Page 102 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Unit 8: Love Lives beyond the Tomb by John Clare

Though Clare never really has to know the major Romantics, he moved on the edges of their Notes
circle. On his rare visits to London, he met Coleridge on one trip and, in fact, shared Keats’s
publisher, John Taylor. Clare’s poems reflect some of the values and explore many of the themes
associated with the Romantic poets though his preoccupations and beliefs are occasionally at
odds with theirs.
The Romantic poets were passionate about the natural world, seeing in it reflections of the
eternal. (They did tend to differ from each other about what they imagined the eternal to be.)
Clare’s preoccupation with nature was considerable but it had a different source from other
Romantics: he was of the country in a way that none of the others were. Born in the village of
Helpstone (now Helpston) in Northamptonshire in 1793 and raised there, he was the son of an
illegitimate thresher and the grandson of a shepherd (though his paternal grandfather had been
a schoolteacher) and lived in this area (in the same house until he was thirty-eight) throughout
his life. He had little formal education after the age of twelve but was an avid and eclectic reader,
borrowing books and saving money to pay for his own growing collection. Though he claimed
that, above all, he would have liked to write the popular tale, Cock Robin, he was a discerning
critic. Until his poetry attracted the attention of patrons who were able to subsidise him, he held
down a variety of short-lived menial jobs ranging from ploughboy, under gardener, lime
burner, potboy to general bar person and even, briefly, private soldier. He had also educated
himself to a high enough standard to give private lessons to the children of his neighbours.
However, in his final long confinement in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, which lasted
from 1841 to his death in 1864, his occupation was given as “gardening”.
Clare began writing poetry secretly as a boy. He would read out examples to his parents, which
he pretended were others’ works, which he had copied to help him practise his handwriting.
Local booksellers, clergy and gentry took him under their wings and, eventually, he began to be
published as “the Northamptonshire Peasant” by John Taylor, who happened to be the cousin of
a Stamford grocer. Clare embarked on the life of a minor celebrity, at least locally, and the tag
of “Peasant Poet” outlived him. He seems always to have been slightly ambivalent about it. He
wrote that he had become “the stranger’s poppet show” and that his wife and mother complained
of the stream of visitors to the house. However, he courted his celebrity to some extent, was very
watchful of other local poets whose fame might eclipse his own and always presented his work
to the publisher with idiosyncratic spelling, a minimum of punctuation and numerous dialect
expressions and grammar. He also claimed that he wrote “in great haste” and never revised his
work. He declared himself, with some pride, “untutored” and insisted that “I will not use low
origin as an excuse for what I have written”, remarking dryly that “the Fens are not a literary
part of England”.
Clare’s obsession with nature had another spur: in 1809, Parliament agreed on legislation,
which enclosed a great deal of England’s common land. Ordinary people, such as Clare, were
now forbidden to roam over vast areas where they had previously been allowed to go. This was
a particular blow to Clare. He had been rather private as a boy – he described himself as “timid
and superstitious” – and he loved to skip school or church (preferring, as he said, “the religion
of the fields”) to embark on long walks in the country where he would think or write. However,
he became more sociable and his autobiographical writings reveal the sort of scrapes, usually
involving women or drink, typical of a young man of his background. This fervent enthusiasm
for solitary rambles was a habit that he maintained until he was incarcerated (and even after –
early in 1841, he escaped from an asylum in Epping Forest and walked the eighty miles home).

Unlike some of the Romantics, whose origins were less humble and whose rural leanings are
sometimes sentimental, Clare’s countryside is known in detail. It is the recognisable country of
his own experiences, as Wordsworth’s was the Lakes. So his poems are full of the Fens with their
characteristic sweeps of flat land, large skies, woods, specific animals, plants and their habitats
and habits and, crucially too, the relationships and personalities of the people who lived there.
These were the subjects not only of Clare’s poetry but also of all his writings and he is a complete

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 97