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Sat 03 Mar 2010Coping with Clare
BIOGRAPHY: BRIAN LYNCHreviews The Poet’s WifeBy Judith Allnatt Doubleday, 396pp, £16.99
POETS DON’T have to be able to read and write. The first songs, after all, were sung before paper was invented, by people who never went to school. The concept, then, of the peasant poet says less about both peasantry and poetry than it does about those who conceived it. John Clare (1793-1864) was such a poet, and in the romantic history of the art – is there any other? – he also had the significant advantage of being mad. This is not a negligible amazement: the parsonical aristocrat who was often his inspiration, William Cowper, wrote The Castaway, one of the finest poems in the language, while he was, seemingly, entirely insane.
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