Abstract
Drawing on the opening chapter’s assessment of ecocritical readings of Clare’s ‘place’, this chapter analyses Clare’s resistance to Romantic egotism: first, through the close and contextualised reading of a letter in which he theorises widely about limitations on his own expression and voices (and the political self-regard of public rhetoric); second, through an extended analysis of a sonnet and its manuscript contexts. This chapter both analyses Clare theorising what we might now call a ‘green’ levelling of the politics of writing styles, and then reveals what happens when he puts that ecocentric theory into poetic practice. It uses Deleuze and Guattari’s modelling of the rhizome to unlock significant patterns in Clare’s nature poetry. This chapter opens up problems of editing and interpreting Clare’s manuscripts.
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- 1.
Unsigned review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, XXXVIII (July 1835), 231–47, in Critical Heritage, pp. 235–6.
- 2.
John Wilson in Critical Heritage, p. 228 [Wilson’s emphasis and spelling].
- 3.
See Adam Rounce, ‘John Clare, William Cowper and the eighteenth century’, in New Essays on John Clare, pp. 38–56.
- 4.
Stephen Bygrave, Coleridge and the Self: Romantic Egotism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 3–4.
- 5.
William Hazlitt, ‘Observations on Mr. Wordsworth’s Poem, “The Excursion”’, in The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable; London: Longman et al., 1817), 2, pp. 95–122 (pp. 99, 120 and 121).
- 6.
Hazlitt, ‘Observations on Mr. Wordsworth’s poem, “The Excursion”’, p. 114.
- 7.
John Kinnaird, William Hazlitt: Critic of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 225.
- 8.
William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: Or Contemporary Portraits, 2nd edn (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), p. 165.
- 9.
William Hazlitt, ‘Mr. Coleridge’, in The Spirit of the Age: Or Contemporary Portraits, 2nd edn (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), pp. 57–75 (p. 62).
- 10.
By Himself, p. 144.
- 11.
William Hazlitt, ‘On Egotism’, in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 1, pp. 377–403.
- 12.
William Hazlitt, ‘Mr. Wordsworth’, in The Spirit of the Age, pp. 189–206 (p. 201).
- 13.
John Keats, ‘Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818’, in Hyder E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 1, pp. 386–7.
- 14.
There are many accounts of Clare’s indirect relationship with Keats, but the most thoroughgoing is by John Goodridge, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 59–82.
- 15.
By Himself, p. 188.
- 16.
Pet. A61, p. 3. See chapter 4, p. 225n97 for a transcription of this costed list of books.
- 17.
Emma Trehane, ‘“Emma and Johnny”: The Friendship between Eliza Emmerson and John Clare’, JCSJ, 24 (2005), 69–77 (76). See also Bate, Biography, pp. 163–4, and passim.
- 18.
Letter to George Darley, January–February 1830, Letters, p. 502.
- 19.
Letter to John Taylor, before 15 September 1830, Letters, pp. 512–13. A ‘seton’ is a skein of cotton passed below the skin and left with the ends protruding to promote drainage. What Clare was being treated for by the London doctor George Darling remains unclear.
- 20.
All the details of Clare’s visit to London are drawn from Bate, Biography, p. 332.
- 21.
Letters, p. 504. For a discussion of this letter as a precursor to a similar critique of the narrator’s first-person singular in Virginia Woolf, see John Goodridge, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 2–3. See also a brief discussion and excerpt of it in Dan Piepenbring, ‘That Swaggering, Bouncing Pronoun’, Paris Review, 13 July 2015 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/13/that-swaggering-bouncing-pronoun/ [accessed August 27 2016].
- 22.
‘Don Juan’, in Living Year, 1841, p. 53, ll. 255–8.
- 23.
See John Goodridge, ‘“Now Wenches, Listen, and Let Lovers Lie”: Women’s Storytelling in Bloomfield and Clare’, JCSJ, 22 (2003), 77–92.
- 24.
In Jamaican Rastafarian patois, ‘I’ ideally replaces singular subject and object pronouns, which are regarded as being divisive. ‘I and I’ (or ‘I&I’) symbolises the highest form of unity. By way of contrast, in Clare’s theory the ‘I’ is a cause of hierarchical division.
- 25.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On Life’ in Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (eds), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002), pp. 505–9 (p. 508). Shelley’s italicised emphases.
- 26.
Pet. A46, p.41; Letters, p. 491.
- 27.
Barbara M. H. Strang, ‘John Clare’s Language’, in R. K. R. Thornton (ed.), The Rural Muse: Poems by John Clare (Ashington: MidNAG and Carcanet, 1982), pp. 159–73 (p. 161).
- 28.
For a summary of eighteenth-century English-language debates over standardisation, regulation and then prescription, see Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 3rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1978), pp. 253–93. For an accessible discussion of the dash, see Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2013), pp. 145–65.
- 29.
E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (Old Woking: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969), p. 85.
- 30.
In their Captain Swing, Hobsbawm and Rudé provide a comprehensive assessment of the twenty-two counties in which the riots, machine-breaking and rick-burning broke out across 1830 and into 1831, including in villages close to Helpston, across Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk.
- 31.
Lucas assesses key poems Clare wrote in response to the rural troubles across 1830 and 1831, in ‘Clare’s politics’, John Clare in Context, pp. 148–77 (pp. 166–8). Alan Vardy’s account is essential reading in this regard: John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), especially pp. 169–75.
- 32.
Eric Robinson and David Powell (eds), The Parish, ll. 1014–15 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 56.
- 33.
See Alexander Murray (ed.), Sir William Jones, 1746–1794: A Commemoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). I owe a debt of gratitude to the late Bob Cummings for extensive direction on this front.
- 34.
John James Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 213.
- 35.
The most comprehensive study of this area of Clare’s life and work is offered by Sarah Houghton-Walker, John Clare’s Religion (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
- 36.
By Himself, p. 78.
- 37.
The Parish, p. 45, ll. 545–8.
- 38.
See P. M. S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell (eds), A Champion for the Poor; Political Verse and Prose (Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 2000), pp. 267–80.
- 39.
Pet. A46, p. 43.
- 40.
Kate Soper, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 207.
- 41.
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), p. 174.
- 42.
For a delineation of the two positions, see Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, 4th edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 10–27. For a balanced overview of ecologism, see Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies, 3rd edn (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 198–225.
- 43.
Mark J. Smith, Ecologism: Towards Ecological Citizenship (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998), pp. 4–8.
- 44.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’, in Thomas Hutchinson (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), p. 586, l. 143.
- 45.
There are many recent definitions of ecocentrism, but a fine literary analysis, alongside a consideration of the tradition of literary anthropomorphism, is offered by Bryan L. Moore, Ecology and Literature: Ecocentric Personification from Antiquity to the Twenty-first Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), especially pp. 5–21.
- 46.
Mark J. Smith, Ecologism, p. 5.
- 47.
Tom Paulin, ‘John Clare: A Bicentennial Celebration’, in Richard Foulkes (ed.), John Clare: A Bicentenary Celebration (Northampton: University of Leicester, Department of Adult Education, 1994), pp. 69–78 (p. 75).
- 48.
For four indicative examples, see ‘Waterloo’, EPI, pp. 208–11; ‘Sonnet’ (first line: ‘England with pride I name thee…’), EPII, p. 599; ‘Nelson & the Nile’, MPIV, pp. 100–4; ‘On Seeing the Bust of Princess Victoria by Behnes’, MPIV, pp. 160–1. See also Sam Ward, ‘“This is radical slang”: John Clare, Admiral Lord Radstock and the Queen Caroline Affair’, in New Essays on John Clare, pp. 189–208 (p. 203).
- 49.
Richard Heath, The English Peasant (1893), extracted in Critical Heritage, p. 294.
- 50.
See for example: John Lucas, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1688–1900 (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), pp. 135–60; John Lucas, John Clare (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994); Roger Sales, John Clare: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
- 51.
P.M.S. Dawson, ‘John Clare—Radical?’, JCSJ, 11 (1992), 17–27, and ‘Common Sense or Radicalism? Some Reflections on Clare’s Politics’, Romanticism, 2.1 (1996), 81–97.
- 52.
Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 206–61. Alan Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003).
- 53.
Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) pp. 8–9; Biography; “I Am”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) and John Clare: Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2004).
- 54.
Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 21.
- 55.
‘Familiar Epistle to a Friend’, MPIV, pp. 508–17 (p. 509, ll. 25–32).
- 56.
Taylor to Clare, 6 January 1821, Letters, p. 135. Like other commentators before him, Jonathan Bate seems to imply (Bate, Biography, pp. 218–9) that the marginal pencilled words ‘*This is radical slang’ alongside stanzas 107 and 108 in a fair manuscript copy of ‘The Village Minstrel’ (previously entitled ‘The Peasant Boy’) are Radstock’s (Nor. 3, p. 186b). But Robert Heyes is certain the hand is Taylor’s. See John Goodridge and R.K.R. Thornton, John Clare, The Trespasser (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2016), p. 85n76. I offer, yet again, my thanks to Robert Heyes for once again complicating another foundational Clare myth.
- 57.
Sales, John Clare, pp. 51–9 (pp. 53 and 56).
- 58.
Ward, ‘“This is radical slang”: John Clare, Admiral Lord Radstock and the Queen Caroline Affair’, p. 203. Ward concludes that ‘…if Clare’s most anti-aristocratic seeming verse might have been viewed as contiguous with the wider radical discourse centred around Caroline, it did so because of the implicit challenge his writing posed to contemporary definitions of legitimate plebeian discourse and not because he was in any direct sense an active proponent of radical reform’ (p. 203).
- 59.
Barrell, p. 103.
- 60.
Barrell, p. 105.
- 61.
Barrell, p. 120.
- 62.
Simon J. White, ‘John Clare’s Sonnets and the Northborough Fens’, JCSJ, 28 (2009), 55–70 (56). For wider contexts of Clare as a Fenland poet, see Bridget Keegan, British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 148–71. For an analysis of the language patterns in Fenland poems, see Helen Pownall, ‘Syntax and World-view in John Clare’s Fen poems’, JCSJ, 34 (2015), 37–50.
- 63.
Pet. A61, p. 83. For a transcription, see Letters, p. 629.
- 64.
MPV, p. 267.
- 65.
The starnels also ‘darken like a cloud the evening sky’ in the poem appearing just two pages later in this manuscript, the first line of which is ‘The wild duck startles like a sudden thought’. MPV, p. 269–70.
- 66.
The Oxford editors decide to collect together as if one poem three sonnets which feature maids shouting to call farmhands to breakfast (see MPV, pp. 327–8). Page 127 of A61 features the first two sonnets of this supposed series, penned on paper with a rough tear at the bottom, approximately 10 inches long and 4 inches wide. Then on page 128 of A61 we are on distinctly different paper (the same size as that of ‘The shepherds…’), in a script that is clearly Clare’s hand but with a different pen (and/or ink) to page 127. In the Oxford edition, the sonnet ‘The maiden shout to breakfast round the yard’ (first line) is positioned as the third and final sonnet in this supposed series about maidens shouting (see MPV p. 328, l. 29). To further complicate matters, some (though not all) of the lines of this group of poems can be found in Nor. 7 (see headnote to the poems in MPV, p. 327). It is a remarkable achievement that the Oxford editors managed any coherence in this array of diverse materials. But it is also problematic that to an extent (though not entirely), these poems’ position – and their narrative-derived relatability – in the definitive edition is being dictated to by an archivist’s decisions on the order in which they have been pasted into manuscript fascicles based on mentions of maidens shouting and the appearance of the clumsy, hungry labourer Hodge (cf. my discussion of Hodge as the staple stereotype of male labouring idiocy below), but not (it would seem) on the material qualities of the paper on which they are written. It might be that the third sonnet is a rewrite of the first two of A61, or vice versa.
- 67.
The lead example here is in the two isolated lines on page 54 of A61 – ‘As stubborn as the oak that cannot bend/He recks no master & he has no friend’. The Oxford editors (MPV, pp. 290–1) install these lines as the closing couplet to an otherwise twelve-line sonnet which appears on page 77 of the A61 manuscript, first line ‘From place to place they go afar they roam’, a poem about lone travellers whom the shepherds of the closing lines regard as ‘field marauders’, even if the poem itself seems rather in awe of them. The final two lines that the editors import here do work (even if the ‘oak’ is an odd simile for the travelling kind), yet there is no evidence presented that this couplet on page 54 was in fact written as the close of the twelve of page 77. Page 77 is quite distinct paper from page 54 too, not that this would be conclusive evidence in either direction. The editors have created a poem that simply does not exist in manuscript. For fragments in A61 the editors decide have no home, see MPV, pp. 330–1.
- 68.
The thirty-two sonnets I am identifying as a discrete subsection of the wider ‘Northborough sonnet’ project (if project is was what it was) appear in MPV, pp. 267–76; 292–98; 327–30. Their first lines and page numbers in the A61 Pet. manuscript are ‘I love to hear the evening crows go bye’ and ‘The shepherds almost wonder where they dwell’, p. 47; ‘The horses are took out the cows are fed’ and ‘When milking comes then home the maiden wends’, p. 48; ‘The wild duck startles like a sudden thought’ and ‘He eats a moments stoppage to his song’, p. 49; ‘The noisy blathering calves are fed & all’ and ‘Tis late the labouring men come dropping in’, p. 50; ‘The cowboy shuns the shower & seeks the mat’ and ‘He waits all day beside his little flock’, p. 51; ‘With hands in pocket hid & buttoned up’ and ‘Lapt up in sacks to shun the rain & wind’, p. 52; ‘With careful step to keep his balance up’ and ‘The cowboys hut of straw neglected lies’, p. 53; ‘With hook tucked neath his arm that now & then’ and ‘He finds his old knife where the gipseys lay’, p. 54; ‘The maiden ran away to fetch the cloaths’ and ‘Among the orchard weeds from every search’, p. 79; ‘With boots of monstrous leg & massy strength’ and ‘There is a place scarce known that well may claim’, p. 80; ‘They pelt about the snow the birds to scare’ and ‘The cloudy morning brought a pleasant day’, p. 81; ‘The reeking supper waits the labourer home’ and ‘The crows drive onward through the storm of snow’, p. 82; ‘Close by the road the traveller set his cart’, p. 83; ‘He never knew a book & never bought’ and ‘He smokes his pipe & drinks his pint of ale’, p. 84; ‘The maiden shout to breakfast round the yard’, p. 128; ‘He fights with all the whasps nests in his way’ and ‘The school boy sets his basket down to play’, p. 129; ‘Maids set their buckets down & run the while’ and ‘& every morning passing gives a call’, p. 130. Page 54 also contains the two-line fragment discussed in the preceding note.
- 69.
For his insights into the potentially arbitrary order of pages in the process of preservation of Clare manuscripts into fascicles, I am indebted to Richard Hunt, Director of Culture at Vivacity, Peterborough City Council, and former archives manager of Peterborough Central Library.
- 70.
Following Barrell’s lead, Joseph Phelan reads a diminution in the move to Northborough in the quality of Clare’s supposedly Keatsian ability to complicate the sonnet form, the standard story of ‘an increasing sense of alienation from the natural world’ on that move away from Helpston, and he finds ‘a poetry in which the boundaries between poems seem to have dissolved altogether’ – which for him appears to be a weakness. See Joseph Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 39–42 (41). He picks up on Barrell, pp. 177–80.
- 71.
John Goodridge, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 6.
- 72.
Goodridge, John Clare and Community, pp. 3–7.
- 73.
Pet. A61, p. 80; MPV, pp. 293–4.
- 74.
Sarah Houghton-Walker, Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 103.
- 75.
See ‘When milking comes then home the maiden wends’, ‘Tis late the labouring men come dropping in’ and ‘The maiden ran away to fetch the cloaths’, MPV, pp. 270, 271, and 292 respectively.
- 76.
All MPV (all untitled; first lines): ‘Tis late the labouring men come dropping in’, pp. 271–2, l. 1 and ll. 15–16 (a rare sixteen-line sonnet in this particular series); ‘The maiden ran away to fetch the cloaths’, p. 292, ll. 11–12; ‘The reeking supper waits the labourer home’, p. 294, ll. 1–2; ‘He never knew a book & never bought’, p. 298, ll. 13–14.
- 77.
‘He never knew a book & never bought’, MPV, pp. 297–8.
- 78.
Somewhat more sardonically, Clare plays with the ambivalent possibilities of ‘nothing’ in a line about Byron: ‘Who with his pen lies like the mist disperses /& makes all nothing as it was before’, ‘Don Juan’, Living Year 1841, p. 51, ll. 233–4.
- 79.
Pet. A61, p. 47. See also MPV, p. 267 and Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson (eds), Northborough Sonnets (Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1995), p. 67.
- 80.
Pet. A61, p. 47. See also MPV, p. 268 and Northborough Sonnets, p. 67.
- 81.
LPI, p. xvii.
- 82.
A clean critical-apparatus-free ‘reading text’ was one of the innovations – along with facsimiles of manuscripts, ‘primitivist’ transcriptions and inclusion of variants – of the influential twenty-one-volume Cornell University Press edition of the works of William Wordsworth (1975–2007). For a history of this edition, see Jared Curtis, ‘The Cornell Wordsworth: A History’, [Cornell University Press, n.d.], http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/html/WYSIWYGfiles/files/Cornell_Wordsworth_History.pdf [accessed 28 August 2016].
- 83.
See ‘Sonnet After the Manner of X X X X X’, MPII, p. 7.
- 84.
I am thinking specifically here of Wordsworth’s poems such as ‘Simon Lee’, ‘We Are Seven’, ‘The Last of the Flock’, ‘Old Man Travelling’ – all of them in Lyrical Ballads (1798). In terms of its ‘wedding guest’ frame, Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ is an ‘encounter’ poem – though this is not a poem in which Clare ever expressed an interest; he was not impressed by Coleridge as a poet or as a man. Clare noted that he thought Coleridge’s ‘sonnets are not happy ones’, though he thought ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ ‘beautiful’. His journal records that he read these poems in October 1824, in Poems by S.T. Coleridge, to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd (London: Cottle, et al., 1797), the book having been a gift from Lord Radstock. See Clare’s unimpressed account of meeting Coleridge, and of reading the poems, in By Himself, pp. 144 and 186.
- 85.
Here are some examples among many where ‘loose’ operates as ‘lose’ from across the length of Clare’s writing career: ‘Plough men from their furrowy seams/Loose the weary fainting team’ in the very early poem ‘Summer Evening’ (EPI, p. 7, ll. 67–8); ‘& others driving loose their herds at will’ in ‘Rural Morning’ (EPII, p. 616, l. 119); ‘The sun een seems to loose its way’ in ‘The Flitting’ (MPIII, p. 481, l. 55); ‘…birds scarce loose a nest the season through’ in ‘The Woodman’ (MPIV, p. 212, l. 14); ‘The tempest could not loose her when he tried’ in the untitled Northborough double sonnet, first line ‘The f[l]aggy forrest beat the willows breast’ (MPV, p. 261, l. 23); ‘The knot is tied – & then we loose the honey’ in ‘Don Juan’ (Living Year 1841, p. 57, l. 298).
- 86.
This poem appears in a Burns collection Clare owned: The Poetical Works of Robert Burns (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, et al., 1817), p. 356. Item 134 in [David Powell], Catalogue of the John Clare Collection in the Northampton Public Library (Northampton: County Borough of Northampton Public Libraries, Museums and Art Gallery Committee, 1964).
- 87.
See, for example, Andrew Goatly, ‘Green Grammar and Grammatical Metaphor, or Language and Myth of Power, or Metaphors We Die By’, in Alwin Fill and Peter Mühlhäusler (eds), The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), pp. 203–25. In the same collection, see Mary Kahn, ‘The Passive Voice of Science: Language Abuse in the Wildlife Profession’, pp. 241–4.
- 88.
MPV, pp. 105–14.
- 89.
‘The tensor effects a kind of transitivization of the phrase, causing the last term to react upon the preceding term, back through the entire chain…An expression as simple as and…can play the role of tensor for all of language.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 110.
- 90.
‘Summer Evening’, EPI, p. 7, ll. 67–8; ‘The Hue & Cry. A Tale of the Times’, MPIV, p. 520, l. 45.
- 91.
Felicity J. Colman, ‘Rhizome’, in Adrian Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 231–3 (p. 231). For wider considerations of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to ecocritical thought, see Bernd Herzogenarth (ed.), Deleuze│Guattari & Ecology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), and Bernd Herzogenarth (ed.), An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze│Guattari (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). See also Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London and New York: Continuum, 2000).
- 92.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 27–8. Authors’ italicised emphases.
- 93.
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 25–6.
- 94.
Robert Lynd, ‘Review of Poems, Chiefly from Manuscript’, 22 January 1921, in Critical Heritage, pp. 340–3 (p. 342). Edmund Gosse, ‘Review of Poems, Chiefly from Manuscript’, 23 January 1921, in Critical Heritage, pp. 343–6 (p. 344).
- 95.
Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship, pp. 244–52.
- 96.
Jan Tschichold, The Ampersand: Its Origin and Development, trans. Frederick Plaat (London: Woudhuysen, 1957), p. 5.
- 97.
Alan Loney, & The Ampersand (Wellington: Black Light, 1990), no pagination; Loney’s emphasis.
- 98.
It is impossible to list all of Clare’s references here, but his typical enthusiasm and knowledge of watery and wetland environments can be found in the index to Natural History, under items such as Crowland Wash, Deeping Fen, Holme Fen, North Fen, Welland Ford and Whittlesey Mere.
- 99.
Bridget Keegan, British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 149–50.
- 100.
Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship, p. 247. See also Critical Heritage, p. 195.
- 101.
For an extended discussion of ‘becoming-animal’, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 265–78.
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Kövesi, S. (2017). Clare and Ecocentrism. In: John Clare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59183-1_2
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