A Natural Poet

John Clare
A Biography
by Jonathan Bate
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 672 pp., $40

"I Am"
The Selected Poetry of John Clare
edited by Jonathan Bate
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 344 pp., $17

THE EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY John Clare is the best English poet that hardly anyone reads. Or so, at least, contends Jonathan Bate, whose "John Clare: A Biography" has recently appeared, along with a new edition of poems by the Romantic poet: "'I Am': The Selected Poetry of John Clare." Bate, a distinguished Shakespeare scholar, claims to have discovered Clare through a love of nature poetry and his interest in the link between creativity and madness. He spent five years with Clare's copious literary remains and decided to act on his conviction that "John Clare is the one major English poet never to have received a biography worthy of his memory."

Born in 1793, Clare was a farm laborer who grew up in grinding poverty. He was the village oddity--a boy who revered learning, who preferred time alone with a book or long solitary rambles in nature. When he came to national attention in 1820 for his first collection, "Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery," his publishers lauded him as the English "peasant" poet, the counterpart of Scotland's Robert Burns.

It both helped and hurt Clare's reputation to be labeled a "peasant savant"--just as it both helped and hurt his reputation to be known as a "mad poet" when, later, stress unhinged his mind and he was committed to a lunatic asylum. He seemed a two-trick pony: a fellow who dashed off a few good verses despite the dirt under his fingernails and the demons beneath his brow. His most commonly anthologized poem, "Lines: I Am," written in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, begins:

I am--yet what I am, none cares or knows; 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--like vapours tossed.

Like the other Romantics, Clare glorified the Individual--even this individual who cannot name himself. And like them, Clare celebrated childhood's innocence. Many of his poems are about memory and loss, intimations of mortality, the marvels of the natural landscape. He also captured the folk songs and tales of his region before they disappeared and enshrined the vernacular speech of his time and place. His poems crackle with local dialect: "pooty" means "snail shell," "crizzle" is "freeze," "flaze" is a smoky flame.

As woods were razed and the open fields around him enclosed by landowners, Clare rushed to record nature as he knew it before the fences went up. As his friends the gypsies were driven from their traditional camping grounds, Clare jotted down their stories and recorded their songs (a fiddler, he also taught himself how to write music). And the result is that his poems do capture the landscape. Indeed, he noted that John Keats, like "other inhabitants of great cities, often described nature as she appeared to his fancies and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described." Clare's own "The Nightingale's Nest" thus offers a naturalist's counterpoint to Keats's mythologically inspired "Ode to a Nightingale."

Jonathan Bate argues that "the art of noticing was one of Clare's principal poetic gifts." A shepherd-boy looks up at the wild geese gabbling overhead and He marks the figured forms in which they fly / And pausing, follows with a wondering eye, / Likening their curious march in curves or rows / To every letter which his memory knows. Birds, fens, harvest suppers, haymaking, cowslips, and orchids populate Clare's work, their joys ceaselessly lamented, as in "Childhood":

When we look back on what we were And feel what we are now, A fading leaf is not so drear Upon a broken bough, A winter seat without a fire, A cold world without friends Doth not such chilly glooms impart As that one word portends.

Poor Clare grew increasingly alienated from his childhood, his homeplace, and himself as he grew older. While a boy, he began working full-time--first as a farm laborer, later as a lime-burner. What money he earned had to support his parents and sister because of his father's rheumatism. His compensations he found first in nature, and then in women and alcohol. He retained an idealized image of a schoolgirl, Mary Joyce, whom he could never hope to marry. Late in his life, in the Northampton Asylum, he believed he was actually married to her as well as his real wife, Patty. He also believed he was Lord Byron (and wrote catchy, lewd revisions of "Don Juan" and "Childe Harold") and a prize fighter.

John Clare was something of a nine-days' wonder in England after his first book of poems; by the time his three other--and better--collections appeared, no one cared much anymore about the untutored genius. Rousseau's "noble savage" had disappeared with the forests, Shelley and Byron were dead by the mid-1820s, and, anyway, poetry had fallen out of fashion, plowed under by the novel. Clare was weighted down with cares--he'd married his pregnant girlfriend and moved her into his parents' cottage; his poetry earned little, and, despite the help of literary friends, he still had to work as a manual laborer to feed his family, which ultimately grew to include a half-dozen children.

One of his aristocratic patrons set his family up in a better cottage some miles away from his homeplace of Helpston. The house was bigger, cleaner, better ventilated, and it had a garden, but leaving the village of his birth for a hostile new village (the locals resented the lord's giving Clare the renovated cottage) only deepened Clare's depression. By 1834, blue devils became his constant companions. He began to see evil spirits around him and to believe that his family was bewitched. His brains felt like they were boiling, while his limbs burned. Sometimes he could not leave the cottage; other times manic energy consumed him and he wrote reams of sonnets. A characteristic one, about a badger hunted by dogs, runs:

He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies And leaves his hold and cackles, groans, and dies.

In 1837, he was committed to an asylum, for his own welfare and that of his family. Happily for John Clare, during his era "Moral Treatment" was the new philosophy of mental care. In the two asylums where he spent the rest of his life (with the exception of a few months when he escaped and walked home to his family), warm baths, good food, and cozy rooms with fireplaces were the norm for less-afflicted patients like Clare. Clare also enjoyed the privilege of walking out in the nearby woods and to local villages; he could also work in the asylum gardens, read, write, and play ball games or chess.

Although he missed home desperately and sex particularly, his physical health blossomed. Nor was he without intellectual companionship--other writers and artists were "guests" at his asylum, including, for a few months, the young Alfred Tennyson. He lived until 1864, a plump, ruddy-cheeked fellow, known in the village of Northampton as a poet who was happy to write poems for money, a quid of tobacco, or a pint of ale.

So, why should we care about him now? Not because he was a peasant poet. There were several of them at the time; it was the vogue early in the nineteenth century, and, anyway, Robert Burns has that niche locked up. And not because he was a mad poet. There were several of those at the time, as well, and Christopher Smart seems to be the acknowledged champion of that era's fascination for the poetry of the insane asylum.

No, Clare deserves reading mostly because he was the best nature poet of his era. As Bate puts it, "Clare knew his environment with a lived intimacy that sets him apart from well-born pastoral poets." Precisely because our age celebrates nature writing, Clare should fare better now than he did in his own day.

And what is Life? An hourglass on the run, A mist retreating from the morning sun, A busy bustling still repeated dream. Its length? A minute's pause, a moment's thought. And happiness? A bubble on the stream That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.

Bate is right that to read such poems is to see that John Clare is a major Romantic who belongs beside Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

Susan Balée is writing the gallery guide to the Barnes Foundation's art collection.