"I Am" The Selected Poetry of John Clare

by Clare, John; Bate, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780374528690
• ISBN10: 0374528691
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-11-15
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Hail, humble Helpstone ... Where dawning genius never met the day, Where useless ignorance slumbers life away Unknown nor heeded, where low genius tries Above the vulgar and the vain to rise. --from "Helpstone" "I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clareis the first anthology of the great "peasant poet"'s remarkable verse that makes available the full range of his accomplishments. Here are the different Clares that have beguiled readers for two centuries: the tender chronicler of nature and childhood; the champion of folkways in the face of oppression; the passionate, sweet-tongued love-poet; and the lonely visionary confined, in old age and senility, to asylums. John Clare(1793-1864) lived all his life in rural Northamptonshire. He is widely celebrated as one of England's great nature and folklife writers. Jonathan Bateis the author ofShakespeare and Ovid(1993) andThe Genius of Shakespeare(1997). He is Leverhulme Research Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick. John Clare (1793-1864) remains the great "peasant poet" of English literature, as well as one of our finest nature writers. In this anthologythe first to mine the entire range of Clare's verseBate fully reveals his mastery. In the pages of "I Am", we encounter the tender chronicler of nature and childhood; the champion of folkways amid oppression; the passionate, sweet-tongued love poet; and the lonely visionary confined (in old age and senility) to asylums. "What distinguishes Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world."Seamus Heaney "[Clare is] a poet of the first rank."Eric Gudas,TheBloomsburyReview "[These poems were chosen with] editorial sensitivity and care . . . [An] extremely welcome gathering."Thomas R. Smith,Ruminator Review "[An] admirable new selection."James Fenton,TheNew YorkReview of Books "The broadest and most reliable sample of Clare's work now available, ranging from 'early poems' through to poems written in the Northampton asylum, and showing on every page how Clare deserves a place alongside his great Romantic contemporaries . . . Now we can see clearly, and as Clare meant us to see, the scope as well as the substance of his work: the density of his sonnet-writing as well as its detailing; the structure as well as the strangeness of his satires; and the discipline as well as heartbreak of his wonderful natural elegies."Andrew Motion,The Guardian "No poet, living or dead, sets before us with more un-ego-clouded immediacy nature's busy, juicy surface activity [than Clare]."Jeredith Merrin,The Southern Review "An essential complement to Bate's deservedly praised new biography of Clare."Jeremy Treglown,The Times Literary Supplement "Bate is right [that] John Clare is a major Romantic who belongs beside Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats."Susan Balee,The Weekly Standard "Clare grabs hold of youno, he doesn't grab hold of you, he is already there, talking to you before you've arrived on the scene, telling you about himself, about the things that are closest and dearest to him, and it would no more occur to him to do otherwise than it would occur to Whitman to stop singing you his song of himself."John Ashbery,Other Traditions "I find myself repeating whole poems of Clare's without having made a conscious effort to memorize them. And though it was taken as a symptom of madness tha

Author Biography

John Clare (1793-1864) lived all his life in rural Northamptonshire. He is widely celebrated as one of England's great nature and folklife writers.

Jonathan Bate is the 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.

Table of Contents

A Chronology	p. XI
A Note on This Selection	p. XV
Early Poems
To the Fox Fern	p. 3
Schoolboys in Winter	p. 4
To an Infant Sister in Heaven	p. 5
A Moment's Rapture While Bearing the Lovely Weight of A. S--r--s	p. 6
A Ramble	p. 7
Dedication to Mary	p. 9
from Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820)
from Helpstone	p. 15
What is Life?	p. 19
Dawnings of Genius	p. 21
Patty	p. 23
The Primrose	p. 24
The Gypsies' Evening Blaze	p. 25
The River Gwash	p. 26
The Meeting	p. 27
from The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems (1821)
from The Village Minstrel	p. 31
Song ("Swamps of wild rush-beds and sloughs' squashy traces")	p. 39
To an Infant Daughter	p. 40
Langley Bush	p. 42
The Last of March (written at Lolham Brigs)	p. 43
To my Cottage	p. 47
In Hilly Wood	p. 48
To Autumn	p. 49
from The Parish
[Miss Peevish Scornful]	p. 53
The Progress of Cant	p. 55
The Overseer	p. 57
from The Shepherd's Calendar (1827)
January	p. 61
from March	p. 74
from May	p. 76
from June	p. 78
from July [manuscript version]	p. 80
from September	p. 82
from October [manuscript draft]	p. 83
from December	p. 86
The Moors	p. 89
from The Midsummer Cushion
Shadows of Taste	p. 95
Childhood	p. 101
The Moorhen's Nest	p. 116
The Progress of Rhyme	p. 120
Remembrances	p. 132
Swordy Well	p. 135
Emmonsails Heath in Winter	p. 136
Love and Memory	p. 137
The Fallen Elm	p. 141
The Landrail	p. 144
Pastoral Poesy	p. 147
The Wren	p. 152
Wood Pictures in Spring	p. 153
The Hollow Tree	p. 154
The Sand Martin	p. 155
from The Rural Muse (1835)
from To the Rural Muse	p. 159
Autumn	p. 163
The Nightingale's Nest	p. 168
The Eternity of Nature	p. 172
Emmonsales Heath	p. 176
Decay: A Ballad	p. 180
The Pettichap's Nest	p. 183
The Yellowhammer's Nest	p. 185
The Skylark	p. 187
First Love's Recollections	p. 189
Summer Moods	p. 192
Evening Schoolboys	p. 193
The Shepherd Boy	p. 194
Lord Byron	p. 195
To the Memory of Bloomfield	p. 196
Beans in Blossom	p. 197
To De Wint	p. 198
Sudden Shower	p. 199
Stepping Stones	p. 200
Pleasant Places	p. 201
On Leaving the Cottage of my Birth	p. 202
Poems Written at Northborough
To the Snipe	p. 207
[The Lament of Swordy Well]	p. 211
Snowstorm	p. 220
Bumbarrel's Nest	p. 221
Open Winter	p. 222
[Double Sonnet on the Marten]	p. 223
[Sonnet Sequence on Fox and Badger]	p. 225
[Field-Mouse's Nest]	p. 228
[Birds at Evening]	p. 229
[Trespass]	p. 230
Glinton Spire	p. 231
Poems Written at the High Beach Asylum
A Walk in the Forest	p. 235
London versus Epping Forest	p. 236
The Gypsy Camp	p. 237
Two songs and some stanzas from Child Harold: Song ("The sun has gone down with a veil on his brow")	p. 238
[stanzas] ("Mary, thou ace of hearts, thou muse of song")	p. 239
[song] Written in a Thunderstorm July 15th 1841	p. 242
Don Juan: A Poem	p. 244
Poems and Prose Written at Northborough, Between Two Asylums
Recollections of Journey from Essex [prose account]	p. 257
Two songs for Child Harold: Song a ("I've wandered many a weary mile")	p. 265
Song b ("Here's where Mary loved to be")	p. 266
[Prose sketch]: "Closes of greensward"	p. 267
[Lines Written on St Martin's Day, 11 November 1841, manuscript text]	p. 268
Poetry Written While an Inmate of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum
Graves of Infants	p. 271
Stanzas ("Black absence hides upon the past")	p. 272
To Mary	p. 273
A Vision	p. 274
Sonnet ("Poets love nature")	p. 275
An Invite to Eternity	p. 276
The Dying Child	p. 278
The Invitation	p. 280
Lines: "I Am"	p. 282
Sonnet: "I Am"	p. 283
Song ("True love lives in absence")	p. 284
My Early Home Was This	p. 286
The Winter's Spring	p. 287
Sonnet: Wood Anemone	p. 289
Sonnet: The Crow	p. 290
Pleasant Sounds	p. 291
Clock-a-clay	p. 292
Childhood	p. 294
To be Placed at the Back of his Portrait	p. 296
The Yellowhammer	p. 298
How Can I Forget	p. 299
To John Clare	p. 300
Birds' Nests	p. 301
Glossary	p. 305
Sources	p. 309
Index	p. 313
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