Culture | Literary biography

The forgotten


JOHN CLARE, peasant poet of rural Northamptonshire, was the son of an agricultural labourer. Aside from his poetry, which was a life-long obsession, he was in turn a thresher, bird-scarer, plough boy, pot scourer and gardener. Clare the poet was discovered in 1819 by a local bookseller. He was 26. Later, Clare declined into obscurity and spent his last 30 years in an asylum. Such are the bald, sad facts of the life.

Clare was not an uneducated man. He read voraciously, especially the English poets, but he was in love with his own Northamptonshire dialect and he despised the tyranny of conventional grammar. His spelling was wildly inconsistent; like W.B. Yeats, who was also an atrocious speller, he heard words in different ways at different times. Being desperately poor, paper was always scarce—as was ink. The consequence of all this was that Clare's manuscripts, so crowded with words, were notoriously difficult to read and decipher. Clare poured forth a torrent of poems. Editing them was a labour of love and many remained unpublished until late in the 20th century. Difficult decisions had to be made, one of which was whether he should be regularised to suit a metropolitan audience. Without editorial work, Clare would always remain a semi-literate, child-like primitive; with the wrong kind of editorial interference his virtues could easily fail to be recognised.

Given the drawbacks, then, what were his virtues? At its best, Clare's poetry deals with the minute particulars of rural life. He idealised his native village, Helpston, its local customs, bird life, brakes and spinneys. He wrote matter-of-factly, as he spoke, about very particular things: posts, stones, flowers. The poems are simple, precise and beautifully attentive. The dialect words, too, are stunningly rich and evocative: “pooties” (snail shells), “crizzle” (to freeze), “cowslaps” (cowslips), “whirl puffs” (a sudden gust of wind driving the dust into an eddy). The mixture of emotional heat and cool precision is rare among poets.

Clare's first book sold well. He was received as an authentic, untutored rural genius, which was true in part, and educated audiences were delighted by such an engaging idea—at least, at first. As his poetry matured, however, his audience declined; probably, the idea of a peasant poet can engage the attention of fickle townies for just so long, and no more.

Clare's last years were tragic. When asked why, Fenwick Skrimshire, the grisly named doctor who admitted him to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum in 1841, attributed the poet's decline to: “years of addiction to poetical prosing”. In his last years, Clare believed himself to be Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron and other poets who had enjoyed enduring fame during his lifetime. When asked what inspired his poetry, Clare replied that it “came to him in the fields, whilst walking”, that he had “kicked it out of the clods”. There it had been, his for the miraculous taking.

Neglected for much of the 19th century, Clare was rehabilitated by a succession of fellow poets and poet/editors, including Edmund Blunden, Edward Thomas and Geoffrey Grigson, all of whom recognised the virtues of such a close and passionate love for the particular. John Ashbery wrote this of him: “Clare is someone I turn to when I really need to be reminded of what poetry is.” And in Jonathan Bate, John Clare has found a scrupulous and sensitive biographer.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "The forgotten"

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From the October 11th 2003 edition

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