I'd say that Clare and Dickinson were of nearly equal stature in the Department of Ornithology. Many of their poems about birds are as beautiful as John Audubon's drawings. Going strictly by the numbers, BYU's Emily Dickinson Lexicon, one of my favorite resources, says that ED's poetry has 177 references to "bird" or "birds," not to mention all the references to individual species such as robins, larks, and sparrows. John Clare, not to be outdone, describes about 150 different species in his bird poems, with many species mentioned more than once.
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