John Clare (1793-1864) 

John Clare is often considered to be the quintessential nature poet of the Romantic era. He was acclaimed as a "natural poet" from the time his first volume, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, appeared in 1820. Unlike Burns, whose education undercut claims for his status as a "primitive" or "rustic," Clare was an uneducated field laborer who produced direct, sensuous lyrics recording the natural world around his native village of Helpston in Northamptonshire. Although influenced by his reading of  Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Byron, his poetic style and manuscript idiosyncrasies reveal a verbal immediacy that makes him unique among the poets of his era:
While ground larks on a sweeing clump of rushes
Or on the top twigs of the oddling bushes
Chirp their 'cree creeing' note that sounds of spring
And sky larks meet the sun wi flittering wing
Soon as the morning opes its brightning eye
Large clouds of sturnels blacken thro the sky
From oizer holts about the rushy fen
And reedshaw borders by the river Nen
                         (from "March," The Shepherd's Calendar) 
Clare's unselfconsciousness came at a price, however. By 1837 he was committed to an asylum at Epping Forest and later to Northampton Asylum for the remainder of his life. Some of his most powerful and moving lyrics were written during his periods of "insanity":
I hid my love in field and town
Till e'en the breeze would knock me down.
The bees seemed singing ballads o'er
The fly's buzz turned a lion's roar;
And even silence found a tongue
To haunt me all the summer long:
The riddle nature could not prove
Was nothing else but secret love. ("Song," 1842-64)

Clare links:

Clare on the natural world (poetry excerpts)

Natural history in Clare's writing (prose excerpts)

 

Back to A Romantic Natural History