Abstract
To conclude the book, this chapter turns both to the present – and considers the manner in which Clare is rewritten by contemporary creative writing – and to the past – assessing how historicism has avoided the problematic presence of Clare in its own practice. It focuses upon some of the problems of the dominant mode of critical historicism, and through the examples of contemporary writers such as Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair who have responded to Clare, this chapter turns to Gadamer’s theorisation of horizons of history and critical prejudice – to assess the manner in which horizons of situation (temporal, spatial, prejudicial) work in Clare studies. The book ends with a brief experiment – in which the possible claims to truth of differing modes of responding to Clare are compared.
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Notes
- 1.
Iain Sinclair, Edge of the Orison: in the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’ (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 343.
- 2.
For accounts of John Ashbery’s engagements with Clare, see Ben Hickman, John Ashbery and English Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Clare’s Lyric: John Clare and Three Modern Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 161–78; Ken Babstock, ‘As Marginalia in John Clare’s The Rural Muse’, in Methodist Hatchet (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2011), p. 5; David Baker, ‘Fives Odes on Absence’, in Scavenger Loop: Poems (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), pp. 27–33, and note, pp. 107–8; William Bedford, ‘The Flitting, i.m. John Clare’, JCSJ, 35 (2016), 53–8; Alison Brackenbury, ‘Visit’, ‘Still young’, ‘On the boards’, ‘Divided’, ‘Enclosure’, ‘Breaking’, in Breaking Ground and Other Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1984), pp. 99–132; Wendy Cope, ‘John Clare’, in If I Don’t Know (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 29; Sarah Corbett, ‘Pictures of Power: Sonnets and Variations after John Clare’, JCSJ, 33 (2014), 41–7; Patrick James Dunagan, Drops of Rain/Drops of Wine (New York City: Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), p. 5 [untitled]; Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), pp. 32, 65, 67, 74 and 89; Paul Farley (ed.), John Clare: Poet to Poet (London: Faber and Faber, 2007); Anthony Hecht, ‘Coming Home’ (From the journals of John Clare), Millions of Strange Shadows (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 25–7; Edward Hirsch, ‘Three Journeys’, in Wild Gratitude: Poems (New York: Knopf, 2010; first edn, 1986), p. 64–6; Michael Longley, ‘Journey out of Essex or, John Clare’s Escape from the Madhouse’, Poems 1963–1983 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986; poem first published 1969), p. 56 – see Bate, Biography, p. 557; Jeanette Lynes, Bedlam Cowslip: The John Clare Poems (Hamilton, Ontario: Buckrider Books, 2016); Glyn Maxwell, Drinks with Dead Poets: The Autumn Term (London: Oberon Books, 2016); David Morley, The Gypsy and the Poet (Manchester: Carcanet, 2013) and Simon Kövesi, ‘Interview with David Morley: The Gypsy and the Poet’, JCSJ, 32 (2013), 49–72; Wendy Mulford, ‘John Clare’s Mountain’, in Denise Riley (ed.), Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970–1991 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 114–20; Alice Oswald (ed.) includes Clare’s poetry in – and uses a Clare quotation for the title of – her environmental anthology, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet (London: Faber and Faber, 2005); Tom Paulin’s various responses to Clare are covered in Bate, Biography, p. 557–8; Derek Walcott, ‘The Bounty’ in The Bounty (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), pp. 3–16; Sam Willetts, ‘Honest John’, in New Light for the Old Dark (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), p. 15; David Wojahn, ‘Napping on my Fifty-Third Birthday’, in World Tree (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), pp. 22–4.
- 3.
London Magazine, August 1824, 143–5 (144, 143).
- 4.
For an extensive account of the ways poets have responded to Clare, see Bate, Biography, pp. 545–59. See also John Lucas (ed.), For John Clare: an Anthology of Verse (Helpston: John Clare Society, 1997), pp. ix–x.
- 5.
James Dacres Devlin, Go to Epping! (London: Effingham Wilson, 1841). See my discussion of Devlin’s poem, in ‘John Clare’s deaths: poverty, education and poetry’, in New Essays on John Clare, pp. 146–66 (pp. 154–8).
- 6.
The most comprehensive collection of such poems appears in John Lucas (ed.), For John Clare: an Anthology of Verse.
- 7.
Bate, Biography, p. 558; see also Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 15.
- 8.
Edward Bond, The Fool and We Come to the River (London: Methuen, 1976). First produced in 1975; revived in 2010 in Kilburn, London.
- 9.
Simon Rae, Grass (Bampton: Top Edge Press, 2003).
- 10.
D. C. Moore, Town and Honest (London: Methuen Drama, 2010).
- 11.
Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire: A Novel (Atlanta and Portland: Top Shelf Productions, 2003; first published 1996), pp. 223–36.
- 12.
Alan Moore, Jerusalem: A Novel (London: Knockabout, 2016).
- 13.
Hugh Lupton, The Ballad of John Clare (Sawtry, Cambs.: Dedalus, 2010): ‘There is nowhere a body can cast its eye but there is activity upon the face of the land…With the setting of fences comes a new order’, pp. 217–18.
- 14.
John MacKenna, Clare: A Novel (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1993).
- 15.
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009).
- 16.
Judith Allnatt, The Poet’s Wife (London: Doubleday, 2010).
- 17.
Richard Mabey, Nature Cure (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005). Among the many engagements with Clare of which Mabey writes, see especially Whistling in the Dark: in Pursuit of the Nightingale (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993), Flora Britannica (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants (London: Profile Books, 2012), and The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn (London: Profile Books, 2011). For an excellent account of Mabey and Clare, see Theresa M. Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), pp. 126–58 and 246–7.
- 18.
Iain Sinclair, Edge of the Orison: in the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’ (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
- 19.
Christopher Innes, ‘Elemental, My Dear Clare: The Case of the Missing Poet’, in Martin Middeke and Werner Huber (eds), Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (London: Camden House, 1999), pp. 187–200 (p. 199).
- 20.
Rita Felski, ‘“Context Stinks!”’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), 573–91 (576 and 577–8).
- 21.
Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox (eds), The Limits of Literary Historicism (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2011), p. xvi.
- 22.
Eric Hayot, ‘Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), 739–56 (742).
- 23.
James Chandler, ‘Introduction’ to his Cambridge History of Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 1–18 (p. 3).
- 24.
Jerome McGann, ‘Is Romanticism Finished?’, in James Chandler (ed.), Cambridge History of Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 648–64 (pp. 651 and 650).
- 25.
McGann, ‘Is Romanticism Finished?’, pp. 656–7.
- 26.
McGann, ‘Is Romanticism Finished?’, p. 663.
- 27.
McGann, ‘Is Romanticism Finished?’, p. 662.
- 28.
McGann, ‘Is Romanticism Finished?’, p. 657.
- 29.
Alan Liu, ‘Review of David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination’ in Wordsworth Circle, 19.4 (1988), 172–81 (179). Quoted in introduction to Damian Walford Davies (ed.), Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 5.
- 30.
See, for example, Jerome McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, Modern Language Notes, 94.5 (December 1979), 988–1032 and The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (University of Chicago Press, 1983).
- 31.
Jeffrey Insko, ‘The Prehistory of Posthistoricism’, in Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox (eds), The Limits of Literary Historicism (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2011), pp. 105–23 (p. 106).
- 32.
Rita Felski, ‘“Context Stinks!”’, 579.
- 33.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 305. First published in German, 1960.
- 34.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 304–5.
- 35.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 305.
- 36.
Robert Piercey, The Crisis in Continental Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 146–7.
- 37.
Alan Moore, Jerusalem: A Novel (London: Knockabout, 2016), pp. 923–68 (p. 940).
- 38.
By Himself, pp. 40–41.
- 39.
Tom Paulin, ‘Gentlemen and Ladies Came to See the Poet’s Cottage’, London Review of Books 26.4 (19 February 2004), 17–20 (17) [review of Bate’s Biography, his Farrar, Straus and Giroux selection, MPV and Alan Vardy’s John Clare, Politics and Poetry].
- 40.
Bate, Biography, pp. 41–4 (start of chapter 3, ‘Horizons’).
- 41.
Foulds, The Quickening Maze, p. 3.
- 42.
Sinclair, Edge of the Orison, p. 148.
- 43.
Sinclair, Edge of the Orison, p. 278.
- 44.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 117.
- 45.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 305.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 305.
- 47.
Morning Chronicle, 15 March 1822, [column 1, p. 4].
- 48.
Bury and Norwich Post: Or Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge, Ely, and Norfolk Telegraph, 27 February 1822, p. 634.
- 49.
Nor. 7, p. 3A.
- 50.
EPII, pp. 590–3. See also the editors’ note to a separate publication of ‘The reformers hymn’: ‘Not published in Clare’s lifetime. An earlier draft was entitled “The Labourers Hymn”…The fact that “The reformers hymn” was copied into his fair copy book Pet. A40 suggests that it is the later and definitive version.’ P. M. S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell (eds), John Clare, A Champion for the Poor (Ashington and Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 2000), p. 261.
- 51.
By Himself, p. 68. This is also a key passage in George Deacon’s account of the significance of song to Clare’s life and contexts. See Deacon, p. 38.
- 52.
By Himself, p. 30.
- 53.
EPII, pp. 593–7.
- 54.
Nor. 7, pp. 3A–B.
- 55.
Nor. 7, p. 3A. See also EPII, p. 591, ll. 11 and 22.
- 56.
See, for example, my discussion above of Richard Heath’s 1893 claim that Clare was ‘capable of being developed into the intensest patriotism, with a love of old customs and old institutions – in fact, a Conservative by nature’.
- 57.
Nor. 7, p. 3B.
- 58.
Paul Muskett summarises the sorts of people involved: ‘One hundred and twenty-three men appeared before the courts in connection with the agrarian disturbances of 1822. The Bury Gazette suggested that “great spouting radicals” had fomented discontent, but of all those whose occupations were given only 5 were designated as other than labourers; a yeoman, a farmer, an innkeeper, a carpenter and, almost predictably, a shoemaker. The rioters were usually active in their own villages and no evidence was produced of any general conspiracy or “organized system”…in 1822 the labourers were singleminded in their determination to put a stop to machinery.’ Paul Muskett, ‘The East Anglian Riots of 1822’, Agricultural History Review, 32.1 (1984), 1–13 (9).
- 59.
Edward Bond, The Fool and We Come to the River (London: Methuen, 1976). ‘On Entering Paradise’ appears on p. 75.
- 60.
A summary of the contents and political predispositions of labouring-class poetry in the first decades of the nineteenth century is offered by Scott McEathron (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets, 3 vols (Pickering and Chatto, 2006), 1, pp. xvii–xxiv.
- 61.
Bate, Biography, p. 351.
- 62.
See Muskett, ‘The East Anglian Riots of 1822’, 9.
- 63.
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 158.
- 64.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 305.
References
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Innes, Christopher, ‘Elemental, My Dear Clare: The Case of the Missing Poet’, in Martin Middeke and Werner Huber (eds), Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (London: Camden House, 1999), pp. 187–200
Insko, Jeffrey, ‘The Prehistory of Posthistoricism’, in Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox (eds), The Limits of Literary Historicism (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2011), pp. 105–23
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Lupton, Hugh, The Ballad of John Clare (Sawtry, Cambs.: Dedalus, 2010)
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——— Flora Britannica (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996)
——— Nature Cure (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005)
——— Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants (London: Profile Books, 2012)
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——— ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, Modern Language Notes, 94.5 (December 1979), 988–1032
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——— Voice of the Fire: A Novel (Atlanta and Portland: Top Shelf Productions, 2003)
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Kövesi, S. (2017). Conclusion: Clare as Our Contemporary; Clare as History. In: John Clare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59183-1_5
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