Delight and sorrow co-exist and interact, each rendering the other more intensely poignant.

When Clare was young, he enjoyed the common illusion that the natural order, the world as given, was eternal, a safe stronghold, a protected space: his early poetry is an unexceptionable expression of such confidence: secure verse presenting a secure world. As he began, however, to know the sharper vicissitudes of human intention and hope, his poetry, in order to continue to be true, learned to register and incorporate all those contingencies that threaten to make of any life, of any mind, a diminished thing: time, circumstance, mutability, loss, defeat and the less benign aspects of human culture.

The compliant naivety of childhood that leads us to accept our early environment without question as ‘natural’, was in Clare’s case well justified, for he grew up in a world that seemed to a considerable degree unmarked by human hands. It was in his youth and early manhood that ‘improvements’ began to dismember what had been a relatively unspoilt, organic-seeming landscape: pastures were put to the plough; trees and shrubs uprooted; streams re-routed and tidied up; fens drained; common land enclosed. Dikes, ditches, drains, embankments, new or improved roads reshaped the landscape irrevocably, just as the railways were to do again in mid-century.

The delicate and harmonious balance of nature and culture, manifest in the richness of wildlife cheek by jowl with village paths and stiles - this was disrupted with a determination, a mania for improvement, that struck Clare’s snail-horn sensitivity as a calamity, a destruction of Eden, an act of monstrous sacrilege. It is, then, hardly surprising that Clare’s poetry takes on a clamatory and elegiac note, a note of urgency, protest and grief, so that he both compassionates with wild things turned out of their homes and comminates the more systematized and efficient agriculture that imposed on his fellow-villagers a new and demeaned economic status and a raw despoliation of their hitherto stable landscape. For Clare, poetry became his best way of registering such dreadful loss and of crying out against it: and his subtext from henceforth was to be the resonant and inclusive myth of the loss of Eden. Thus, willy-nilly, he found his theme, his theme found him.

Such was the general predicament - a breaking of old ties, the felling of sacred trees, an obliteration of preconscious rhythms, the mortal damage to old unquestioned ways - but Clare’s individual plight intensified his perceptions of such change; for his trauma was not a matter merely of a general plight, a deleterious change in the culture of the rural poor, further exacerbated by the economic consequences of the Napoleonic wars; it was also the peculiar tragedy of a man, an individual, in limbo. As a spectator, he inhabited the role of a literary onlooker, re-reading his society and his landscape from points of view, through perspectives and lenses, derived from his readings in eighteenth-century topographical and philosophical poetry and botany. Once having tasted of the fruit of such trees of knowledge, how could he ever again feel himself to be at home with illiterate and even brutalized tillers of the soil? At the same time, how could he hope effectively to become, to be, a poet? How find an economically viable life’s work as a poet? He remained, to all intents and purposes, a day-labourer, counting his pennies, following the plough, a muddy rustic with straw in his hair and a non-standard dialect on his lips.

Economic necessity, the daily burden of feeding a family and keeping a roof over their heads, pressed down hard on him, even as he felt confusingly alienated from his unquestioning illiterate neighbours. He ended, thus, in a no man’s land, where he was neither spectator nor participant, exiled by his dreams of metropolitan literary recognition, and yet tugged back in to local dailiness by his need to earn a shilling and by his dependence on the more primal, oral, local roots of the village and its landscape.

In his maturity as a poet, in his middle years, 1820-35, we see him achieving a precarious balancing act, holding in suspense these conflicting elements, both achieving a coherent literariness and also finding the confidence, the resourcefulness, the integrity, to acknowledge and incorporate in his poetry the gifts of his oral tradition, both of story and song.

But his moments of individuation, of reconcilement, of achieved coherence, were snatched from the long and severe turmoil of a total distress: social, intellectual, vocational and emotional. There is, even yet, no clinical consensus about Clare’s mind and its wounds,* and no categorical endorsement or denial of the judgements of those who nudged Clare into the confinement of a lunatic asylum. But it is clear from his manuscripts, both his poems and his letters, that under emotional, vocational and economic stress, his fantasies, both positive and negative, slipped over into periodic delusion, and poetic fictions lurched crazily into bouts of hallucination. The tensions that possessed and wracked him - tensions between an irretrievable Edenic past and a pressing, bleak prospect of loss and confinement - these tensions drove him sporadically into something close to schizophrenia or paranoia. Yet, even so, his spiritual strength, his peasant resilience, were such that at times he could transform these tensions into the penetrating eloquence and achieved, stabilizing form of song, of lyric, of elegy, making resonant harmony out of radical discord. And his more extended later poems, written by or through a Byronic persona — such poems derive considerable energy and power from an often savage dialogue between hope and despair, memory and desire, what might have been and what was.

Salient moments in his life’s wretched chronology include: 1820 and 1821, the publication of his first two volumes; 1820, 1822, 1824, his visits to London to meet the literary lions and to be both honoured and patronized as a ‘green man’; 1824-7, his struggles with Taylor, his publisher, to agree on publishing his Shepherd’s Calendar; 1832, his enforced move from Helpstone, his birthplace, to Northborough; 1835, publication of his Rural Muse; 1837-41, his term in High Beech Lunatic Asylum, Epping Forest; 1841, his escape, followed by his removal to Northampton Asylum; 1841-64, his confinement at Northampton.

 

Clare was born in Helpstone, midway between Peterborough and Stamford, near Peterborough Great Fen. His mother was illiterate; his father, barely literate, had a good repertoire of folk-songs. According to the law of averages, Clare should have become an agricultural labourer, earning a bare subsistence wage, and in possession, at best, of a merely functional literacy.

Aroused, however, by oral tales and chapbook romances, he early became an avid reader; and when he was thirteen, his reading of Thompson’s Seasons excited him so intensely that he began to write verse. When he had learned to read and write, he had become something of an exception: when he committed himself to writing poetry, he became an anomaly.

Still a boy, he set to earn his living by selling the labour of his hands: he worked variously as a ploughboy, as a reaper and thresher, a jobbing-gardener, and at lime-burning. And while still a young man, he fell in love with Mary Joyce, a local farmer’s daughter. Their relationship ended around 1816, seemingly at the insistence of her father. Clare was to be haunted by her ‘presence’ almost to his dying day.

In 1820, as a result of some fortunate contacts, his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published; he visited London and, through his publisher, John Taylor, met many literary figures; and he married Patty Turner, who was already six months pregnant with their child. His book quickly went into four editions, and he became a nine-days’ wonder.

His second volume, The Village Minstrel, appeared in 1821, and two years later he began to plan a long, ambitious poem, The Shepherd’s Calendar, which appeared after many frustrations and delays in 1827. His health first showed signs of serious trouble in 1823, and from then on he was visited by bouts of severe melancholy, severe doubt and hopelessness. His emotional/ nervous afflictions have been posthumously subjected to various analyses; the most plausible diagnosis seems to be a manic-depressive condition in which he became periodically psychotic.

In 1828, he paid his fourth visit to London; in 1830, a sixth child was born; and in 1830 and 1831 he again suffered a severe and prolonged illness. Friends and patrons joined in a well-meaning scheme for his relief, which involved moving him and his family to a more commodious cottage, with a modest smallholding, in the village of Northborough, about two and a half miles - as the crow flies - from Helpstone, and about three and a half miles by road.

His work up to about 1825 is predominately a prolific series of celebrations of delight in perceiving and representing natural life, and an exploration of the relationships of a hardworking lowly human society to its rural environment and the cycle of the year, with its swing between benign summer and bleak winter.

‘What are days for?’ asked Philip Larkin in a celebrated poem. ‘Days are where we live ... They are to be happy in ...’ Clare’s representations of his days and seasons, times and places, appear to endorse Larkin’s conclusion. The microcosm of the moment, like the macrocosm of the season - each is celebrated as offering its own distinctive satisfactions, and in his earlier poetry Clare seems to be possessed by the particular vividness of moments and of local places. As Tim Chilcott has remarked, these poems construct and mediate a vivid sense of presentness and of simultaneity. Their achievements, their numbers and their effects can be summed up in one word: plenitude.