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If the myth of the Romantic Poet must include single-minded devotion to the muse, a love of nature and its perfections, sensual dalliance, and more than a little dose of madness, then John Clare should be in the first rank, with his contemporaries Byron and Keats. Instead, he has long been a marginal figure in the pantheon of English verse, a quirky afterthought to the conversation. What Jonathan Bate's John Clare: A Biography establishes, in its copious detail and sensitivity to Clare's human plight, is the worthiness of Clare to stand in the first rank of English poets of any age. This sense is deepened by the presence of a companion volume edited by Bate, "I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare. What rings throughout both texts is the clear, sad voice of Clare, which grew ever sharper as success and sanity left him behind. Amidst the tragic web of biographical details, the power and clarity of that voice constantly resonates. Like a perplexed literary archaeologist, I ask myself, "How have we lost touch with such a voice for so long?"
John Clare: A Biography by Jonathan Bate Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003 648 pp., $40 
"I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare edited by Jonathan Bate Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003 318 pp., $17, paper |
Clare's legacy has long existed under the shadow of easy clichés: he was a poet of peasant origins (a relative rarity), and he spent the last 30 years of his life institutionalized for mental illness, probably what we would now call bipolarity (not so rare for a poet). In his beginning and his end, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, we find the focal points of his life. The beginning is less simple to navigate than it seems, since the class-consciousness that so dictated Clare's life is difficult for an American reader to fathom. We have a relatively egalitarian literary history, and some of our greatest writers have working-class roots. Not so in pre-Victorian England. The fame and infamy of Robert Burns, the great and greatly flawed Scottish poet who died young amidst alcoholism and sexual scandal, created a rather dubious niche at the end of the 18th century for the "peasant poet" among English writers. Bate deftly exposes the patronizing nature of such a label, more akin to "idiot savant" than heir of the English poetic tradition.
Despite a variety of endowments and trust funds set up for him by patrons, Clare remained near the poverty level throughout his life. However, he never launched into economic diatribes. Instead, the strength of his "peasant poetry" is a recurring lament of a different sort, namely, the changes taking place in the countryside of England during his lifetime, as the Enclosure Laws were enacted to eliminate common pasture land, and the fencing and hedging of private property forever altered the rural landscape.
Bate is insistent upon the lasting impact of this tension on a poet who so often wrote out of exuberance for the open-ended world of his youth: "In Clare's world, there was an intimate relationship between society and environment. The open-field system fostered a sense of community." Bate relates a telling incident after the publication of Clare's second volume, at the height of his fame, when one of his patrons, Lord Radstock, insisted that instances of what he called "radical Slang" be elided from the lead poem, "The Village Minstrel"by which he meant Clare's spirited attack on the Enclosure Laws. Among Clare's final poems before the onset of unshakeable depression are those that posit the situation of the countryside around him as analogous to his faltering psyche. Bate notes that "His poetry held his sense of personal loss together with indignation at the curtailment of ancient rights within his community. Save in memory and poetry, there was no road back to childhood, to the unenclosed commons, to Eden." This is borne out in the poetry of this phase: "On paths to freedom and to childhood dear / A board sticks up to notice 'no road here.' "
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