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The Soul of John Clare: Poet of nature
Insane, free, and lost to the world
The countryside in which John Clare was born was an unrestricted pastoral world. The enclosing of the common land was now beginning and the roaming youth who listened attentively to the tales of the old shepherdess and the folk songs of his father could not evade the transforming impulse that pushed farmhands and herders into new, grimy urbanscapes. As the heart of a country was fenced into a strait-jacket, so the soul of its most romantic poet was desolated.
“every common’s gone…..oh it turns my bosom chill…” *
John Clare had a relationship with nature unlike others. He was a part of nature himself, in communion with the trees and the flowers, the insects and the animals. His rudimentary schooling was sufficient to awaken him to fairy stories and ghost tales and to people his imagination with friends and enemies sufficient to enliven his solitary world. Here was a seven-year-old boy set to ploughing and labouring to help feed his illiterate family. Here was a young man who never read a poem until, by chance, a book he borrowed entranced him. And then there was a man whose poetry sang of disappearing worlds.
All changed, at points in his life; yet only to return him each time to his own inner wanderings and…
