Volume 51, Number 14 · September 23, 2004
John Clare's Genius
By James Fenton
John Clare: A Biography
by Jonathan Bate
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 648 pp., $40.00
'I Am': The Selected Poetry of John Clare
edited by Jonathan Bate
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 318 pp., $17.00 (paper)
John Clare and the Folk Tradition
by George Deacon
London: Francis Boutle, 400 pp., £15.00 (paper)
Roethke's 'sweet man,' John Clare (1793–1864)—loved, like Blake and Smart, for a perceived wisdom in his madness—has long been an honored presence among the poets of the English language. Of the English, Edmund Blunden, Geoffrey Grigson, and James Reeves were among his editors, and Auden (who borrowed words from John Clare in his 'Letter to Lord Byron') put him into at least three anthologies. Of the Irish, Patrick Kava-nagh and Michael Longley wrote poems about him, while Tom Paulin and Seamus Heaney (as we shall see) turned him into a quasi-political figurehead.
Review, 5043 words
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