John Clare: A Biography (review)

Figure 1.

John Clare: A Biography.

So poor that on occasion he had to write on the back of bark, the poet John Clare is one of literature's undervalued greats—an oversight rectified in some measure by this fine biography. Bate doesn't stint on detail, charting Clare's life from its origins in his beloved rural Helpston to the poet's brief forays into fame in literary London and eventually to Clare's abrupt change of fortune and protracted decline.

To modern readers acquainted with the often arbitrary nature of the publishing industry, Clare's early ascent, finely detailed by Bate, will seem fairly staggering. Oblivious to the possibilities of literary fame and fortune at a time when many members of his class in England were illiterate, Clare was trumpeted as the "Northhamptonshire Peasant Poet." (The phrase "peasant poet," which had already been used in conjunction with Robert Bloomfield and Robert Burns, was effectively a marketing term in early-nineteenth-century England.) Wandering the bogs and fens of his native land, Clare developed an eye for nature that went beyond that of a naturalist, "seeing" with greater precision than any writer of his time. His observations became the basis for thousands of poems, many of them edited into publishable form by the tireless John Taylor. Taylor was also John Keats's editor, and, as Bate points out, he is viewed by Clare scholars as either something of a hero or a tampering rogue, depending on their perspective. Clare wrote with a flagrant disregard for grammar—a discipline in which he was never properly trained—and his verse was replete with local aphorisms and colloquial misspellings. Taylor guided the manuscripts through to published form, inviting the criticism that he had compromised the poet's essential aims.

But with an eventual dwindling demand for verse, especially in book-length editions, Clare lost his market. His friends and family members would insist that he had also lost his reason, and the poet was long confined to mental institutions, from which he occasionally escaped. Bate hesitates, though, in concluding that Clare was a madman, citing the poetry of the asylum years. There is nothing in the English language like some of these works—Clare's rewrite of Byron's "Don Juan," "An Invite to Eternity" and the poem-as-apocalypse that is "I Am." They are poems that even today might conceivably be dismissed as too experimental for mainstream publication.

In the asylum Clare would sometimes tell his visitors that he was Byron or Shakespeare; or he would say that he, John Clare, had met such literary greats and that he had admired their work and vice versa. Was he simply a man amusing himself as others poked fun at him? Or did he understand, in some visionary way, the boundless nature of belonging to an artistic brethren? As Bate compellingly relates, Clare often seemed to straggle unintentionally into history, even into his own story—as when he was returning from the woods one day and happened, quite by chance, upon Byron's funeral procession.

As for Keats, the greatest imagistic poet of the age, Clare (another gifted imagist) shared common ground with him exactly once: in their mutual editor Taylor's office, Keats wrote down some lines for "Lamia" on the handiest piece of paper—the back of a letter written by John Clare.