Biography: John Clare has been a fragile vessel adrift amidst storms of fashion, in his own time and in ours, miraculously surviving.
Born the son of a labourer near Peterborough in 1793, largely self-taught and wholly abandoned to poetry, he won support from a newspaper proprietor and local patrons, was taken up by a London publisher in the 1820s and lionised, but was dropped from favour when fashions changed. He returned home, then was forced to move from the place of his birth, while his health finally gave way. He spent the last 27 years of his life in asylums, continuing to write until the end came in 1864.
As literary history settled into place in the familiar Victorian rear-view mirror perspective, Clare appeared an accident of history similar to the butt of Pope's satire, Stephen Duck, who also died mad, or his own contemporary Robert Bloomfield, author of The Farmer's Boy.
The big guns of transcendental Romanticism squeezed him out. While he said of Keats, "He often described nature as she appeared to his fancies", Keats, who shared the same publisher, complained that Clare's "description too much prevailed over the sentiment". His effects appeared too simple for criticism that above all valued Imagination and Symbol. He waited to begin to be rediscovered by Edmund Blunden and Geoffrey Grigson, at a time when Edward Thomas was in every rambler's pocket and Christopher Smart's 'Jubilate Agno' was seen as a precursor of Surrealism.
It is only inevitable that Clare should have become a minor cause célèbre in subsequent years. Romanticism has become a contested site and the virtues of particularity are asserted in the face of totalising transcendentalism.
He joins minorities excluded by what was understood as an exclusivist, conservative aesthetic. The removal of layers of institutional grammar and conventional spelling superimposed by well-meaning publishers likewise suits a fashion for editorial primitivism: full-scale publishing projects launched in the 1980s have come to completion only this year.
From a different direction, 1960s dissertations that incorporated Clare's sense of personal dispossession into an argument about enclosure and capitalism have given way to enshrining him centrally in a new eco-critical pantheon. And this last part of the story has gained a particularly English-Irish twist at a time when the transatlantic alliance has come under strain.
Clare was passed over by American professors who put together the big institutional anthologies like the Norton English Literature and the New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, and the omission - though subsequently and somewhat crudely repaired - has enhanced the sense of his special local standing in a world of global economics. The Irish admirers include Timothy Brownlow, Hugh Haughton, John MacKenna and Seamus Heaney - a roster that speaks for itself.
All of this drives Jonathan Bate's agenda, and no better person to articulate it.
He writes out the story of Clare's life and the tribulations that beset it against a background-sense of current environmental issues. He is knowledgeable, readable, generous with quotation, committed. What Clare wrote now fills 11 forbidding volumes in university libraries that require explanation and context to make sense of the good things they hold.
The career and the work hang together, and this new book is the best guide for anyone to understand why he matters now. Clare was central in Bate's plea for a green aesthetic, The Song of the Earth; he is an exemplary poet with a special meaning for our time.
But the truth is of course not so simple. Clare needed to write as he needed to breathe, needed to scribble even when what he wrote did not make sense, so that Bate's story describes a victim who was awkward, often confused, and was for a long period deranged. The gap between an untutored style and conventional expectations is alarmingly wide and mirrors a fundamental uncertainty of direction. Clare stood outside the community he is taken to represent and had no audience outside himself to write for, apart from the passing fashion that led him astray, nor could he hold on to an impersonal idea like the equally isolated Hölderlin. His writing simply is. It sits so lightly on the soil that, whether it succeeds or whether it is merely inconsequential, it comes and goes from nowhere. That is its merit and its limitation.
The way of writing refuses or is unable to develop an encompassing view, it allows details to stand adjacent to one another without appropriation. There is an accumulation of particulars, perspectives are foreclosed, end-stopped lines are the norm.
The method was not unselfconscious - a section of 'The Parish' is devoted to satirising too-evident artistry, his personae are helpless or hunted animals - but the effect can be muddling because nothing is subordinated. If identity breaks down altogether in many of the late poems, leading to a confused medley of competing voices, the simplicity of the successful poems likewise comes from absence of control.
The overall result is shards and moments of extraordinary poignancy, crystalline pathos, the occasional jewels the more poignant amidst acres of waste.
Clare needed to put pencil to paper in order to feel he existed, like Emily Dickinson, but without her shaping sense, and Bate's argument would be firmer if it incorporated a more exact evaluation of Clare's writing.
Overall, it certainly constitutes the poignant record of a life, but what body of work waits to be discovered in it? As Yeats made clear, the difference is cruel and crucial.
- J. C. C. Mays
John Clare: A Biography By Jonathan Bate Picador, 650pp. £25
J. C. C. Mays is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at UCD. His edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works was published in 2001. Coelacanth Press recently published his N11 A Musing
J. C. C. Mays