called echolocation; the third, in another jump, is dedicated to Lascaux and the early mark-making of cave drawings.1 In each case, the poem is glancingly related to these named links. Together they establish certain motifs: need, the body, a self-conscious concern for form, and the making of visual art. There are also a few surprises among Snediker's Jamesian titles—specifically, the use of the titles of three short stories, not among James's best-known, which also appear out of chronological order: "Fordham Castle" (1904), "Flickerbridge" (1902), and "The Abasement of the Northmores" (1900).
The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling, edited by Robert Pinsky. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019, 215 pages. Review by Paul Schwaber.
John Clare's bird's nest poems create much of their dramatic interest by emphasising the vulnerability of the birds, the fragility of the eggs, and the interdependence of the surrounding ecosystem. ...This essay draws on concepts from French phenomenology to discuss the poet-speaker's embeddedness in a particular moment within that ecosystem and the extent to which his own vulnerability facilitates empathy with the birds he meets. Clare foregrounds the tension between pre-reflective processes, which Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls ‘operative intentionality’, and the categorical concepts or expectations that fail to account for these. He establishes the birds' own perceptive acts as part of what is given within operative intentionality, without claiming that his understanding is adequate to thinking with a bird or conceptualizing the delight of discovery. Jean-Luc Marion's concept of ‘saturated phenomenality’ provides a means of describing the surplus of what phenomenologists call ‘intuition’, to which Clare's bird's nest poems often attest.
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