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The long-awaited literary biography of the supreme "poets' poet"
John Clare (1793-1864) is the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self, but until now he has never been the subject of a comprehensive literary biography.
Here at last is his full story told by the light of his voluminous work: his birth in poverty, his work as an agricultural labourer, his burgeoning promise as a writer--cultivated under the gaze of rival patrons--then his moment of fame in the company of John Keats and the toast of literary London, and finally his decline into mental illness and his last years confined in asylums. Clare's ringing voice--quick-witted, passionate, vulnerable, courageous--emerges in generous quotation from his letters, journals, autobiographical writings, and his poems, as Jonathan Bate, the celebrated scholar of Shakespeare, brings the complex man, his beloved work, and his ribald world vividly to life.
Jonathan Bate is the author of The Genius of Shakespeare and The Song of the Earth. He is Leverhulme Research Professor of English Literature at the University of Warick.
A Booklist Editors' Choice John Clare (1793-1864) is the greatest working-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self, but until now he has never seen the subject of a comprehensive literary biography. Here, at last, is his story, revealed by the light of his voluminous work: his birth in poverty, his work as an agricultural laborer, his burgeoning promise as a writer cultivated under the gaze of rival patrons, his moment of fame in the company of John Keats as the toast of literary London, and finally his decline into mental illness and confinement in asylums. Clare's ringing voice—quick-witted, passionate, vulnerable, courageous—emerges through generous quotation from his letters, journals, autobiographical writings, and poems, as Jonathan Bate, the celebrated scholar of Shakespeare, brings the complex man, his beloved work, and his ribald world vividly to life. "[An] engrossing volume . . . Bate makes Clare's life as fascinating for us today as it was for Victorians, and his scholarship corrects the mistakes of earlier biographers without clogging the narrative. By surveying a broad selection of his subject's work, he sustains his contention that Clare ought to be considered a major poet. His unaffected diction, blessedly unencumbered by the ornate conventions of his time, sounds contemporary . . . In this groundbreaking biography and the judicious selection of poems [made by Bate] in 'I Am', John Clare's voice carries across the centuries and speaks to us as freshly as the unspoiled nature he loved."—Phoebe Pettingell, The New Leader "Splendid . . . It is Clare's love of his native countryside that comes through most powerfully in this volume . . . Thanks to Mr. Bate's biography, Clare will no longer be remembered as a mere madman or prodigy, but will be granted his rightful place in the canon as England's pre-eminent poet of nature."—Amanda Kolson Hurley, The Washington Times "Perceptive."—Adam Kirsch, Bookforum "Bate's thorough and lively [study] provides a more nuanced view both of Clare's psychological complexity as a person and of the possibilities for artistic and intellectual development available in the milieu of Clare's upbringing than has hitherto been available."—Eric Gudas, The Bloomsbury Review "One of the challenges for [Clare's] biographer is to establish a living sense of the diverse realms he inhabited as agricultural worker, fashionable poet, foundering literary celebrity, and mental patient. Another is to trace the development of Clare's crystalline poetic vision, which unerringly focused and deepened itself while his beloved Northamptonshire landscape, his financial prospects, his literary status and even, at last, much of his personality, fell apart round him. Jonathan Bate's biography, the first full-scale life to appear since 1932, succeeds splendidly on both counts, not only making generous use of Clare's own wonderful prose and verse but adding historical perspective and a constant, intelligent probing . . . One of the strengths of John Clare: A Biography is its refusal to propose easy answers to any of the questions raised by Clare's life. Bate has an essayist's ability to walk around a problem, interrogating it from various sides . . . Clare's is an extraordinary story, both disturbing and inspiring. Jonathan Bate tells it in considerable detail and this is a big book, with a level of detail and intricacy of argument which demand stamina from the reader. But its seriousness, compassion, and lightness of touch make it highly readable."—Grevel Lindop, The Times Literary Supplement "Fascinating . . . For more than a century, Clare has been hailed as a victim—of an uncultivated upbringing, of ignorant editors, of brutal doctors, even of the demon of poetry itself. The story of the divinely endowed poetic genius martyred by his gift is hard to resist, but Bate undertakes to dispel these notions, revealing the breadth of Clare's knowledge, the purposefulness of his writing style (he wouldn't take criticism, even from Keats), and his reliance on the generosity and intelligence of his editor, John Taylor. Bate's exploration of these myths is as compelling as his debunking of them. He richly describes the social and cultural life in 19th century England, specifically the presentation of Clare's 'peasant poet' persona, the political pressures Clare faced while receiving aid from wealthy aristocratic patrons, and the 19th century understanding and treatment of mental illness, which, to Clare's benefit, had recently undergone a transformation to a more humane form. Since his life seemed to beg for an explanation and his work espoused no ideology or agenda—merely the quiet appreciation of the natural world—Clare has been a kind of blank slate on which later generations project their own identities. Through scrupulous historical research, at times dizzying in its attention to detail, Bate avoids this pitfall, illuminating rather than obscuring Clare's personality and his poetry. His intimate and definitive account of Clare's life accomplishes more than most biographies could hope to: It gives us plenty of reasons to turn to the poet's verse."—Jason Baskin, Newsday "An appropriately ample and properly judicious biography. It rises from a passionate conviction in Clare's genius, and spreads into a calm appraisal of his experience. But there's cleverness in this calm: Bate knows the sadness of Clare's story has led previous writers to make false claims, or to agitate the clear spirit of his writing with their own well-meant heat. His own tactic is to take nothing for granted, to stay as close as possible to Clare's own intentions, to resist the temptation to read all the poems as being strictly autobiographical, and to admit ignorance where ignorance exists . . . Bate wisely makes space for a thematic approach, winding chapters on (among other things) heredity, childhood, social environment, and friendship around the hard facts of birth, family, and so on. Far from making Clare seem vague, this has the good effect of allowing him to be in a kind of dream. It's a dream which combines elements of bliss—the
- Sales Rank: #910494 in Books
- Published on: 2003-11-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 2.06" w x 6.00" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 672 pages
From Booklist
*Starred Review* John Clare (1793-1864) is one of the most compelling figures in English literature, but until Bate, whose previous books include studies of Shakespeare and a novel, took up the challenge, it was widely supposed that Clare's life was rather shadowy. An agricultural laborer with a rudimentary education, Clare was fascinated from childhood by the animals, plants, and weather of his farming community. He taught himself to write some of the most keenly observant nature poetry in English, in essence the first truly ecological poetry. His first book caused a sensation. He was dubbed "the peasant poet" (Robert Burns and the now-forgotten Robert Bloomfield, both of whom Clare admired, held that title before him), endowed with stipends by wealthy magnates, and brought to London to meet the literary lights of the capital and, momentously for his future, witness the funeral procession of Lord Byron. He produced three more collections, each less successful (though acknowledged to be better) than its predecessor. Meanwhile, he broke down mentally and spent his last 30 years in lunatic asylums, for much of that time under the impression that he was Byron. He ceased writing only for some eight years of the 1850s, and he left some 3,500 poems as well as much prose in manuscript, and much of that is better than what he had published. Bate takes Clare's literary work, both sides of his correspondence, and others' written records of Clare as the bedrock of an enthralling book that brings its subject to life as few biographies ever do. It helps that Bate writes like a dream himself. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Jonathan Bate [is] the sanest, shrewdest scholar of Shakespeare at present."--James Wood, The Guardian
About the Author
John Clare (1793-1864) lived all his life in rural Northamptonshire. He is widely celebrated as one of England's great nature and folk-life writers.
Jonathan Bate is the celebrated author of Shakespeare and Ovid (1993) and The Genius of Shakespeare (1997). He is Leverhulme Research Professor and King Alfred Professor of English at the University of Warwick.
Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Fabulous Portrait
By Gianmarco Manzione
Endearing, moving and mysterious, this is as sensitive a portrait of John Clare as we are likely to get. Bate's love for his subject is obvious throughout the book, in which he succeeds so well at walking the line between adoration and accuracy. Teeming with observations such as "for Clare even a fishpond is saturated with feeling and memory," Clare's unusually intense absorption in nature is brought to light here with the kind of beauty and empathy only a fellow-writer such as Bate could achieve.
Yet despite Bate's insistence on Clare's genius (I'm quite insistent on it myself after having read the biography and skimming through the Selected Poems) he does not look away from uglier aspects of Clare's life: his infidelity and apparent spousal abuse, his alcoholism and, most of all, the ever-bewildering case of his diagnosis as a "lunatic." This is where Bate's book becomes particularly poignant, and I wish he had spent less time gossiping about Clare's wrangles with publishers and more on the man's complicated and harrowing character. For this reason I felt the book to be a bit longer than it needed to be, but perhaps I'd feel differently had the material in the last 150 pages, which deals extensively with Clare's mental illness, been fleshed-out even more. Surely accounts of Clare's occasional belief that he was Lord Byron or Jack Randall the boxer are of far more interest than how many pounds he was paid for a poem published in the London Magazine.
Nonetheless, Bate does an excellent job of avoiding the temptation to romanticize Clare's dramatic mental illness (for which, in the end, "manic-depression" seems to be the most accurate but not necessarily conclusive diagnosis. In her incredible book, Touched With Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison lists Clare's name among the poets she counted as victims of manic-depressive illness). Unlike other biographers of writers (Quentin Bell's book about Virginia Woolf comes to mind) Bate does not settle for Clare's own metaphorical explanations for his "madness." Indeed, Bate often disputes the very term "madness" and exposes it as a dated and even superstitious label. He does not so thoroughly drench the artist's mental struggles in myth and theory as to have it become the stuff of folklore. Surely it would be flattering to think of Clare as some divinely inspired mystic, but Bate's many more logical scenarios are a refreshing contrast to the "mad genius" stereotype.
While Clare attributed his madness to the day he watched a friend fall to his death from a tree as a child, Bate's more plausible suggestions include: Clare's concussion after tumbling out of a tree himself as a boy, his heavy drinking, the awful malnutrition of his diet, the tormenting stress of his perpetual poverty amid obligations to his wife and seven children, his frustrating efforts to further himself as a poet while having to beg for farm work, and "mercury-poisoning resulting from attempted treatment for syphilis." In a further example of Bate's mature handling of this particular issue, he writes that "we should not rule out the possibility that his own derangement was partially shaped by his reading about the mental suffering of other writers." Clare was terribly impressionable. However, where Bate tells us that Clare's "episodes" afflicted him only after being admitted to the aszlum as if to imply that he was bound to become psychotic after living among the mad for two decades, Jamison writes in "Touched With Fire" that "manic-depressive illness not only worsens over time, it becomes less responsive to medication the longer" it goes untreated, so it seems only logical that his condition would have worsened with age, especially since no such "treatment" as Jamison discusses was available in his day.
Compounding the reasonable possibilities Bate offers is the fact that Clare's very devotion to write poetry may have been interpreted as madness by his neighbors. Tragically, this seems to be a chief reason why he was eventually confined. As Bate says early on, "In summer he walked in the woods and fields alone, a book in his pocket . . . his love of books began to isolate him from other boys . . . the villagers found this behavior very odd: `some fancying it symptoms of lunacy.'" Even after reading the book, it is anyone's guess as to whether Clare was insane; but stories of his battles against what illness he may have suffered from as well as the ignorance, incompetence and greed of those purporting to care for him make for a rather heart-breaking read. What we can be sure of, though, is that mad or not, Clare had become more of a liability than a father or husband. "There is no evidence that he was taken to the asylum because he was `mad' in the sense of having lost consciousness of his identity . . . he was taken to the asylum because he needed better care than could be provided by his family," Bate writes.
Though he probably takes a bit too much liberty in attempting to explain nearly every one of Clare's symptoms in a more rational light, Bate's assertions about Clare's psychological temperament make for some absolutely riveting explications and commentary. "To say that he had written the works of Byron and Scott was but an extreme way of saying he had written works that he hoped might one day be regarded as the equal of" those works, he supposes. In an even farther-fetching attempt at psychoanalysis, Bate explains Clare's delusion that he was a famous boxer as a dramatization "of the fact that Clare spent his life fighting battles - for his poetry, for recognition, for survival, against his inner demons." While this is probably the point at which Bate seems more of an adoring and apologetic fan than biographer, who's to say? We will never really know what was going on inside that jewel of a mind, and considering all that was taken from the man in his life by his illness, time, or other people, maybe that secret is the one thing we can let Clare keep.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Absolutely Great
By M. Hori
This is a wonderful biography of Clare. Bate not only paints a convincing picture of this largely self-taught genius, but he also provides illuminating information about the social context in which Clare moved. His speculations concerning Clare's mental illness are also on the mark. Take your time with this book. It's an enjoyable ramble through the fields and by the end you'll have a well-rounded picture of John Clare and a greater appreciation for his work.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A Very Fine Biography of Clare
By buckwheatbarleycorn
Jonathan Bate's admirable biography of John Clare is worthy of this unique poet. There were moments while reading the first two hundred or so pages of John Clare A Biography when I began to sense I was residing in Clare's mind and footsteps which is truly a tribute to Bate's fine scholarship and narrative skills. The remainder of the book is excellent as well. Very memorable and very much worth reading and exploring.
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