"I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare

by John Clare, Jonathan Bate (Editor)

Overview

Hail, humble Helpstone ...
Where dawning genius never met the day,
Where useless ignorance slumbers life away
Unknown nor heeded, where low genius tries
Above the vulgar and the vain to rise.
—from "Helpstone"

"I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare is the first anthology of the great "peasant poet"'s remarkable verse that makes available the full range of his accomplishments. Here are the different Clares that have beguiled readers for two centuries: the tender chronicler of nature and childhood; the champion of folkways in the face of oppression; the passionate, sweet-tongued love-poet; and the lonely visionary confined, in old age and senility, to asylums.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374528690
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/15/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.77(d)

About the Author

John Clare (1793-1864) lived all his life in rural Northamptonshire. He is widely celebrated as one of England's great nature and folklife writers.

Jonathan Bate is the author of Shakespeare and Ovid (1993) and The Genius of Shakespeare (1997). He is Leverhulme Research Professor and King Alfred Professor of English at the University of Warwick.

Table of Contents

	A Chronology	XI
	A Note on This Selection	XV
	Early Poems
	To the Fox Fern	3
	Schoolboys in Winter	4
	To an Infant Sister in Heaven	5
	A Moment's Rapture While Bearing the Lovely Weight of A. S--r--s	6
	A Ramble	7
	Dedication to Mary	9
	from Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820)
	from Helpstone	15
	What is Life?	19
	Dawnings of Genius	21
	Patty	23
	The Primrose	24
	The Gypsies' Evening Blaze	25
	The River Gwash	26
	The Meeting	27
	from The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems (1821)
	from The Village Minstrel	31
	Song ("Swamps of wild rush-beds and sloughs' squashy traces")	39
	To an Infant Daughter	40
	Langley Bush	42
	The Last of March (written at Lolham Brigs)	43
	To my Cottage	47
	In Hilly Wood	48
	To Autumn	49
	from The Parish
	[Miss Peevish Scornful]	53
	The Progress of Cant	55
	The Overseer	57
	from The Shepherd's Calendar (1827)
	January	61
	from March	74
	from May	76
	from June	78
	from July [manuscript version]	80
	from September	82
	from October [manuscript draft]	83
	from December	86
	The Moors	89
	from The Midsummer Cushion
	Shadows of Taste	95
	Childhood	101
	The Moorhen's Nest	116
	The Progress of Rhyme	120
	Remembrances	132
	Swordy Well	135
	Emmonsails Heath in Winter	136
	Love and Memory	137
	The Fallen Elm	141
	The Landrail	144
	Pastoral Poesy	147
	The Wren	152
	Wood Pictures in Spring	153
	The Hollow Tree	154
	The Sand Martin	155
	from The Rural Muse (1835)
	from To the Rural Muse	159
	Autumn	163
	The Nightingale's Nest	168
	The Eternity of Nature	172
	Emmonsales Heath	176
	Decay: A Ballad	180
	The Pettichap's Nest	183
	The Yellowhammer's Nest	185
	The Skylark	187
	First Love's Recollections	189
	Summer Moods	192
	Evening Schoolboys	193
	The Shepherd Boy	194
	Lord Byron	195
	To the Memory of Bloomfield	196
	Beans in Blossom	197
	To De Wint	198
	Sudden Shower	199
	Stepping Stones	200
	Pleasant Places	201
	On Leaving the Cottage of my Birth	202
	Poems Written at Northborough
	To the Snipe	207
	[The Lament of Swordy Well]	211
	Snowstorm	220
	Bumbarrel's Nest	221
	Open Winter	222
	[Double Sonnet on the Marten]	223
	[Sonnet Sequence on Fox and Badger]	225
	[Field-Mouse's Nest]	228
	[Birds at Evening]	229
	[Trespass]	230
	Glinton Spire	231
	Poems Written at the High Beach Asylum
	A Walk in the Forest	235
	London versus Epping Forest	236
	The Gypsy Camp	237
	Two songs and some stanzas from Child Harold: Song ("The sun has gone down with a veil on his brow")	238
	[stanzas] ("Mary, thou ace of hearts, thou muse of song")	239
	[song] Written in a Thunderstorm July 15th 1841	242
	Don Juan: A Poem	244
	Poems and Prose Written at Northborough, Between Two Asylums
	Recollections of Journey from Essex [prose account]	257
	Two songs for Child Harold: Song a ("I've wandered many a weary mile")	265
	Song b ("Here's where Mary loved to be")	266
	[Prose sketch]: "Closes of greensward"	267
	[Lines Written on St Martin's Day, 11 November 1841, manuscript text]	268
	Poetry Written While an Inmate of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum
	Graves of Infants	271
	Stanzas ("Black absence hides upon the past")	272
	To Mary	273
	A Vision	274
	Sonnet ("Poets love nature")	275
	An Invite to Eternity	276
	The Dying Child	278
	The Invitation	280
	Lines: "I Am"	282
	Sonnet: "I Am"	283
	Song ("True love lives in absence")	284
	My Early Home Was This	286
	The Winter's Spring	287
	Sonnet: Wood Anemone	289
	Sonnet: The Crow	290
	Pleasant Sounds	291
	Clock-a-clay	292
	Childhood	294
	To be Placed at the Back of his Portrait	296
	The Yellowhammer	298
	How Can I Forget	299
	To John Clare	300
	Birds' Nests	301
	Glossary	305
	Sources	309
	Index	313

Editorial Reviews

What distinguishes Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world.” —Seamus Heaney

“Clare grabs hold of you—no, he doesn't grab hold of you, he is already there, talking to you before you've arrived on the scene, telling you about himself, about the things that are closest and dearest to him, and it would no more occur to him to do otherwise than it would occur to Whitman to stop singing you his song of himself.” —John Ashbery

From the Publisher

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. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Best remembered for his descriptive nature writings and considered by many "the poet's poet," John Clare (1793-1864) never received recognition as a major Romantic poet. In his lengthy scholarly biography, well-known Shakespeare scholar Bate (The Genius of Shakespeare) draws on letters, journals, poems, and previous biographical accounts to reconstruct the life of this enigmatic working-class English poet. Focusing primarily on Clare's career as a published poet from 1819 to 1835, Bate closely examines Clare's long-term relationship with editor John Taylor, whose heavy hand was instrumental in deciphering Clare's handwriting and correcting his grammar. As Bate reveals, even with the sales of four volumes of poetry and regular financial support from friends and patrons, Clare and his family lived in poverty all their lives. His unhappy marriage, desire to please his politically correct patrons, and drive to produce successful publications caused him immense mental strain. He continued to write poetry during his descent into depression and throughout the 20-plus years he spent in asylums. Bate masterfully points out where data are lacking or misleading. Although some details of the poet's relationship with his wife and children are somewhat glossed over, this long-awaited literary biography effectively fills a void. Appropriate for all academic libraries. "Small joy to him were childhood's tempting tricks,/ Which schoolboys look for in their vacant hours;/ With other boys he little cared to mix;/ Joy left him lonely in his hawthorn bowers." These lines from Clare's largely autobiographical poem, "The Village Minstrel," included in a new collection edited by Bate, reveal not only the protagonist's isolation but Clare's as well. Released this fall simultaneously with Bate's biography of the poet, the collection focuses on Clare's descriptions of rural life, with a few selections on childhood, love, and philosophy. Out of the mass of writing Clare produced during his lifetime, Bate has carefully selected poems from each of his published volumes for this short but concise offering. Included are writings from Clare's earliest days all the way through poems and prose written at the asylums. Clare celebrated nature in most of his writings, as in the poems about bird nesting and in the poem "The Shepherd's Calendar," which chronicles nature's changes during each month of the year. But as this collection discloses, Clare also used his poetry to criticize the wealthy. An excellent introduction to Clare's work, this is appropriate for all libraries.-Jaime Anderson, Henrico Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal