Return of the Peasant Poet

...they demand little scholarly gloss beyond the translation of a few archaic words...

...Anthologists have not overlooked Clare's tuneful lyrics...

...A severe recession, culminating in the Great Panic of 1826, put some 80 banks out of business, bankrupted publishing houses, and ruined authors as commercially successful as Sir Walter Scott...

...By 1837 family and friends had him certified at a private asylum in Epping Forest, on the northeast edge of London...

...Though more original, it did not match the first book's sales, perhaps because of its length...

...A mere 5' tall when fully grown, he was less adept at field labor than his sturdier father, so he sought alternatives, including gardening—an indulgence of his love of plants—to supplement his income...

...This romantic impulse also sparked an interest in "natural" (i.e...

...Country dialect often marked Clare's verse: An "ash-dotterel" describes the tree's having been cut to produce a rounded crown of branches...

...Meanwhile, he and Patty continued to have children (seven out of nine survived), increasing the poet's burdens at home...

...Robert Burns was popular, and another working-class poet, Robert Bloomfield, had recently made a name for himself...

...There, too, he was allowed to walk to the village, and he continued to write poetry—carefree lyrics about nature as well as despairing laments for the past...

...All along he saved every scrap of paper for scribbling poetry...

...Years later he told a friend, "I wrote because it pleased me in sorrow—and when I am happy it makes me more happy and so I go on...

...Yet unless you remember freshman English in exceptional detail, you probably cannot dredge up many facts about his life or name the title of a poem, much less recall that over 3,500 ofhis verses have been preserved...

...Therefore, I Am prints a regularized text, except for two excerpts from The Shepherd's Calendar, which allow the reader to confront the crudities of the poet's manuscripts head on...

...Textual problems have complicated matters and continue to provoke disputes in the scholarly community...

...Shy, with rustic manners, he nevertheless charmed people...

...a sonnet written in his early 40s, demonstrates his habitual close observation of surroundings...

...My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivion's host: Like shadows in love-frenzied stifled throes— And yet I am and live— Following his death, a few of Clare's poems enjoyed some posthumous fame in periods when lyric poetry was popular...

...uneducated) poets...

...Thus encouraged, Clare produced a spate of new poems, many of which appeared the following year as The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems...

...A number of wealthy patrons set up a trust for his support so he would have more time to write...

...Through a series of fortunate contacts, Clare's first book, Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published in 1820 by Taylor and Hessey, the London firm that had recently brought out Endymion by the young Cockney John Keats...

...As Bate points out, however, the climate for poetry was not good...

...But the poet's psychologists did understand that his delusions revealed resentment that his early literary success had withered...

...Moreover, in his extensive note to I Am Bate cites evidence that Clare "positively wanted his friends and publishers to assist him in the preparation of his work for the press...

...Actually, the year of Clare's arrival in the world was marked by sweeping changes: The French executed Louis XVI and Britain, anxious that revolutionary fervor might spread across the channel, put its Navy to sea and prepared for war...

...25 examples appear in The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, and most collections covering that period include several of his works...

...One sustained work, "The Parish," a series of sketches—some satirical, others sympathetic—limning a community through its inhabitants, reads like a precursor of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology...

...The Hollow Tree...

...Fans of the "peasant poet" flocked to Helpston to meet him...

...As a young poet, he was subject to censorship when he complained in print that the rural poor were oppressed or protested the enclosure laws' conversion of common lands into private property...

...He claimed to be the late Lord Byron, composing several "new" cantos of "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan" in the style of the originals, plus a few obscene passages, reproduced by Bate, that involve the young Queen Victoria...

...The poem evokes aparticular tree, much loved as a boyhood refuge: How oft a summer shower hath started me To seek for shelter in an hollow tree: Old huge ash-dotterel wasted to a shell, Wlwse vigorous head still grew and flourished well, Wliere ten might sit upon the battered floor And still look round discovering room for more...

...And he who chose a hennit life to share Might have a door and make a cabin there— They seemed so like a house that our desires Would call them so and make our gypsy fires And eat field dinners of the juicy peas Till we were wet and drabbled to the knees...

...Perhaps, too, the label "peasant poet" tended to suggest from the start that Clare was a curiosity rather than the serious poet he proved to be...

...One of them, Mary Joyce, roused his imagination throughout his life, though he last saw her in 1821...

...Bate dryly attributes this diagnosis to 19th-century England's class consciousness...

...These selections inspire gratitude for Bate's judicious work on the rest of the poems...

...Is it truer to the original to leave the text as a largely self-taught author wrote it, with its unconventional spelling and lack of punctuation, or should the poems be standardized and made more enjoyable...

...He was a hypochondriac, but it is possible that some of his complaints stemmed from venereal disease...

...Peasants like the poet's family rented cottages from the local squire in exchange for their grueling manual labor on his land...

...In this groundbreaking biography and the judicious selection of poems in I Am, John Clare's voice carries across the centuries and speaks to us as freshly as the unspoiled nature he loved...

...To the disapproval of his highborn patrons, he remained an inveterate skirt chaser...

...Some betray his mental confusion, some are among his most powerful works...

...After this he dwelled increasingly on a lost time when wildcats still roamed England freely, villagers baited badgers with dogs for sport, and ancient superstitions held sway...

...As A youngster, Clare was encouraged to read as widely as his limited access to printed materials allowed, and until age 13 his parents sent him to school whenever they could afford the fees...

...Ironically, Clare's instincts were conservative and monarchial, yet he still identified with a peasantry struggling for its livelihood within a volatile economic system...

...I suspect one reason for this, though Bate does not mention it, is the easy, self-explanatory quality of most of Clare's musical lyrics...

...A portrait of the young Clare depicts an ethereally boyish face, alive with enthusiasm, "'more cowslip than cowherd," according to one of his editors...

...In John Clare: A Biography (Farrar Straus Giroux, 548 pp., $40.00) Jonathan Bate argues that the honor belongs instead to the "Peasant Poet of Northamptonshire...

...His fantasies, which paired feelings of grandeur and persecution, grew wilder and more frequent the longer he stayed at the asylum...

...He taught himself mathematics as well as some botany, and devoured the works of every poet he could find...

...His unaffected diction, blessedly unencumbered by the ornate conventions of his time, sounds contemporary...

...At times, Clare insisted she was his daughter...

...Poverty, madness and, above all, lost love make for an engrossing story...

...In becoming a celebrated poet," Bate writes, "Clare found himself not only torn from his own world of rural labor, but also torn between the very different assumptions and manners of the aristocracy and the middle classes...

...An American visitor shrewdly observed that the patient confused what he had read with his own experience...

...The reviews praised his lyric touch and stunning powers of observation...

...Ashbery captured the quality of his friendly immediacy: "[Clare is] 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...

...In one of his last poems, Clare wrote: I am—yet what I am, none cares or knows...

...A few of Clare's verses appeared in local newspapers, and a new collection was discussed but never assembled...

...Clare's effusive productivity, though, resulted in his writing essays and longer poems...

...His editors were faced with the task of deciphering his crabbed handwriting, correcting many peculiarities of spelling and punctuation, and culling an excess of verses into a manageable book...

...Clare's poetic aspirations burgeoned during an era that prized nature and folk verses...

...Nevertheless, he remains largely overlooked by academics and the poetry-reading public...

...Shortly afterward Clare's bipolar tendencies began to manifest themselves...

...His third collection, The Shepherd's Calendar, took years to produce because of editorial problems, but contained his strongest work...

...Aside from hallucinations that Clare recorded in his letters, it is not known what symptoms led to his being committed...

...In an age when universities produce most of our literary criticism, poetry that is too easily understood tends to be shoved aside in favor of complex work that cannot be deciphered without elaborate exegesis...

...The financial windfall allowed Clare to marry Patty a few months before the birth of their first child...

...Although his vivid account of this homecoming, written shortly afterward, sounds sane in its descriptions of scenery and Clare's experiences, madness is evident in passages concerning his two families...

...But in our old tree house, rain as it might, Not one drop fell although it rained all night...

...Clare cherished the memory of this pastoral existence until his death in 1864, and many ofhis poems mine childhood nostalgia...

...By the time he composed this sonnet he had moved a few miles from Helpston to Northborough...

...Lines he wrote lamenting the decline of fellow rural poet Robert Bloomfield's reputation in favor of more fashionable writers apply even more to himself: "[The verses] shall murmur on to many a spring/When their proud streams are summer-burnt and dry...

...In the summer of 1841, Clare left the asylum for one of his daily strolls in the forest but instead walked all the way back to Northborough—an 80-mile journey that lasted four days...

...With his newfound reputation and money in his pocket, Clare started to drink heavily, pursued extramarital affairs and frequented prostitutes...

...On several occasions the young poet visited London, where he met various distinguished writers, including William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Thomas De Quincey...

...Now and then visitors dropped in on the once celebrated poet and often found him claiming to be a well-known prizefighter, or Byron, or an eyewitness to historical events that took place centuries earlier...

...By surveying a broad selection of his subject's work, he sustains his contention that Clare ought to be considered a major poet...

...Such questions are relevant, but the example of Emily Dickinson illustrates that satisfying resolutions are possible...

...The establishment was run on humane and enlightened principles...

...Bate makes Clare's life as fascinating for us today as it was for Victorians, and his scholarship corrects the mistakes of earlier biographers without clogging the narrative...

...Clare lived at home for four months before he was recommitted, this time to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1864, at age 71...

...Bate does point t? another reason for the fate of Clare's output: The pathos of his biography— the first one appeared shortly after he died—captivated readers more than the poetry itself...

...Financial disputes, both with his publishers and with his lordly patrons, put him under further stress...

...In 1832 Clare and his family were offered a larger cottage in the nearby village of Northborough...

...Delusional, exhausted and hungry, he arrived convinced he had married both Mary Joyce and Patty, and was disconcerted by not finding the former waiting for him...

...spurts of manic composition would give way to spans of lethargic depression when he could accomplish nothing...

...A sympathetic caretaker preserved his manuscripts...

...drabbled" clothes have been splashed with mud...

...As oral traditions were dying out in rural cultures, scholars rushed to record ballads and fairy tales for posterity...

...In our own day, discussions of the late Ted Hughes also tend to center more on the poet's life than his work...

...The causes of this important writer's neglect are outlined in Bate's engrossing volume, and the biographer has simultaneously edited "I Am ": The Selected Poetiy of John Clare (Farrar Straus Giroux, 311 pp., $ 17.00), further illustrating his subject's range...

...Clare was born in 1793, the eldest child of a farm day laborer in the village of Helpston, and grew up in a rural society whose traditions were rapidly vanishing...

...The move from his boyhood home, coupled with the decline of his literary fortunes, brought on a severe depression that festered over the next few years into insanity...

...inmates were allowed out for walks, and some—including the future laureate Alfred Tennyson— were treated like guests at a hotel...

...She had died in an accident a year earlier...

...During Clare's youth and early adulthood, the government's growing concern for national security turned repressive...

...Several modern poets, including Robert Graves, Theodore Roethke, John Ashbery, and Seamus Heaney, have credited him with influencing them...

...Doctors diagnosed his insanity as a case of too much study and poetry writing by an insufficiently educated person...

...Clare's collection sold out rapidly and went to three printings in that year alone...

...By then he had married Martha Turner (called Patty...

...These works, of course, remained unpublished until well into the 20th century...

...Besides the natural world, his topics were the people and customs of his village and his infatuations with local girls...