Given his acutely responsive - and appreciative - sensibility, there was always something worthy of his keenest attention.

Structurally, most of his earlier poems are relatively simple, especially in their syntax, which lies closer to the rhythms of a speaking voice than to those of prose: their subtlety and richness are to be found, not in a sophisticated syntax, but in an intimately absorbed attentiveness to commonplaces - the ordinary is embraced and transformed by the intensity of attention into the extraordinary - and in a stubborn belief in the mimetic sufficiency of ordinary local language, a dialect which registered a special acuity of perception in the realm of elemental sensation. The relationships between word and world appear to be perfectly harmonious and unstrained, as if that which Clare perceived could speak with its own voice.

For over twenty-six years, the constraints of the sonnet and of the rhyming couplet provided Clare with two of his most congenial and elastic frames; and as he became well-versed in the seventeenth-century poets, on some of whom he fathered some of his own poems, and drew more deeply and more surely on English folk-song, so he developed his own distinctive lyricism, and reaffirmed spoken song as one of the distinctive gifts of the English-speaking poetic genius.

By 1832, some difficult truths had shaken Clare’s delicate and vulnerable sensibility: very early he had made the crucial and irreversible shift from a primarily oral culture to a literate and literary culture. But even as his work was in fact published, meeting with a confusing variety of responses from his readers, the integrity of his vision and of his native language was challenged and compromised by well-meaning friends, patrons and editors, and he continued inescapably to live among people to whom poetry was a closed book. His own wife could not share his life as a poet, and Mary Joyce had been absent from his life for over ten years but continued obsessively to engage his deepest and most intense feelings, an emblem of what might have been.

All aspects of his experience, all his social and literary relationships, served to enforce his sense of having left familiar ground yet of not having securely arrived somewhere else; he discovered himself to be adrift, in limbo, an anomalous and wrong-footed misfit: liminal man, in no man’s land, stuck at some kind of threshold, unable to go either back or forward. Even his sacral landscape had proved impermanent, despoiled often beyond recognition by the ‘improvements’ of enclosure.

Such was Clare’s predicament, in which the move to Northborough proved to be the last straw: an intended amelioration of his plight merely served to exacerbate his sense of alienation. In June 1837, little improved by the appearance of The Rural Muse (1835), he was taken to Dr Matthew Allen’s private asylum at High Beech in Epping Forest. He spent just over four years there; his physical health improved considerably, but his mental condition showed little change. He resolved the matter for himself by running away — escaping — in July 1841, and walked all the way to Northborough in search of ‘home’ and in the hope of being reunited with his ‘first wife’, Mary Joyce. She had died, a spinster, in 1838: when his family told him of this, he did not believe them.

After five months with his family, ‘homeless at home’, he was removed in December 1841 — he was allowed to wait until after Christmas but was taken before he could say, or hear, ‘A Happy New Year’ - to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. There he was treated humanely and allowed generous freedom of movement until his misbehaviour resulted in confinement to the asylum grounds. He died there, 20 May 1864, and was buried at Helpstone five days later.

In 1832, Clare was midway in his life as a poet; under the various stresses and limits of his circumstances, his poetry was undergoing a deep change. No longer could he find a seemingly inexhaustible delight in the ‘eternal recurrence of common order’; no longer did he find himself ‘rapt with satisfied attention ... to the mere spectacle of the world’s presence — one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one’s sense of its unfathomable significance’; no longer was he able to believe that ‘life is always worth living if one have ... responsive sensibilities’. *On the contrary, a deepening sense of disenchantment, of loss and alienation, of having lost his way, threatened to overwhelm the impulse to celebrate the affirmation of joy and delight.

How, then, to resolve the tensions, the collisions and contradictions of the positive and the negative charges? Was any kind of integration, of resolution, possible? His earlier answer — corresponding presumably to his manic-depressive swings of mood - had been to keep them separate, to channel them into two different kinds of poetry, affirmative and elegiac. But from about 1830 on, he was increasingly disposed to let them fight it out within the same, one, text; as a result his poetry realizes a richer and more complex tension, in poems that enact the often savage interplay of his inner dialectic. So his poetry continued, but also modulated: on occasions it reverted, even to the end of his life, to a spare melodic lyricism, close to folk-song: on the other hand, and increasingly so, it unravelled as an endless, seamless interwoven sequence of meditations, reflections, speculations, arguments, self-communings, appeals, accusations, rejoinders, speaking out of the unresolvable quarrel between the claims of the heaven and of the hell which pressed in on his purgatorial soul. In one sense, he evolved a less rich poetry, less rich in terms of sheer sensuous registration — ‘a few weathered images/on the bottom of the burned-out eye’ (Z. Herbert); in another, he came to make a richer poetry, richer for realizing the energies of a mind in conflict with itself.

 

Clare’s reputation during his lifetime flared briefly like a shooting star, waned and disappeared into a limbo of neglect. Posthumously, it has progressed in fits and starts; but in every generation since his death he has been briefly rediscovered, most conspicuously by Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter after World War I; by Anne Tibble and her husband in the 1930s; and by Geoffrey Grigson during World War II. His critical reputation has always been problematical; academics have tended to cling to received opinion: romantic poetry had achieved a kind of definition by the mid-nineteenth century, and was known to comprise Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley. This constellation has persisted, like holy writ, consigning Clare to the outer ditches and hedgerows. The poets, however, have known better: Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Blunden, James Reeves, Dylan Thomas, John Hewitt, Theodore Roethke, Charles Causley, John Fowles, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney have all borne witness to his fructifying presence in their lives as readers and writers. In so doing, they have taught us that to ask, ‘Is John Clare a major poet?’ is to ask the wrong (pecking-order) question; they have, conversely, taught us to recognize what he, distinctively, can continue to give us: what it is that, variously, we can discover and rediscover; how we can be animated and reanimated through listening to him: a joyful, even ecstatic, obliteration of self in the act of attending; responsiveness to all forms of life; how to speak of vicissitude and loss; how to love local truths, and how to treasure our parochial blessings, and all that our infatuation with Progress would destroy. As Seamus Heaney has written, ‘it was the unique achievement of John Clare to make vocal the regional and particular, to achieve a buoyant and authentic lyrical utterance at the meeting-point between social realism and conventional romanticism.’ And, again, Heaney has helped us to recognize how John Clare ‘lived near the abyss but resolved extreme experience into something infinitely gentle’. *

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The texts of John Clare’s poems are particularly vulnerable, in a variety of ways.

Texts published during his lifetime were the result of an unsatisfactory compromise between his own intentions and pressures from his patrons and publishers. Differences centred not only on the sentiments expressed, but also on Clare’s use of the syntax and lexicon of his own non-standard dialect, which was construed as ‘provincial’ and lower class or vulgar.

For reasons that are not altogether clear, Clare himself was impatient of the conventions of punctuation and, with few exceptions, his own manuscripts are unpunctuated. Again, his spelling is, to modern eyes with benefit of dictionaries, deviant: he consistently wrote ‘hugh’ for ‘huge‘, ‘loose’ for ‘lose’, ‘then’ for ‘than’ and ‘childern’ for ‘children’, for example. Many other words he spelled inconsistently. Again, in his own manuscripts, the syntax is that of his local dialect, especially in the vexed matter of subject-verb agreement.