Providing the first reliable basis for a new assessment of John Clare's poetic growth, this two-volume collection presents all of Clare's early poems--many published here for the first time--and all known variants. Ranging from juvenilia to the published poems that first established Clare's reputation, this edition preserves Clare's characteristic spelling, punctuation, grammar, and vocabulary, and includes an introduction, extensive annotations, and a glossary.
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"A necessary purchase for libraries serving graduate programs in English, and desirable for larger libraries serving advanced undergraduates because no satisfactory selections of Clare's early poetry exist."--Choice
"This Clarendon Press edition is a splendid achievement."--JEGP
About the Author
John Clare (1793-1864) was an English poet, in his time commonly known as "the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet", the son of a farm labourer, born at Helpston near Peterborough. Eric Robinson is at University of Massachusetts. David Powell is at Nene College, Northampton.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The copyright tangle,
This review is from: The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804-1822: Volume I (Oxford English Texts) (Hardcover)
You should read an article about John Clare by John Lanchester in the New Yorker magazine, 27 October 2003 (pages 98-102). All my information comes from that article, which lauds Eric Robinson for decades spent assembling and publishing nine volumes of poems by John Clare, a penniless English peasant who overcame poverty to do his writing, including many poems written while in a British madhouse, where he died. The poems excerpted in the New Yorker are superb. Clare wrote about 3500 poems (Emily Dickinson only 1775). Along with the kudos to Robinson, the author of the New Yorker article criticizes him for buying up, for one pound, the copyright to all Clare's unpublished poems (the majority of them) and denying publication by others. Perhaps that is why this 500-odd page book costs $180.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Oxford English Texts: The View From the Pit,
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This review is from: The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804-1822: Volume I (Oxford English Texts) (Hardcover)
The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804-1822: Volume I (Oxford English Texts). Edited by Eric Robinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Hardcover, 638 pages. ISBN 0198123140
It isn't long since Oxford English Texts were truly superb books. They were sturdy books, well-printed in large readable fonts on excellent paper, sewn in signatures so that they could be opened flat without cracking the spine, and bound in real cloth. Not only were they real books, books built to last and that one was proud to own, but they were also a pleasure to read and were very reasonably priced. It seemed clear to me at the time that Oxford University Press was being run by honorable men who were concerned to give value for money and who took pride in the excellence of the products of their press, excellence not only in terms of superior scholarship but also in terms of design and physical makeup. Sitting on my shelves at the moment, for example, is my 3-volume OET Spenser, a set that has seen many years of hard service and that bids well still to be in good shape when the time comes for me to be transported out of this vale of tears into what I hope will turn out to be a more spiritual dimension, though one can never be sure of these things. But given all this I must now ask: What on earth happened to the Oxford University Press? Did some wicked witch wave a wand and transform the board of directors from the sober and responsible gentlemen they used to be into a bunch of malevolent grinning demons? I say this because, not only has the OUP suddenly stopped producing truly excellent and reasonably priced books, but the objects they are today producing can hardly be considered 'books' at all; perhaps 'quasi-book' might be a better designation. Although the scholarship of these OUP quasi-books remains impeccable, gone are all the other features I described above. Today we are being given texts in tiny and barely readable fonts and printed on stacks of loose sheets glued along the back and then slapped between a couple of thin pieces of paper-covered cardboard; what we are being given, in other words, are cheaply produced paperbacks masquerading as 'books' and designed to self-destruct after minimal use. And OUP actually has the audacity to ask for these wretched objects ten times as much as they formerly charged for a real book? Sometimes I think I must have died and woken up in hell. I would really have liked to have given this book 5 stars for its superb content as Eric Robinson and his colleagues have done a magnificent job of editing these important materials but, since only an extremely thin film of glue is holding the pages of my copy together I fear they may well start falling out and that this quasi-book will self-destruct before I am able to finish reading it, I am compelled to assign it only 2 stars, not only for its atrocious physical makeup but also of course because of its truly bizarre price. Details of the 9-vol. Oxford English Texts set of the complete poems of Clare are as follows: The Early Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996-2003); The Later Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Needless to say, all of these volumes are as overpriced and wretchedly produced as was the first volume.
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