John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance by Johanne Clare (review)

110 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 history of Venus and Adonis, Leech remembers from his own childhood 'a school where in a one-volume Shakespeare the leaves of the poem were sewn together to keep prying eyes away' (194); or to that other passage when, writing of Doctor Faustus, he is reminded of 'a small boy in the early years of this century who tried to make a practice of not complaining when the bath water was too hot, "because," he said to himself, "I had better get used to it'" (84). This book stands as a fine memorial to the distinguished scholar and critic that boy became. (MICHAEL H. KEEFER) Johanne Clare. John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance McGill-Queen's University Press. xiii, 217. $25.00 Johanne Clare's study examines the influence exerted by John Clare's social position on his attempts to compose poetry that would find a place in the established tradition of English literature. In particular, it argues that Clare attempted through a variety of poetic forms to mediate between his commitments to his 'social being' and to his 'imaginative life' in a way that would 'make them one' (6). At the same time it provides us with a detailed and convincing outline of Clare's development from a deferential and tentative experimenter in verse to a mature writer of 'confidence and creative poise' (148). Not much of this is new to Clare scholarship, of course: the main subjects treated here -. poverty, enclosure, poetic aspiration - have been extensively discussed by Clare's biographers and some of his critics. In fact, much of what weakness there is in the book can be traced to its author's ignoring of the work already done on Clare. Almost none of the biographers are cited, for example, in spite of the fact that this is essentially a biographical study, concerned with how the circumstances of Clare's life affected his writing. The poems discussed here are those of the early and middle periods of Clare's life that fit into four categories: poverty poems, enclosure elegies, vocational poems, and bird poems. While the titles sound rather trite as criteria for literary distinctions, the discussion of the poems themselves builds a consistentand illuminating picture of Clare's developing attitude to himself, his social position, and his craft. Individual poems often sink from sight when they are subordinated to the larger argument, but several, including 'Lament of Swordy Well,' 'The Village Minstrel,' and 'Eternity of Song,' emerge from the general argument with a more comprehensive reading than they have hitherto enjoyed. Perhaps the most impressive characteristic of the book is the author's sensible reading of so many of the individual poems and, especially, her perceptive discussion ofClare's use of dialect. Her application ofcommon sense, rather than the ingenious logic so often applied to that controversial problem, leads to a refreshing assessment of its role in Clare's writing. HUMANITIES 111 A similarly pragmatic and successful method governs her assessment of Clare's learning. Her own learning, on the other hand, frequently weakens the credibility of her argument. In her conclusion, for example, she picks a quarrel with Edmund Blunden and John Middleton Murry over their refusal 'to credit Clare with the most basic intellectual skills.' She acknowledges that their criticism is out of date, but insists that their 'imperious refusal' continues to inform Clare criticism today (190). Such a mistake might be pardonable if it did not remind her reader that a whole generation of Clare scholarship has been largely ignored throughout her book, the generation which immediately precedes her own and which has already taken up the quarrel with Blunden and Middleton Murry. It is fair enough to argue that a scholarly book should be accessible to the non-specialist, as she does, but it is quite another thing to convey the impression that no other critic or biographer has dealt with the concerns that she does. Such a method leads to other problems. In the chapter on 'The Nature of Society,' for example, the author betrays the fact that she is not a social historian, yet she invokes the aid ofno otherscholars to help her sketchin...