Reading Romantic Clare

White, Adam

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-53859-4_2

Adam White²

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Abstract

This chapter summarises Clare’s reading of the work of his Romantic contemporaries – chiefly those four poets with whom he is most poetically comparable: Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Burns. Attending to the works of these poets that Clare knew and his recorded statements about them helps to establish why and how these writers were particularly important at broadly taken periods of Clare’s writing career. The poems that Clare wrote directly about three of his contemporaries, Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats, are analysed in this chapter, which is also devoted to reading some of Clare’s most identifiably Romantic poems, and thus preparing key contexts for the rest of the book.

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Notes

1.
By Himself, p. 139.
2.
John Middleton Murry, John Clare and Other Studies (London: Peter Nevill, 1950), p. 20; Geoffrey Grigson, Selected Poems of John Clare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), pp. 7–20; Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 109.
3.
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by W.J.B. Owen and Jane Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), III, pp. 26‒52 (p. 26). All further references to Wordsworth’s prose are from this edition.
4.
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 2004), p. 249.
5.
Clare and Other Studies, p. 19.
6.
Clare and Other Studies, p. 20. All quotes here are from this page.
7.
Lyric and Labour, p. 109.
8.
Simon Kӧvesi, ‘John Clare’s Deaths: Poverty, Education and Poetry’, in New Essays on Clare (Kӧvesi and McEathron), pp. 146–167 (p. 149).
9.
Cited in Critical Heritage, p. 410.
10.
Visionary Company, p. 445.
11.
Bounds of Circumstance, p. 152.
12.
Letters, p. 23.
13.
Cited in Critical Heritage, pp. 405, 410.
14.
By Himself, p. 186.
15.
See Adam White, ‘The Order of Authors: Degrees of “Popularity” and “Fame” in John Clare’s Writing’, Authorship, 3:1 (2014), n.p. <http://www.authorship.ugent.be/article/view/1070> (accessed 10 July 2016).
16.
Letters, pp. 371‒372 (p. 372).
17.
By Himself, p. 190.
18.
Letters, p. 408. Clare doesn’t say when he read the paper, but notes that it was printed by ‘Ridge of Newark’ and contained ‘Susan Grey’; Clare also mentions this poem in the journal entry of 25 October 1824 cited above: whether ‘Susan Gray’ is a conflation of Wordsworth’s ‘Poor Susan’ and ‘Lucy Gray’ is not entirely clear. ‘Susan Gray’ is also referred to as a Wordsworth poem by nineteenth-century critics.
19.
By Himself, p. 58.
20.
Poems Descriptive, pp. 16–29.
21.
See Francis Jeffrey’s review of The White Doe of Rylstone (written 1807‒1808; first pub. 2 June, 1815) in the Edinburgh Review, vol. XXV (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1815), pp. 355‒363. Jeffrey claims that the Lyrical Ballads were a ‘very pretty deliration’ (p. 356). In what would become his infamous review of The Excursion from the year before, Jeffrey disparaged Wordsworth’s ‘system’ of poetry.
22.
Letters, pp. 221‒222.
23.
See Poems of the Middle Period, II, pp. 7, 359; Poems of the Middle Period, IV, pp. 357–358.
24.
The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. by Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 196‒197.
25.
Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in the Northampton Public Library: With Indexes to the Poems in Manuscript (Northampton: Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery Committee, 1964; with inserted loose-leaf Supplement, 1971), p. 34.
26.
Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), p. 268.
27.
By Himself, p. 145.
28.
Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1993), V, p. 194. See stanza 93. All further references to Byron’s poems are keyed to the volumes in this edition.
29.
Robert Southey, Lives of the Uneducated Poets (London: H.G. Bohn, 1831).
30.
By Himself, p. 145.
31.
Catalogue of the Clare Collection, p. 32.
32.
Early Poems, I, pp. 522–524 (p. 522). This text dates from 1818–1819.
33.
By Himself, p. 53. Clare uses the word ‘universal’ earlier in the extract and discusses ‘true poesy’ in the context of Wordsworth.
34.
See The Thirteen-Book Prelude, 2 vols (ed. by Mark L. Reed, 1991), I, p. 180. The 1850 version of Wordsworth’s poem has ‘carry meaning to the natural heart’. This is from Book VI, line 112. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Wordsworth’s poems are from The Cornell Wordsworth, 21 volumes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975‒2007). Volumes are cited in the first instance by title, editor(s), and date. All references to The Thirteen-Book Prelude are from vol. I.
35.
Letters, p. 86.
36.
See Poems of the Middle Period, IV, pp. 582‒583. The Oxford editors of Clare believe this sonnet dates from around 1832.
37.
Poems of the Middle Period, III, p. 581.
38.
Clare, Politics and Poetry, p. 14 (see also pp. 18, 40).
39.
Among a number of instances in Wordsworth’s poetry, see The Excursion, Book IV, line 810. See The Excursion (ed. by Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, Michael C. Jaye, and David Garciá, 2007), pp. 48–297 (p. 152).
40.
Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800‒1807 (ed. by Jared Curtis, 1983), p. 147.
41.
For more on this, see J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Still Heart: Poetic Form in Wordsworth’, New Literary History, 2:2 (1971), 297‒310.
42.
Lines 7 and 10 of Wordsworth’s sonnet, however, make the idea of rural forms important.
43.
‘Feelings’ and ‘pleasure’ are two of the mainstays of Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads. It is not clear whether Clare was familiar with this prose text, though the extent of his knowledge of Wordsworth that I have charted so far suggests it is not unlikely that he knew (of) it. See Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797‒1800 (ed. by Jared Butler and Karen Green, 1992), pp. 738–765 (pp. 743, 741).
44.
See Mina Gorji’s John Clare and the Place of Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 58‒64.
45.
See, for instance, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (70), in Poems, in Two Volumes, pp. 271–277 (p. 273); and, moreover, ‘Surprised by joy―impatient as the Wind’, in Shorter Poems, 1807‒1820 (ed. by Carl H. Ketcham, 1990), pp. 112–113.
46.
‘Contested Bounds’, p. 544.
47.
Later Poems, I, p. 25.
48.
Timothy Webb, ‘The Stiff Collar and the Mysteries of the Human Heart: The Younger Romantics and the Problem of Lyrical Ballads’, in A Natural Delineation of Human Passions: The Historical Moment of Lyrical Ballads, ed. by C.C. Barfoot (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 209–249 (p. 230).
49.
Helen Boden, ‘Clare, Wordsworth’s Pedlar, and the Fate of Genius’, John Clare Society Journal, 11 (1992), 30–42 (p. 30).
50.
Lyrical Ballads, pp. 164–166. In this poem, the briar is threatened by a cascade rather than directly by the ‘wind’ that Clare refers to in his sonnet on Wordsworth.
51.
Lyrical Ballads, pp. 64–69 (p. 66).
52.
Rural Muse, pp. 169–171 (pp. 169–170).
53.
Lyrical Ballads, pp. 116–120 (p. 119).
54.
Poems of the Middle Period, III, pp. 581–584 (pp. 582, 584).
55.
See Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 100. Jarvis is analysing ‘Home at Grasmere’. See also line 128 of ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, in Poems, in Two Volumes, p. 275.
56.
See also lines 11 and 19 of the text, in Later Poems, I, p. 19.
57.
Lyrical Ballads, p. 751. By ‘Romantic alienation’ I mean the kind described in Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ (see lines 25–26, 53–54).
58.
John Powell Ward, The English Line: Poetry of the Unpoetic from Wordsworth to Larkin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 58.
59.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 138.
60.
P.M.S. Dawson, ‘Of Birds and Bards: Clare and His Romantic Contemporaries’, in John Clare: New Approaches, ed. by John Goodridge and Simon Kӧvesi (Helpston: John Clare Society, 2000), pp. 149‒159 (p. 150).
61.
Adam White, ‘Identity in Place: Lord Byron, John Clare, and Lyric Poetry’, The Byron Journal, 40:2 (2012), 115–127. Many of these Clare poems are imitations of Byron’s Hebrew Melodies.
62.
Simon Kӧvesi, ‘Masculinity, Misogyny and the Marketplace: Clare’s “Don Juan A Poem”’, in Clare: New Approaches (Goodridge and Kӧvesi), pp. 18‒202; Paul Hamilton, ‘Byron, Clare, and Poetic Historiography’, in Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–1845, ed. by Porscha Fermanis and John Regan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 223–246 (pp. 225, 242).
63.
Margaret Russett, ‘Clare Byron’, in Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 137–155 (pp. 140, 144).
64.
Harriet Schechter, ‘The Limitations of Imitation: Byron, Clare and the “Hebrew Melodies”’, John Clare Society Journal, 4 (1985), 24‒30.
65.
Anne Barton, ‘John Clare Reads Lord Byron’, Romanticism, 2:2 (1992), 127‒148; By Himself, p. 156. Byron refers to Clare in the ‘Pope-Bowles controversy’ (see Barton, p. 129).
66.
Catalogue of the Clare Collection, pp. 24–25.
67.
See Letters, p. 440.
68.
See Letters, p. 651. This information is in an 1841 letter to Matthew Allen.
69.
Clare quotes from Byron’s ‘Sonnet on Chillon’ at the end of his record of his journey out of Essex. See By Himself, p. 265.
70.
Rural Muse, p. 30; Poetical Works, III, pp. 259‒265 (p. 259). Clare connects Napoleon, a hero of Byron’s, to eternity; Clare also connects Byron to eternity in his sonnet on him, treated below.
71.
Rural Muse, pp. 53–54; Poetical Works, III, pp. 380‒382.
72.
Later Poems, I, p. 654.
73.
Later Poems, I, p. 170.
74.
Poetical Works, III, pp. 284‒286 (p. 286).
75.
For Clare’s lyric, see Later Poems, I, pp. 396–397; ‘I Am’: Selected Poetry of John Clare, ed. by Jonathan Bate (New York: Farrar, Straux, and Giroux, 2003), p. 282.
76.
See ‘So We’ll Go No More A Roving’, in Poetical Works, IV, pp. 109‒110.
77.
Rural Muse, p. 95.
78.
See Frank Doggett, ‘Romanticism’s Singing Bird’, Studies in English Literature: 1500‒1900, 14:4 (1974), 547‒561.
79.
For details see Lisbeth Chapin, ‘Shelley’s Great Chain of Being: From “blind worms” to “new-fledged eagles”’, in Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics, ed. by Frank Palmeri (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 153–169 (p. 167). ‘Eagle spirit’ is from Julian and Maddalo. See Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 214 (line 51).
80.
Rural Muse, p. 120.
81.
For more on the issues of poetic fame (and what is for Clare usually deemed to be its antithesis, ‘popularity’), see White, ‘The Order of Authors’.
82.
Poetical Works, II, pp. 136‒137.
83.
Rural Muse, pp. 124–125 (p. 125).
84.
Carlos Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 17, 21.
85.
Later Poems, II, p. 983.
86.
John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. by Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 1978, repr. 1982), pp. 65‒162 (p. 65). For the Ode, see pp. 282‒283 (p. 283). All further references to Keats’s poetry are from this edition.
87.
Imagination of the Reader, pp. 40‒41.
88.
Clare and Community, p. 70.
89.
Clare and Community, pp. 67, 82.
90.
John Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. by G.M. Matthews (Abingdon: Routledge, 1971), p. 153.
91.
Letters, pp. 77–82 (p. 80). It was published on 1 July 1820.
92.
For further details on this subject, see Luisa Conti Camaiora, ‘Keats in John Clare’s Letters’, in The Challenge of Keats: Bicentenary Essays: 1795–1995, ed. by Allan C. Christensen, Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones, Giuseppe Galigani, and Anthony L. Johnson (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 161–179.
93.
Letters, pp. 80–82 (pp. 80, 82).
94.
Letters, p. 51; p. 519. The 1830 letter is to Herbert Marsh.
95.
Village Minstrel, II, p. 207.
96.
Complete Poems, pp. 360‒361 (p. 361).
97.
Complete Poems, p. 283.
98.
Village Minstrel, II, p. 14.
99.
Village Minstrel, II, p. 208.
100.
Complete Poems, pp. 165‒166.
101.
Susan Evance, Poems (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), p. 6.
102.
See, for instance, ‘Fancy’, in Complete Poems, pp. 223‒235 (p. 223).
103.
Complete Poems, pp. 47–53; By Himself, p. 57 (see also p. 35).
104.
A further echo of Keats’s ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ is, as Goodridge and Thornton point out, detectable in the opening two lines of Clare’s early poem ‘Narrative Verses Written After an Excursion From Helpston to Burghley Park’: ‘The faint sun tipt the rising Ground/No Blustry wind – the air was still’. See ‘Clare: The Trespasser’ (Haughton, Phillips, and Summerfield), p. 92.
105.
Rural Muse, pp. 138‒139.
106.
Complete Poems, p. 284
107.
Poems of the Middle Period, III, pp. 561‒565 (p. 561).
108.
Thirteen-Book Prelude, p. 107.
109.
Thirteen-Book Prelude, p. 185.
110.
Complete Poems, p. 40 and p. 277.
111.
Later Poems, I, p. 1023.
112.
Poetical Works, I, pp. 129‒131 (p. 130). The poem is contained in Hours of Idleness.
113.
Later Poems, II, p. 1106. Lines 77–78 of Burns’s poem are written above the seven lines of Clare’s ‘Birds Nest’.
114.
Critical Heritage, pp. 105, 118.
115.
See Bate, Clare: A Biography, p. 347. Cunningham was also a correspondent of Wordsworth’s.
116.
Catalogue of the Clare Collection, p. 26.
117.
Letters, p. 386.
118.
Letters, p. 602. See also p. 46.
119.
Letters, pp. 596‒599 (p. 598).
120.
Frederick Martin, The Life of John Clare (London and Cambridge, Macmillan & Co., 1865), pp. 129–132.
121.
Letters, p. 45.
122.
Catalogue of the Clare Collection, p. 24.
123.
Letters, p. 5.
124.
See Early Poems, I, p. 3; Catalogue of the Clare Collection, p. 31: Clare owned Ramsay’s Poems on Several Occasions.
125.
Letters, p. 42.
126.
Poems Descriptive, p. 196; Early Poems, I, p. 417. Burns: Complete Poems and Songs, ed. by James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, repr. 1971), p. 12: compare, for instance, line 14 of Clare’s sonnet and line 16 of Burns’s poem.
127.
By Himself, p. 115: these ‘Autobiographical Fragments’ are believed to date from 1821 to 1826 (see pp. xvi‒xix).
128.
See Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 798‒799. The claim here is that ‘Burns is completely assimilated to the role of Poet Wordsworth had now (in 1803) conceived for himself’. For an alternative view, see Russell Noyes, ‘Wordsworth and Burns’, PMLA, 59:3 (1944), 813‒832.
129.
Burns in Global Culture (Pittock), p. 14.
130.
See Village Minstrel, II, pp. 20‒28; Early Poems, II, pp. 287‒296 (p. 287).
131.
Later Poems, I, pp. 346–347.
132.
See though The Songs of Robert Burns, ed. by Donald A. Low (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), pp. 310‒312.
133.
The Scottish Minstrel: The Songs and Song Writers of Scotland Subsequent to Burns, comp. by Charles Rogers (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1873), p. 194. Preston Mill is in East Linton, East Lothian, Scotland.
134.
Later Poems, I, pp. 243–244 (p. 243); pp. 212–213 (p. 213).
135.
Later Poems, I, p. 290.
136.
Goodridge and Thornton, ‘Clare: The Trespasser’ (Haughton, Phillips, and Summerfield), pp. 87‒130 (p. 108).

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White, A. (2017). Reading Romantic Clare. In: John Clare's Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53859-4_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53859-4_2
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