A HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CLARE’S MUNDANE SUBLIME by Dana Odwazny Pell A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida August 2012 i A HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CLARE’Sii MUNDANE SUBLIM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to share my sincere appreciation and love to my friends, family, and husband for their support throughout this project. Their encouragement kept me writing even when my focus waned. I would also like to express my continued gratitude for my academic springboard, Betsy Cohen. Miles might separate us, but we have come a long way together. In addition, I am indebted to the Florida Atlantic English department faculty, especially Dr. Golden, Dr. Berlatsky, Dr. Adams, and Dr. McGuirk. Each of you has inspired and humbled me. iii ABSTRACT Author: Dana Odwazny Pell Title: A Humdrum Aha!: John Clare’s Mundane Sublime Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Don Adams Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2012 Following the work of Sara Houghton-Walker and Edward Strickland, this thesis theorizes the “mundane sublime” as encountered in romanticist John Clare’s poetry. Instead of being oriented upward, as with Longinus’s elevatory sublime, Clare’s mundane sublime brings the subject downward to earth. While the sublime of the Burkean tradition begins with terror, I claim that the mundane sublime emerges out of love for that which is commonplace. Still revelatory, it may be further characterized by an engagement with ecosystems, eternity, divinity, and nature as a whole. Clare’s style scaffolds images resulting in a profusion of detail that arrests the mind and allows it to reflect on its own position in nature. As Clare’s mundane sublime takes up simple natural objects and posits an ecological interconnectedness, it implies a more environmentally responsible relationship to one’s surroundings, making it increasingly relevant for green studies. iv A HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CLARE’S MUNDANE SUBLIME Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 “On which I love to dwell”: Clare’s Nature.……………………………………………..15 “[T]hose comforts we desire”: The Tempest Versus the Sun-Shower.……………….....27 Enclosing Clare’s ecosystem; Anguish in an Economy of Mind.……………...………..39 Conclusion.………………………………………………………………………….…...53 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..59 v 1. INTRODUCTION Nature has judged man a creature of no mean or ignoble quality, but, as if she were inviting us to some great gathering, she has called us into life, into the whole universe, there to be spectators of her games and eager competitors; and she therefore from the first breathed into our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves. --Longinus, Peri Hypsous I like to make the mundane fabulous whenever I can. --Rufus Wainwright In the last four decades, scholarly interest in John Clare’s life and work has increased greatly. Marginalized as somehow separate from the romantic tradition, his poems had been written off as too simplistic or merely descriptive (Houghton, Todd). As Eric Robinson writes, “he has long remained the most undervalued of English writers…. Clare’s knowledge of natural life is unparalleled among English poets: Wordsworth was an amateur to him” (7). Romanticists have certainly made strides to accept the mad “peasant poet” into the canon, prompting more thoughtful analysis of his poetry’s austere clarity, provincial language, and extensive detail of animals and plants. In particular, consideration for Clare’s poetry is important because it contributes to the practice of green literary criticism—to a reading focused on the importance and significance of the environment and environmental concerns. While scholars have hitherto viewed his work as devoid of the natural sublime, evidence of it nevertheless emerges out of his deceptively simple descriptions. Consideration for Clare’s poetry also adds to our understanding of the history of the sublime by drawing our attention to lesser-known 1 theorists and ideas. In her review of relevant critical texts, “John Clare and Revaluation” (2005), Sarah Houghton-Walker not only turns her eye backward recounting the beginning of academic interest in Clare’s biography, but she also looks forward proposing a hitherto untrodden avenue of scholarship: “[an] area which has not been fully explored by criticism (though it has often inspired other artists) . is Clare’s knowledge of the discourse of the sublime, and the way in which his verse articulates a sublimity felt in the presence of nature” (17). Recognizing such a gap in the literature, Houghton-Walker fills it with her article “‘Enkindling ecstasy’: The Sublime Vision of John Clare” and her later book John Clare’s Religion. In these two works, she directs our gaze to Clare’s brand of the sublime, which she sees as embedded in Christian values. Consideration for the sublime is integral to reading Clare’s poetry because it sheds light not only on his spiritual beliefs, but also on his use of paradox and language (177). She qualifies her choice of words as she writes, “Clare’s very perception of the world at times partakes of a quasi-sublime experience whose translation into poetry marks some of his best verse” (“Enkindling” 177; emphasis added). Discerning the ways in which Clare appropriates the concept for his own, Houghton-Walker troubles the definition of the sublime. She shows us how Clare experiences a language-resistant ecstasy at the sight of the minute and ordinary, rather than the immense and terrifying. I will engage and extend Houghton-Walker’s undertaking in order to demonstrate that Clare’s version of the sublime not only relies upon the ordinary, but that it also evokes a tension between the familiar and the strange. Furthermore, I will situate the sublime as it arises in Clare’s poetry within an ecological framework. Above all, 2 Houghton-Walker’s analysis paves the way for this undertaking to advance what I call the “mundane sublime.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines the “mundane” as “[b]elonging to the earthly world, as contrasted with heaven; worldly, earthly,” common- place, and boring. Given these denotations, the mundane sublime might seem like a contradiction in terms. Still, it is an extension of the romantic project set forth by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads—to open poetry to the commoner, to utilize pedestrian speech in a poetic manner. I contend that, for the most part, Clare’s collection of poetry represents a redistribution of value. It values the undervalued and the overlooked; it values the small. Certainly, Clare’s poems that depict roosters or mice function differently than do “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abby.” Watching rain fall into a puddle is not the same as peering over a cliff at an expansive, tumultuous ocean, albeit the experience may be classified or characterized as the mundane sublime because it too inspires awe. For Clare, a mole-hill is as impressive as a mountain. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine how his descriptions of all too familiar objects might be overshadowed in comparison to those that are new, unexpected, and more grandiose. Previous to Houghton-Walker’s efforts, the only other work to reflect on any kind of sublimity in Clare’s aesthetic was Edward Strickland’s “Clare and the Sublime” (1987). In his essay, Strickland confesses his surprise over the apparent lack of sublime elements in Clare’s body of work. Compiling an inventory of poetic moments, he notes the “virtual absence” of “the naturalistic as well as preternatural sublime—until we confront those few late visionary poems” (142). Moreover, he claims that Clare purposefully evades that terror which is integral to the traditional sublime because of “his 3 psychological constitution and timidity” (143). This comment displays a twofold critical tendency. The first is to label Clare’s pre-asylum poetry as unphilosophical or unemotional. The second is to strictly define the sublime according to those standards authored and perpetuated by the “accepted” romantic poets and by particular critics. These figures include individuals like John Dennis, Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and its earliest originator, Longinus. In the discipline’s foundational text, Peri Hypsous, Longinus1 writes of superlative rhetoric that is sublime because it is exemplary, enduring, forceful, and inspiring: “the true sublime naturally elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud exaltation, we are filled with joy and pride” (179). Sublime speech or writing transports us with an overwhelming power attributed to eloquence and directness. Ranging from form and diction to a work’s thematic content, Longinus methodically breaks down the elements of sublime oratory or writing into five main groupings: “grand conceptions,” “vehement emotion,” “figures of thought and figures of speech,” and “nobility of language” (181). Even though he lays out his treatise as a lesson in ars poetica, the production of the sublime—that ability to move the audience beyond themselves—relies upon what is described as a mysterious divine or daemonic possession of the author or speaker. At its inception, then, the definition of the sublime is slippery. The sublime experience eludes language, and it is perhaps for this reason that so many individuals in the wake of Longinus tried to pin down its meaning in a range of nuanced and sometimes contradictory definitions. After 1674, when Despréaux Boileau translated Peri Hypsous into French, 1 The exact author of the text is unknown, but it is most often ascribed to Dionysius Longinus. 4 consideration for the subject came into vogue among the British literati. If not ushering in considerations for the experience, travel writing and the picturesque coincided with its reception. At this time, questions regarding subjectivity and taste, genius and craft, education and class were brought to the fore anew.