Volume 51, Number 15 · October 7, 2004
Getting Clare Clear
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)
It may seem bizarre to find that John Clare's poetry and his prose—which I discussed recently in these pages[1]—have been stripped of their punctuation and presented as the work of an illiterate, when their author was clearly a learned man. Yet this is what happened during the course of the twentieth century, as editors sought to redress what they perceived as the interfering attentions of nineteenth-century publishers. What they forgot, or overlooked, was the general expectation among authors of the period that their editors would see to it that their works were punctuated on their behalf.
Review, 1928 words
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