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. Should Clare’s poems then be published exactly as they appear in his manuscripts?

In 1961, when Eric Robinson and I began to transcribe Clare’s poems from the manuscripts in Northampton Library, we realised at once that the undertaking did indeed require two pairs of eyes. For about four years we worked our way through many of the manuscripts, both at Northampton and at Peterborough; for personal reasons, I then turned to other tasks. Eric Robinson, helped by others, continues the work of transcribing and editing John Clare to this day. Two volumes of the Early Poems (1804-1822) and two volumes of the Later Poems (1837-1864) have thus far been published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Our initial work of transcription was provoked simply by the obvious inaccuracy of published texts, especially by Geoffrey Grigson’s Poems of John Clare’s Madness: we decided, therefore, to aim for an absolutely literal transcription, and that was the policy that Robinson and I employed in our editions of Clare in 1964, 1966 and 1967.

For the purposes of the present volume, my decision has been to respect the spirit of that editorial policy, but to make changes where the idiosyncrasies of Clare’s manuscripts would merely distract the reader and do nothing for the peculiar integrity of the text. Clearly, a policy of non-intervention can be said to respect the integrity of Clare’s own writing: and what else is there? Some readers are pleased to know that they are reading a text that is as close as may be to Clare’s own hand. Others argue that no writer’s text should be published without the benefit of the standard conventions — orthographic, syntactical and punctuation - of published texts.

The question is complicated by the status of the surviving manuscripts. To generalize, these fall into three rough categories: undated fragments of work in progress: parts of texts to be incorporated into a whole text; undated drafts of complete texts; and undated manuscripts that are some kind of fair copy prepared by a publisher or amanuensis, to provide the printer with a manuscript from which to set up printed copy. In the second and third categories, the relationship between Clare’s own intentions and any particular text is not clear. There are no annotations to signify that, yes, this is the version that Clare himself approved as a ‘final’, print-ready version. In the Northampton years, the problem is further compounded by a progressive decline in Clare’s own control over any text, and by the fact that most of the Northampton poems survive only in the form of Knight’s transcripts. But even a cursory reading of Knight’s texts demonstrates that many of the poems are over-punctuated in ways that sometimes run counter to the structure and sense of the text, and there is also some evidence of bowdlerizing.

Given such a confusing context, a reader is entitled to know exactly what any printed text offers: what editorial policy has been chosen. Let me, therefore, spell out my policy for this volume. In texts which derive from a re-examination of unpunctuated manuscript sources — most of the poetry included in this volume — I have added apostrophes to indicate the possessive and abbreviations; a minimum of on-line punctuation in places where the syntax is ambiguous; and, in order to minimize the need to read twice before identifying the intended meaning, some changes of spelling (e.g., breathes/breaths; ne‘er/ near; where/were).