Simon, you want to get the wonderful and authoritative biography of Clare by Jonathan Bate. It came out last year and is probably why Clare was being written up in the New Yorker. It's big and fat, so of course I never finished it, but I read about half of it and was gripped and enthralled.
Bate, interestingly, had a lot to say about Clare's supposed poverty. Poverty being relative, of course. He argues that the Clares were no poorer than anyone else, and that their snug little house was hardly a hovel by village standards, whatever the London swanks may have thought. He also argues that Clare had the money to self-publish, that his mother though uneducated was not "illiterate" in the way we now apply the word, that he read feverishly and was - albeit self-educated - better-read than some men with "proper" educations, and that he wrote every bit as deliberately, painstakingly and with as much attention to craft as any aristocratic court poet.
But of course the publishers - John Taylor, famous for publishing Keats (& Byron??) as well - marketed Clare pretty aggressively as a poor yokel, almost in a "look, he can write poetry!" kind of way. Ultimately of course, this led to his failure because no one wanteed him to develop as a poet, they only wanted him to be a party trick. So much of his mature work was never published till after 1900 and some not till shockingly recently. Like, the last ten years.
One of the reasons I find him so fresh and important is the way he manipulated language - HIS languiage - to a form that felt right on his tongue, that wasn't "poetic" in the frock-coat, classical-allusion way we think of, but that was rooted in the language and the world. He ADDED something to the way poetry can be used in English.
Of course, he doesn't go in for the sophistries of wordplay and metaphor so much, he's not a metaphysical, he's not big on wit and so on, but his poetry is certainly readable on more than one level. And it feels so meaty and wonderful on the tongue (& in the brain).
Also, because of the enclosing of the pastureland and other things that were going on at the time, even a simple poem like a descri[ption of walking through a given meadow in spring is actually a very political poem. He does talk about the enclosures in some poems, very angrily. And I think even that can compare to poetry, as in "who owns the earth" and"who owns the language" when people thought it was so remarkable that he could even write, as if somehow he shouldn't.
Well, there's my Clare essay! Hope someone finds it interesting. Too bad I'm not doing an exam or something on it!
KEB
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