"I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare (Paperback)

by John Clare (Author), Jonathan Bate (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Though he has steadily furnished anthology pieces, and has been cited repeatedly by John Ashbery as an influence, only recently have scholars and critics, often inspired by Clare's stands on behalf of the poor and by his "green" perspectives on forests and fields, tried to launch him as a major poet. A passionate observer of rural England, and a poet of visionary, even hallucinatory, extremes, Clare (1793-1864) emerged from village poverty to modest success as a "peasant poet" before mental illness confined him to asylums, where he produced works for which there are few points of comparison. Distinguished British academic Bate (whose Clare biography will be published along with this edition) presents the first recent American edition of Clare aimed at nonacademic readers. He draws liberally from Clare's large oeuvre-from long poems, from Clare's most famous prose piece (a record of an eighty-mile foot journey)-and, in a controversial intervention, adds the punctuation, line-breaks and other emendations that Clare had explicitly expected to be part of his printed texts. The results are impressive, though a shorter selection might have made a better case for Clare's greatness: Clare's poems of the 1820s and '30s (the only ones published in books during his lifetime) follow their 18th-century models too closely, and often repeat themselves. Clare's asylum poems, however, sound like nothing else on earth. These include tightly wound cries against isolation and lost love; rigorously attentive descriptions of vulnerable badgers, fragile birds and displaced people; and even energetic long poems that Clare wrote as Lord Byron. Sort through the less-inspired couplets and discover a voice neglected in his lifetime, but impossible to forget once heard.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Bate has made his own chronological selection of Clare's verse, titled after Clare's most famous poem written while institutionalized, to consult before and after as well as while reading his biography, John Clare. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (November 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374528691
• ISBN-13: 978-0374528690
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #649,975 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Stuff, Questionable Selection, June 10, 2004

By	Gianmarco Manzione (Tampa, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The only thing more remarkable than John Clare's talent is that it has taken so long for it to receive the wider audience it deserves. Time and again in Jonathan Bate's appreciable but over-long biography we learn of great poems left to petrify in the dust of museums until "well into the twentieth century." That neglect alone qualifies as a disturbing testament to the cruelty with which some of literature's greatest geniuses flounder and fade under the rubble of history. Though Bate's recent biography is commendable in its success at introducing readers not just to Clare's complicated character, but also to the poet's technical, formal and linguistic ingenuity; he consistently describes poems in the biography that he chose not to include in this "Selected Poems." Most tragic is his decision not to include so many of the poems left out of the original published version of "The Rurual Muse." Moreover, to consider Bate's tantalizing description of some of the poems included in "The Rural Muse" along with his decision to leave them out of this Selected Poems is to encounter the strange misguidedness with which Clare's genius has been treated over the centuries. Writing of "Mary," the childhood love of Clare's life that haunted him into his grave, Bate says that "She is the subject of `The Milking Hour' which "recalls a final evening conversation with her, walking in a wheat field; and in `Nutting'" in which "Clare compares her auburn hair to the colour of ripe hazels, they shell nuts together, she flirtatiously throws the shells at him and then blushes when he pockets the husks as a keepsake." Yet neither poem can be found in this book. Even if page-count was the issue in putting this book together (one that contributed to the unfortunate underrepresentation of Clare's work in his lifetime), I seriously doubt that a lousy two more poems -- the very poems about which Bate speaks so seductively in his biography -- would have been problematic. Such tender images as Bate offers with regard to these poems must have made for some riveting verse from Clare, especially considering the enormous power of "First Love's Recollection," another poem about Mary from "The Rural Muse" Bate deigned to include here, or another of Clare's great "Mary" poems, "Love and Memory":

Thou art gone the dark journey
That leaves no returning;
`Tis fruitless to mourn thee
But who can help mourning
To think of the life
That did laugh on thy brow
In the beautiful past
Left so desolate now?

This is just the first stanza of a poem whose unusual lyrical intensity is sustained throughout. Why Bate couldn't have tossed in just a few more such poems - particularly the ones he talks about in his biography - is as baffling as it is enraging. After so much neglect and misfortune, one would think that Bate might have been a bit more discerning in his choice of poems to include here. It is time for Clare's reputation to be granted its very just reward, and I am afraid that Bate may have missed his chance. (Though I see that he has chosen to participate in the debate himself here, which exemplifies the deep love that must have motivated him to spend so much time and energy on the biography. His point about ratings and discussion is an excellent one.)

Nonetheless, readers will undoubtedly be thankful for some of the unbelievable writing Bate did select for this collection, such as the riveting "The Fallen Elm" in which we find ghostly anticipations of Auden, Philip Levine and Seamus Heany. Speaking of the elm whose falling prompted one of the most moving letters to a friend Clare ever penned, Clare writes:

Thou owned a language by which hearts are stirred
Deeper than by a feeling clothed in words,
And speakest now what's known of every tongue,
Language of pity and the force of wrong.

What amazing writing. That last line smacks of Auden's best work, particularly his masterful "September 1, 1939." The broad strokes of Clare's longer work are matched in power only by his more compact and formally unprecedented sonnets. In the biography, Bates writes that "Clare challenged the conventions of poetic diction by using the vocabulary of his region; in his poems of the 1830s he challenged the conventions of form, revealing that the sonnet could be divided up in new ways." Bates goes on to note that some of the rhyme schemes Clare employed in his sonnets are without precedent, while the timing of his execution simultaneously challenges and revitalizes an overly familiar poetic form. But beyond all of this jargon and technical criticism, the sheer emotional boundlessness of so many of Clare's sonnets is what really strikes home. Bates suggests that Clare is England's greatest poet of childhood. While I think such a statement undermines Blake's achievement, it is not unfair to consider Clare a very close second to Blake. Poems like Blake's "London" or "The Sick Rose" meet their match in some of Clare's more impassioned stretches of verse.

That the world has gone without fully recognizing one of its quieter geniuses is a sad fact of history now. At least someone is trying. Though Bate counts Clare's complete poems to the amount of "3500," it does not seem unreasonable to ask for a more comprehensive representation of the man's achievement. After all, Thomas Hardy's complete poems is over 900 pages long, and while the power of Hardy's work waned with age, Clare wrote some great material while languishing away in asylums as an older man. Even Hardy's amazing earlier poems -- "The Darkling Thrush" or "Neutral Tones," for instance -- fail to entirely outdo a good portion of Clare's work. The two poets are quite comparable, especially since Clare tackled precisely the same themes -- nature, mortality, lost loves, nostalgia -- and sometimes with just as much if not more majesty. I really applaud Bate's great effort on behalf of Clare, and though asking for more in the face of such hard work does little justice to my sincere gratitude, I still think some attention need be paid to the scattered nature of Clare's published writings. I think a fuller example of his work ought to be included in one book, not thrown across many different volumes. If Bate is not the man for this job, hopefully somebody else will be in my lifetime.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Correction of other review, January 30, 2004

By	Prof. Jonathan Bate "jbate97" (Univ Warwick, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

The reviewer who states that Clare did not want his poems punctuated is in profound error, as I demonstrate at length in my biography of Clare. He did. 'Unpunctuated' Clare is a 20th century editorial construct that perpetuates the myth of the 'peasant poet'.

(Apologies for filling in a rating box, but the system wouldn't let me leave it blank: how typical of our culture where everything has to be ranked rather than discussed!)

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historical and Delightful and Beyond Price, October 29, 2003

By	S. Hutton "Scott Hutton" (Hartsdale, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you have any claim to love of poetry please have a glance at this book. Reading Clare, when he's got it on, is like walking through the countryside of a land that no longer exists...but can still, in 2003, through many of these poems, be seen. I opened this book thinking to read for ten minutes or so but could not put it down...