New Essays on John Clare

John Clare (1793-1864) has long been recognised as one of England's foremost poets of nature, landscape and rural life. Scholars and general readers alike regard his tremendous creative output as a testament to a probing and powerful intellect. Clare was that rare amalgam – a poet who wrote from a working-class, impoverished background, who was steeped in folk and ballad culture, and who yet, against all social expectations and prejudices, read and wrote himself into a grand literary tradition.

All the while he maintained a determined sense of his own commitments to the poor, to natural history, and to the local. Through the diverse approaches of ten proven literary scholars, this collection brings out the ways in which Clare's many angles of critical vision illuminate current understandings of environmental ethics, aesthetics, Romantic and Victorian literary history, and the nature of work.

Introduction Simon Kövesi and Scott McEathron

Part I. Poetry
1. John Clare's colours Fiona Stafford
2. John Clare, William Cowper and the eighteenth century Adam Rounce
3. John Clare's conspiracy Sarah M. Zimmerman

Part II. Culture
4. John Clare and the new varieties of enclosure: a polemic John Burnside
5. Ecology with religion: kinship in John Clare Emma Mason
6. The lives of Frederick Martin and the first Life of John Clare Scott McEathron
7. John Clare's deaths: poverty, education, and poetry Simon Kövesi

Part III. Community
8. John Clare's natural history Robert Heyes
9. 'This is radical slang': John Clare, Admiral Lord John Radstock and the Queen Caroline affair Sam Ward
10. John Clare and the London Magazine Richard Cronin