Contested Bounds: John Clare, John Keats, and the Sonnet

SARA LODGE Contested Bounds: John Clare, John Keats, and the Sonnet T he nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary sonnet boom. The revival began in the mid-eighteenth century; among its most prominent exponents were Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and William Lisle Bowles. Smith, influentially, sought a new English form for the sonnet, a form that would emphasize intensity of feeling rather than rhetorical stateliness. Reacting against the formal constraints of the Petrarchan sonnet, both Smith and Bowles developed a free approach to the Shakespearean model that tolerated a variety of irregular and hybrid constructions. As Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson note, however, the popularity of these experiments “incurred the inevitable conservative back­ lash against innovation”' and, by the early nineteenth century, when Wordsworth announced his “conversion”2 to the sonnet and arose as its modern patron, the self-styled inheritor of Milton’s “trumpet, whence he blew / Soul-animating strains—alas too few!,” the Petrarchan sonnet was once again the dominant model. The sonnet was a form framed for self­ reflexive meditation on the constraints and pleasures of form itself; it was also a form framed for comparison. In an age when periodicals, annuals, and anthologies made short poems especially valuable, the sonnet—brief, precious, attemptable by all but perfected by few—was a highly market­ able, collectable object, a gem consciously set offby its clarity and brilliance beside similar stones. To publish a sonnet was inevitably to enter into this market and a structure of comparative evaluation that reflected historical, national, literary, and political allegiances. John Clare was a major sonneteer. His three published collections con­ tain, respectively, twenty-one, sixty, and eighty-six sonnets. Among his I. Feldman and Robinson, A Century ofSonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival 1750—1850 (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12. Their arguments draw on Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 2. As Jennifer Wagner notes in A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nine­ teenth-Century English Sonnet (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 38, Wordsworth’s “conversion narrative” ofrediscovering the sonnet on rereading Milton is du­ bious and reflects his appropriative rebranding ofthe form in terms ofgender and ideology. SiR, 5 1 (Winter 2012) 533 534 SARA LODGE unpublished works, particularly the material designed for a projected vol­ ume, The Midsummer Cushion (1832), there are over three hundred sonnets. As early as 1820, Clare announced to his publisher John Taylor, “I have been terribly plagued with the muses since I saw you I think I have wrote 50 Sonnets.”1 They were important to him. In 1821, he instructs Taylor re­ garding his second book, The Village Minstrel, “have a good care over the Sonnets & I think you will find first & last a Selection far superiour to the first book”4 and again “be careful in perusing the Songs & Sonnet as they are my favourites.”5 By 1824, he was planning an ambitious project akin to Wordsworth’s 1820 sequence of sonnets on the River Duddon. Whatever the success of The Village Minstrel, he told Taylor, he planned to take a sab­ batical of 8 to 10 years to hone his skills and make literary experiments. In that interval, he writes, I have made it up in my mind to write one hundred sonnets as a set of pictures on the scenes & objects that appear in the different seasons & as I shall do it soly for amusment fsic] I shall take up wi gentle and simple as they come whatever in my eye finds any |inter] est these things are resolves not merely in the view for publication but for attempts.'1 It was presumably with a view to such a sonnet sequence that Clare began, in 1824, a manuscript entitled A Collection of Sonnets Descriptive of Appear­ ances in the Seasons and other Pictures in Nature. If Clare had published this sonnet sequence in the 1820s, he would have been ahead of the curve in what became a sonnet rush: of some 250 sonnet sequences published be­ tween 1800 and 1900 only 27 were published before 1830.7 Various critics have considered aspects of Clare’s sonnets, particularly the view of place and of the...