John Clare By Himself [Paperback]

John Clare (Author), Eric Robinson (Editor), David Powell (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0415942349 | ISBN-13: 978-0415942348 | Edition: New edition

The story of the life of John Clare (1793-1864) was first set down more than a century ago, and it has captured the imagination of the reading public ever since. It is told most vividly and poignantly in John Clare's own words. The book includes an introduction, notes, two maps and a glossary of dialect and unfamiliar words, and is illustrated with wood engravings by John Lawrence.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Clare was an English rural-poet and storyteller, commonly known as the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet. David Powell was the librarian at Nene College, Northampton. Eric Robinson is a professor of modern history at the University of Massachusetts.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 388 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; New edition edition (September 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415942349
• ISBN-13: 978-0415942348
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,093,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An invaluable and fascinating life in incredible prose, October 14, 2009

By 

tepi "tepi" - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: John Clare By Himself (Paperback)

John Clare By Himself. Edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell. With Wood Engravings by John Lawrence. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002 (1996). Paperbound 364 pages. ISBN 1-85754-288-6.

'John Clare By Himself' is one of those rare finds, a truly golden book that all lovers of Clare's poetry should read. To fully appreciate his poetry one needs to know about his life and he himself in his 'Autobiographical Fragments', which takes up about a half of the present book, has provided the best account, an account that brings before our eyes, in his own words, a vivid portrait of the life and character of a fascinating man, with all his foibles and weaknesses, virtues and strengths, and also furnishes a detailed picture of the early 19th century English world of the laboring class that he was born into.

Clare was concerned in these writings to portray himself and his world as honestly as possible; within reason he wished to disclose everything and hide nothing. In doing so he runs through a whole gamut of emotions and is by turns joyous and sad, gratified and angry, patient and indignant, compassionate and vengeful, pleased and disgusted, confident and fearful, trusting and suspicious, amused and offended, etc. His frank and honest revelations have, in short, given us a book in which there is never a dull moment

The present book brings together everything of importance that Clare wrote about his life: 'Sketches', 'Autobiographical Fragments', 'Journal', etc., as well as his 'Journey Out of Essex', the famous account of his escape from Dr Matthew Allen's High Beach Private Asylum near Loughton, in Epping Forest, in 1841 and his 100-mile walk home to Northborough.

It's more than sad that John Clare (1793-1864), a major poet of towering genius, should have been so unfairly marginalized by society that he never succeeded in being accepted into the canon of English literature. Any reader of English poetry knows of Byron, Shelley, and Keats; glance in any anthology and you will find them represented by large chunks of their work. But although Clare was their contemporary and his work is certainly as great if not greater than theirs, it can take a long time to discover him and few today bother to read him.

As a 'peasant' Clare may be said to have depicted in his works, both in prose and verse, not a somewhat artificial and attenuated world as seen through the eyes of the upper classes but a far more vigorous and earthy world, a world bursting with life and teeming with an abundance of forms. Nothing is too mean for him to notice, nothing is beneath his gaze: men and women of all sorts and conditions and their joys, sufferings, and hardships; animals, birds, fish, frogs, bees, flies, beetles, spiders, ants, trees, flowers, fields, rivers, streams, storms, floods - all of these and more are set before us in the most incredible prose and in poems that haunt the memory.

It's true that Clare was born into the lowest and most oppressed class of all and that, as an agricultural laborer, he remained (at least in the formal sense) uneducated, never did learn how to spell or punctuate, and was so poor that there were times when he couldn't even afford to buy paper or ink. It's also true that, after suffering a nervous breakdown, he was certified as insane and spent the last twenty-two years of his life in lunatic asylums.

But despite this it has to be said that the man was a veritable fountain of the most sublime poetry, and some of his finest work was actually written during his asylum years. Clare's exquisite sensitivity to the world around him was so acute, and his love of that world was so great, a superabundance of marvelous lines embodying his perceptions, thoughts, and feelings constantly flowed from him and at his death, besides many thousands of pages of a prose which is often every bit as interesting as his poetry, he left over 3500 poems less than one tenth of which saw print during his lifetime as he never did achieve the kind of success he both deserved and longed for.

His complete poems were not even published until the 20th Century when they appeared in the extremely expensive and now virtually unobtainable 9-volume Oxford English Texts edition of 1989-1996; sadly, no reader's edition of this scholarly magnum opus has appeared and much of his prose still remains in manuscript.

For a while, as a 'peasant poet' and therefore something of an interesting oddity, Clare had been lionized by the smart set. But as time went by their interest fell off. The world was changing and the public's taste for poetry was drying up as novel-reading became more popular.

If he had been born in the heyday of poetry twenty years earlier he might have succeeded in getting more of his work published but it was not to be. Just as the beloved trees and fields and streams around his village of Helpstone that he had rejoiced in as as a boy were gradually to be enclosed, sealed off, and to end up bristling with NO TRESPASSING signs, Clare, tragically, was to find that the realm of literary fame was similarly barred to him.

There were many reasons for this, but I can't help thinking that the main reason he failed to carve out a niche for himself in the canon of English poets was that he was born into the wrong class. Perhaps Geoffrey Grigson, one of Clare's earlier editors, may be allowed to speak the last words:

"Clare was a great man, a great poet.... Terrible it seems that such crystalline ability, such lucidity, such incandescence of mental substance, had to consort with deprivation and failure, and with hardness from the world."