‘A language that is ever green’: The Ecological Vision of John Clare

JAMES C. MCKUSICK IA language that is ever green': The Ecological Vision of John Clare John Clare described himself on the title page of his first collection of poems as a LNorthamptonshire Peasant/ a bold assertion of regional identity that situated his voice in an East Midland county that was becoming increasingly a zone of ecological conflict, marked by unequal struggle between the advocates of parliamentary enclosure and the forlorn adherents of the older, sustainable methods of open-field agriculture. The arguments advaneed infavour of parliamentary enclosure during the early nineteenth century will sound familiar to late twentieth-century readers still subjected to the insidious rhetoric of Progress: it was claimed that the enclosure of common fields and 'waste' land would rationalize the existing patchwork of land-ownership and enhance the productivity of agriculture by proViding an incentive for individual farmers to exploit their newly consolidated plots with maximum efficiency. Swamps and marshes would be drained, streams would be rechannelled, forests and scrublands would be cleared, and subsistence farming in general would give way to capitalintensive agriculture. Overlooked in the arcane legal and political process of enclosure were the traditional grazing and gleaning rights of the pOOf, as well as the environmental impact of this radical change in agricultural methods. Parliamentary enclosure proceeded by legal consensus among various classes of landholders; onlya few voices were raised to question the fate of the poor, and virtually nobody questioned the fate of the earth.1 Clare- entered thls discursive minefield with the publication of his first collection, Poems Descriptive of Rural Ufe and Scenery (1820t which forthrightly denounced the 'improvement' of his local environment while evoking with elegiac melancholy the gradual disappearance of the common fields, marshes, and 'waste' lands, and the extinction of an entire way oflife in harmony with the natural cycles of the day, season, and year.2. Clare's poems typically represent the landscape through the point ofview ofa local resident, often a peasant, shepherd, or woodman, or even within the imagined consciousness of a native animal, plant, or waterway. Clare's environmental advocacy is more fully developed in his later collections of poetry, entitled The Village Minstrel (1821), The Shepherd's Calendar (1827), and The Rural Muse (1835), and in his numerous manuscript poems, letters, and journals.Taken together, his works convey a detailed knowledge of the local flora and fauna, an acute awareness of the interrelatedness of all lifeUNIVERSITY OF TDRDNTD QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1991/2 THE ECOLOGICAL VISION OF JOHN CLARE 227 forms, and a sense of outrage at the destruction of the natural environment. Clare's poetry engages ecological issues with an intensity and breadth of vision that is largely unprecedented in the Western tradition of naturewriting ; indeed, Clare's unique accomplishment in combining a deep sensitivity for natural phenomena with forceful environmental advocacy clearly entitles him be regarded as the first ecological writer in the English literary tradition. The social and political contexts of Clare's poetry have been thoroughly scrutinized from a variety of critical perspectives. John Barrell has examined in precise historical detail the impact of the Enclosure Acts on Clare's native village and the reflection of that traumatic process in Clare's early poetry. Johanne Clare, in a wide-ranging and sympathetic study of Clare's response to contemporary social issues, elucidates the connection between Clare's evolving articulation of political beliefs and his depiction of nahtrallandscape. Raymond Williams, in a recent edition of Clare's poetry and prose, has made perhaps the most unequivocal plea for Clare as a spokesman for the English working class.3 However, the truly radical and innovative character of Clare's ecological consciousness still remains obscured by other aspects of his reputation, especially his received image as an uneducated 'peasant poet' who perhaps deserves our pity, but who certainly is unworthy ofserious intellectualconsideration. Yetitis precisely the unconventionality ofClare's poeticvision that prevented his work from being adequately published or recognized in his own lifetime, and that still impedes an adequate critical response to his most unothodox ideas. One of the most perceptive comments on Clare's reputation is made by Geoffrey Summerfield: 'Academics have tended to ... [consign] Clare to the...