John Clare: Striving to Be Himself

PART I

On frst looking in to Keats’s 1820 volume, Clare was struck by the description in Isabella of an ‘eye all pale / Striving to be itself’ and by the phrase from Hyperion, ‘A stream went voiceless by’.1 The italics are Clare’s and they highlight feelings for the diffculties of self-expression and the poignancy of going unheard which underpin his career. Clare is usually admired as the most self-forgetting of writers, his work an antidote to Romantic ‘egotism’,2 its ‘resistance to the burden of individualism’,3 as John Goodridge puts it, fnding voice in moments such as the letter Clare drafted to his friend and patron Eliza Emmerson in 1830:

I am growing out of myself into many existences & wish to become more entertaining in other genders for that little personal pronoun ‘I’ is such a presumption ambitious swaggering little fellow that he thinks himself qual- ifed for all company all places & all employments go where you will there he is swaggering & bouncing in the pulpit the parliment the bench aye every where even in this my letter he has intruded 5 several times already4

There is no denying the generous self-dispersal aimed at here, nor that an effort to elude that ‘ambitious swaggering little fellow’ the letter I fuels large stretches of Clare’s work. But it is also hard to shut one’s ears to the garrulous personality of Clare’s voice. Clare scurries from thought to thought with signature impulsiveness, turning over new images and phrases in a bid to fnd words responsive to the peculiarity of his feeling for his own existence. He delivers his attack on self-aggrandisement with a cheering and irrepressible personal vitality. 44 Part I: John Clare: Striving to Be Himself

Exuberant amid his disavowals of personality, Clare was at other times troubled by his awareness of his own specialness. ‘[T]ho I was not known as a poet my odd habits did not escape notice’, he says of his early efforts to write in ‘the woods or heaths’ in the essay ‘My First Attempts at Poetry’5; ‘I thought sometimes that I surely had a taste peculiarly by myself and that nobody else thought or saw things as I did’, he wrote in another autobiographical sketch.6 The early poetry often achieves an affecting tonal complexity as it shields the pain of alien- ation and a fragile pride in poetic sensibility behind a self-deprecating humour. ‘Een childern startled from his oddness ran’ observes ‘The Fate of Genius’ of its Clare-like protagonist (l. 55). In The Village Minstrel, the long title-poem of Clare’s second volume, the fgure of Lubin is regarded by his neighbours as an ‘uncouthly lout’ (l. 289) and ‘the sport of all the village’ (l. 291) as he goes ‘soodling up and down the street’ in poetic reverie (l. 296). But Clare’s most forceful poetry strives to give voice to his sense ‘that nobody else thought or saw things as I did’. He eventually expressed ‘dislike’ for The Village Minstrel on the grounds that ‘it does not describe the feelings of a rhyming peasant strongly or localy enough’.7 And through the 1820s and 1830s, Clare defned and asserted the ‘strength’ and ‘localness’ of his voice. He rejected Lamb’s advice to jettison ‘provincial phrases’ and take as a model of the ‘true rustic style’ the poetry of Shenstone.8 And he strove in the teeth of commercial and personal crisis to discover a voice free of the ‘rustic’ cultural stereotypes that had made him marketable: ‘all I wish now is to stand upon my own bottom as a poet without any apol- ogy as to want of education or anything else & I say it not in the feeling of either ambition or vanity but in the spirit of common sense’,9 he wrote to Eliza Emmerson in 1832. That spirited, unsentimental plea to be taken on his own terms recurs as a bass note through his letters: ‘All I want is to see my own success in my own profession to stand in my own strength to meet the storm’.10 Clare established the terms on which he wanted ‘his own strength’ to be measured in a series of poetic self-portraits composed in the wake of his popular early volumes, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel (1821). The boldest of these is ‘The Progress of Ryhme’, a poem described by Jonathan Bate as ‘the mani- festo for the mature Clare’.11 The title gives a taste of the hotchpotch of poetic convention and individuality with which the poem speaks: ‘Progress’ puts it in the eighteenth-century mode of Collins or Gray; the Part I: John Clare: Striving to Be Himself 45 misspellings indicate the struggle not only with literary models, but lin- guistic standards themselves that invigorates Clare’s work.12 Some lines from near the start of the poem take us to the heart of Clare’s effort to make himself heard:

I felt that Id a right to song & sung – but in a timid strain Of fondness for my native plain (l. 80–2)

The dynamics of these lines, wavering between boisterous self-confdence and rueful self-regard, point to the confictions of a voice that is by turns daring and tentative in laying claim to ‘a right to song’: ‘& sung’ announces itself with brash assurance across the line ending, only to be undercut by the ensuing concession of that song’s ‘timid strain’, while ‘fondness’ is winningly understated as a term for Clare’s local attach- ments. The ‘native’ timbre of Clare’s poetry is both acknowledged as potential limitation and clung to as proof of its vitality. But ‘The Progress of Ryhme’ is hardly a ‘timid’ poem. It faces down Clare’s anxieties about his ‘right to song’ in rapid tetrameter couplets whose momentum answers to Clare’s cheerful surprise at his own verbal facility: ‘No matter how the lyre was strung / From my own heart the music sprung’ (l. 209–210). The poem succeeds through its interlac- ing of modesty and self-confdence. A characteristic, elongated sentence late in the poem begins with Clare fnding an unassuming image for his standing in the literary world:

The pea that independant springs – When in its blossom trails & clings To every help that lingers bye & I when classed with poesy Who stood unbrunt the heaviest shower Felt feeble as that very fower & helpless all – (l. 299–305)

There is a winning modesty on show in Clare’s contentment to fnd his refection in a pea.13 Yet the lines protest helplessness while demonstrat- ing resourcefulness. A climbing pea, its tendrils spiralling around any 46 Part I: John Clare: Striving to Be Himself available branch, is a brilliantly apt metaphor for someone helping themselves up the social scale. The image is a quiet show of strength, despite the lines’ ostensible despair of being ‘classed with poesy’. At this point, Clare’s sentence turns mid-line upon a ‘but’, cheering itself temporarily with the thought that ‘beautys smile / Is harvest for the hardest toil’ (l. 305–306) before quickly rebounding into a less abstract self-portrait that at once apologises for and asserts the value of Clare’s rusticity as he concedes he ‘little thought to win’ that ‘smile’:

With ragged coat & downy chin A clownish silent haynish boy Who even felt ashamed of joy So dirty ragged & so low With nought to recommend or show That I was worthy een a smile (l. 308–13)

As Tom Paulin has pointed out, these lines exhibit Clare’s ability to lend a homespun touch to prestigious poetic models: Clare ‘stands before us’ here in the metre of Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’.14 Yet the language is Clare’s own. ‘Haynish’ means ‘awkward’ and fnds itself enmeshed in a tangle of assonance and alliteration (‘downy… clownish… haynish… ashamed’) that brandishes that awkwardness as a poetic vir- tue. ‘Smile’ fnds in the line that follows the same rhyme-partner as it had only six lines previously, as Clare continues by speculating how he would have felt ‘amid my toil’ (l. 314) had he known that he would win fame as a poet ‘in the blush of after days’ (l. 317) (the image sees Clare’s poetic success as both embarrassing and bathed in a rosy glow). The pairing comes from Gray’s ‘Elegy’ [‘Let not Ambition mock their useful toil / […] / Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile’ (l. 31–33)],15 but, turning to it twice in so short a space, Clare handles the rhyme in way that faunts his inelegance and drives home its latent suggestiveness: to the eye, the off-rhyme sets the words in contrast, to suggest their incompatibility; to the ear, it asks that if we want to bring the two words closer together, we speak the verse in a rustic east-country accent: smoile. Clare’s vernacular rises through the printed page. ‘Had I but felt’ this possibility of success, Clare fnishes the passage by saying, ‘My heart with lonely fancy warm / Had even bursted with the charm’. Again the lines pay their poetic dues, playing a knockabout variation on the fate of Shakespeare’s Gloucester, whose heart ‘Burst Part I: John Clare: Striving to Be Himself 47 smilingly’ (King Lear, V. i. 198). Yet their vigour owes equally to their grammar’s childlike exuberance (‘bursted’). They also give us, in ‘lonely fancy warm’, a piece of phrasing typical of Clare’s ability to fnd idioms that bears the impression of erratically mingled feelings. The phrase is in itself a characteristic product of a ‘fancy’ whose combined isolation and independent zest issue in a haphazard inventiveness. ‘Clare’s identity is created in and through the language he uses’, says Paulin, but it is ‘distorted by the changes forced on him by the need to tame that language in order to sell the poems it speaks’.16 But the ‘untamed’ Clare remains a boisterous, tangled, poignant individual presence. The artistic life of the writing is in inverse relation to its commercial success.17 The chapters that follow pursue the personal ener- gies inherent in the jumbled registers and autobiographical candour of ‘The Progress of Rhyme’: the frst demonstrates the lively idiosyncrasy of Clare’s idiom and the warmth of personality it conveys; the second examines how Clare communicates fercely distinctive and unguarded feelings within seemingly anonymous or conventional forms. The brio and intricacy of Clare’s idiom are easy to overlook because his verbal imagination is disarmingly artless. It is diffcult to think of another poet who raises so often the question of whether he knows what he is doing. As Stephanie Kuduk Weiner has remarked, Clare pro- vokes ‘a persistent worry […] that he wrote from impulse rather than craft, that for all his genius he possessed a gift he little understood and could scarcely control’.18 An underlying argument of these chapters is that Clare’s expressive ‘gift’ is often liberated through his lapses of ‘control’; that an extemporising chanciness is not just a hallmark of his voice, but central to its contact with his ‘peculiar’ sensibility. Clare’s most distinctive writing is his most untutored. To say as much is not to present Clare as a clueless naïf, but it does involve taking seriously some earlier estimations of Clare which recent criticism has been keen to turn to one side. Clare’s early reviewers get a bad press for caricaturing him as a ‘peasant poet’, and at its most patronising the term denotes novelty rather than originality.19 But the best of these reviewers were strikingly perceptive about the nature of Clare’s achievement: ‘when his attention is attracted by objects which he cannot defne by ordinary language, he invents new forms of expression, as singular as they are vigorous and appropriate’,20 one unsigned article commented in 1820. John Taylor praised Clare in the London Magazine for not ‘affecting a language’ and for ‘compos[ing] his phraseology for himself’: ‘words must be […] 48 Part I: John Clare: Striving to Be Himself put into combinations which have been unknown before, if the things which he is solicitous to express, have not been discovered and expressed before’.21 Clare’s most sympathetic readers have always found ways of dealing with him as a poet who makes himself, in Johanne Clare’s phrase, ‘his own authority’.22 As Mark Storey has acknowledged, ‘Some of the most useful work on Clare has been built on the premise that, whatever his literary debts and allegiances, Clare is a poet sui generis, and that to demonstrate this it is necessary to look at Clare’s work with the kind of detailed intense gaze that he himself proffered to the world in which he lived’.23 Taken at his word, Clare conveys a deep-seated peculiarity of voice and vision.

Notes 1. Clare’s Letters, 81. 2. for a discussion of Clare’s work in relation to this term, and its currency in the criticism of the Romantic period see Simon Kövesi, John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 79–95. 3. John Goodridge, John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 3. 4. Clare’s Letters, 504. 5. ‘My First Attempts at Poetry’, By Himself, 78. 6. John Clare, ‘Sketches in the Life of John Clare’, By Himself, 17. 7. John Clare, ‘Autobiographical Fragments’, By Himself, 113–4. 8. Critical Heritage, 175. 9. Clare’s Letters, 604. 10. Clare’s Letters, 575. 11. Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; London: Picador-Pan Macmillan, 2003), 384. 12. Zachary Leader, arguing against the practice of preserving Clare’s texts in their ‘raw’, unedited state, warns against attributing such misspellings any expressive signifcance: ‘The prime effect of such misspellings is to draw attention away from the poem itself to its provenance, to the poet as peasant’ (Revision and Romantic Authorship [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 229). But if individual misspellings might appear insig- nifcant in isolation, Leader risks ignoring their cumulative impact. The irregularity of Clare’s printed voice testifes to the awkward pressure of his individuality on a standardised language. 13. Clare may be remembering Keats’s lines from ‘I stood tip-toe’: ‘Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a fight: / With wings of gentle fush o’er Part I: John Clare: Striving to Be Himself 49

delicate white, / And taper fngers catching at all things, / To bind them all about with tiny rings’ (l. 57–60, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott [Harlow: Longman, 1970], 85: Keats’s poems are quoted from this edition throughout). 14. Tom Paulin, ‘Introduction’, John Clare: The Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), xx. 15. Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy, Written in a Country Churchyard’, Gray, Collins & Goldsmith: The Complete Poems, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), 103. 16. Tom Paulin, ‘John Clare in Babylon’, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), 53. 17. For Clare’s assertion of agency as a professional author, see Roger Sales, John Clare: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and Alan D. Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 18. Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Clare’s Lyric: Clare and Three Modern Poets (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), 52. 19. As David Constantine points out, the ‘peasant poet’ was fne as an abstract idea, but less acceptable once its realities came into sharper focus: ‘The peasant poet could not be taken neat. There was a certain charm in rusticity, which palled somewhat if the poet could not spell, had no notion of grammar, overdid the dialect words, and dealt with country matters’ (‘Outside Eden: John Clare’s Descriptive Poetry’, An Infnite Complexity: Essays in Romanticism, ed. J. R. Watson [Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP for the U of Durham, 1983], 181). As Roger Sales puts it, the moni- ker ‘evoked images of sturdiness and independence, but crucially within an overall acceptance of a deferential society’ (Literary Life, 26). A more helpful label, acknowledging the brand of unorthodox intelligence and education Clare brings to his writing, is perhaps ‘self-taught’ (see John Goodridge ‘Introduction’, The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, ed. Goodridge [Helpston: John Clare Society and the Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994], 15–16.) 20. Unsigned review of Poems Descriptive, Critical Heritage, 68. 21. John Taylor, from ‘A Visit to John Clare’, Critical Heritage, 161. 22. Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Quebec: McGill-Queens UP, 1987), 59. 23. mark Storey, ‘Clare and the Critics’, John Clare in Context, ed. Geoffrey Summerfeld, Hugh Haughton, and Adam Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 47.