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Clare's ultimate displacement from the roots that had been so critical to his poetry was, in a bitterly ironic twist, brought to pass through a well-meaning act of patronage on his behalf. Having lived his entire life in the small Helpston cottage in which he'd been born, and which he'd come to share with his wife and six children, Clare was offered by the local Marquess of Exeter a larger cottage with some attached land in the neighboring village of Peterborough. Bate describes the family's walk across those few miles, carrying all their belongings, as an exodus from which Clare never quite recovered. The move's effects are made clear in the poem "On Leaving the Cottage of My Birth," which begins as more dirge than elegy: "I've left mine own old home of homes, / Green fields and every pleasant place; / The summer like a stranger comes, / I pause and hardly know her face." This distress was not merely poetic. Soon after moving, Clare began to manifest the uncontrollable symptoms of mental illness that would land him in asylums for the rest of his life.
Despite these struggles with the overarching changes to the land he held so dear, or perhaps because such struggles had become so crucial to him, Clare was able to forge a wonderfully particular account of the natural world. This particularity, this attention to the real and actual, is in fact rather anti-Romantic, and it presages the later minimalism of Clare's asylum poems. Bate is very helpful in tracking this "development towards simplicity that marked the maturing of his poetic voice." In Clare's final published volume, The Rural Muse, many of the nature poems reveal what Bate identifies as "an immediacy unprecedented in Clareperhaps in any prior English poet." Hence, from "The Pettichap's Nest" come these brisk, vivid lines: "Built like a oven with a little hole / Hard to discover that snug entrance wins, / Scarcely admitting e'en two fingers in / And lined with feathers warm as silken stole."
The volume also contains a number of splendid sonnets that rival those of Wordsworth and even Keats, with whom Clare shared a publisher, though Keats died before they could be brought together. Fittingly, Clare's shrewd comment about Keats, that "his descriptions of scenery are often very fine but as it is the case with other inhabitants of great cities he often described nature as she appeared to his fancies and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described," seems a measure of Clare's distinctiveness. He grew up, labored upon, and found his deepest resonances within the actual rural world that is nature as well as "Nature." Keats' nightingale, Shelley's skylark, seem a tad contrived in the presence of Clare's nests and wildflowers.
Unfortunately, such clarity came from within a broader context of delusion and brokenness. Our own age has come to see mental illness, with the attendant pharmaceutical culture, as a commonplace. But anyone who has pondered the plight of the mentally unstable in ages past, without medication and with only primitive asylum care, will catch the poignant note in Bate's narrative. Especially harrowing is the identification with Lord Byron that Clare embraced in his delusion, as he labored extensively to rewrite both Childe Harold and Don Juan in a voice disordered and misogynistic beyond any of Byron's own excesses. But the asylum years also reveal the strangest and most enduring aspect of Clare's versethe clear, bittersweet minimalist voice with which a handful of distinguished modern poets have identified, as Bate points out in his excellent final chapter on Clare's legacy. The most telling quote comes from John Ashbery, for whom "Clare's 'nakedness of vision' is a sign of his remarkable modernity."
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