Born 1793 in the village of Helpston on the edge of the East Anglian Fens – a year after the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and two before John Keats – John Clare attended a school at Glinton church. His autobiographical writings show his acquaintance with mathematics, ‘particularly navigation and algebra’, as well as botany, natural history and music. Alongside his schooling, he worked in a string of jobs as an agricultural labourer, from 1805-9, such as threshing in the fields.

But it was borrowing, aged 13, a well-thumbed copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons that sparked his literary ambitions, turning his labour from the land to the page – from plough to pen.

The complete edition of Seasons, including the final part of the cycle, ‘Autumn’, was published in 1730. Thomson belonged to the Augustan age of Alexander Pope, and his descriptions of the seasonal landscape revelled in Miltonic emulation – the syntax of the blank verse being sinewy and convoluted. Some lines from ‘Spring’ serve as an example:

The Thrush

And Wood-lark, o’er the kind contending Throng

Superior heard, run thro’ the sweetest Length

Of Notes; when listening Philomela deigns

To let them joy, and purposes, in Thought

Elate, to make her Night excel their Day.

The enjambing (‘Throng / Superior heard’), inverted word order (‘in Thought / Elate’) and classical allusions (Philomela, metamorphosed into a nightingale) are all hallmarks of what Jonathan Bate – Clare’s most recent biographer – labelled Thomson’s ‘genteel’ poetic style.

In hindsight, Seasons, composed in polished blank verse, seems so distant from Clare’s own mature voice. Yet it would provide a form, a template, for Clare’s pastoral jottings. A ‘proper’ poetry balanced against Clare’s love of the oral, folk culture of the village, with its ballads and fiddles. As soon as he had saved enough, he snagged his own copy for a shilling at a bookshop in Stamford. He savoured the verse whenever he could during the working day, jumping a wall at Burghley Park (where he would later work as a gardener) to read – and write in studied emulation – privately.

In 1807, Helpston faced an Enclosure Act, which saw the loss of the common land, previously freely accessible to the local people. Hedges and fences created new boundaries of ownership. The very same moment Clare was beginning to pen his own lines praising the fauna, flora and customs of Helpston, other lines were being drawn up and down the map of the local landscape. The centuries-old open-field system was being overturned. Clare’s pen was therefore spurred on not only by Thomson, but an urgent need to voice protest at enclosure – the ‘lawless law’ as he termed it in oxymoronic indignation. Soon, in counties further afield, the countryside would be in open revolt. During the 1830s, agricultural labourers in Otmoor, Oxfordshire were attacking the marks of enclosure – hedges, ditches and bridges – under the cover of night.

‘The Mores’, an early poem, spells out Clare’s feelings of a bygone era:

In uncheckt shadows of green brown and grey

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene

Nor fence of ownership crept in between

To hide the prospect of the following eye

Its only bondage was the circling sky

 Here we have Thomson’s vigorous pentameter tuned to Clare’s concerns of boundary, freedom and vision. As his literary ambitions grew, and overstepped the mark – as Clare began to become more poet than peasant – an unpleasant claustrophobia was emerging.

Activities of bird watching and hunting for birds’ nests and eggs were the very material of Clare’s poetry. Enclosed land forbade trespassing, preventing Clare from accessing such joys of nature harboured there. In ‘Helpston Green’, Clare addresses the once common land directly:

Ye injur’d fields ere while so gay

When nature’s hand display’d

Long waving rows of Willows gray

And clumps of Hawthorn shade

But now alas your awthorn bowers

All desolate we see

The tyrants hand their shade devours

And cuts down every tree

There is no longer any shade to roam in, rest in or explore for the rambler. The trees that harboured the nests of nightingales, thrushes, larks and ravens (all subjects of later poems), that Clare drew inspiration from, are gone.

Clare’s first audience was private: his parents. But as early as 1814, Clare had bought a manuscript-book and was making plans for print publication. After discovering by a Stamford bookseller, Clare was put in touch with John Taylor in in 1819 – the London publisher behind the printing of John Keats. The Clare we know today is a result of this partnership between the ‘peasant poet’ and Taylor, who primed Clare’s manuscripts for print publication. Clare did not use punctuation in his manuscript writing (as can be seen from the quoted section from ‘The Mores’ and ‘Helpston Green’), and so Taylor plugged in the full stops, commas and semicolons for print.

Though Clare co-operated and benefited from Taylor’s editorial aid in terms of punctuation, it is the employment of his local Northamptonshire dialect in his verse which caused contention. As we will see, the politics of ownership and control at the geographical level – in terms of enclosure – intersect with matters of Clare’s language in print culture. John Barrell argues, in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (1972), it is at the level of language that Clare seeks a local quality – a sense of place – in his verse; this is ‘inevitably opposed to the ideology of enclosure, which sought to de-localise, to take away the individuality of a place’. Clare’s employment of Northamptonshire dialect words was fundamental to this project of localisation – a local language for a local landscape.

Richly onomatopoeic words such as gulphy (gulping), scrowled (scratched with lines) and prog (poke) vitalise Clare’s poetry. The latter, prog, was a particular favourite of Seamus Heaney, using it as the title of an essay in The Redress of Poetry (1995). The onomatopoeic quality of Clare’s dialect adjectives allows one to revel in the murmur of trees, or the crunch of footsteps in fresh snow, as language seems to dissolve into pure sensory experience. Take ‘The Woodman’, for example, witnessing the end of a winter day:

And soon the dusky even hovers round

And the white frost ‘gins crizzle pond and brook

Crizzle? A verb meaning ‘to make crisp’. Clare could have described how the frost begins to freeze pond and brook, but there is something bewitching in that sibilant, hissing quality of crizzle, which captures nature’s transformation of water into ice. Heaney in Finders Keepers (2002) said of another of Clare’s poems: ‘Rarely has the butteriness of a butterfly been so available.’ There is no doubt that the Irishman is indebted to Clare’s delicate selection and sprinkling of dialect words, which bring the rural world to life.

A ‘glossary’ was created by Taylor, decoding such dialect words for urban readers, at the back of Clare’s first poetic and commercial hit, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, published in 1820. Taylor was both drawn to Clare’s use of dialect – mythologising it as the ‘unwritten language of England’ – and aware of its uneasy status within permissible poetic diction.  Zachary Leader notes in his study, Revision and Romantic Authorship (1996), that:

Though, like Taylor himself, [Clare] was perfectly aware of his poems’ distinctive (that is, ‘incorrect’) strengths, he sought to balance or combine these strengths with whatever he could gather (‘steal’, it sometimes felt) from tradition — that is, from the polite or literary culture. This balance, I shall argue, was vital to the construction not just of a poetical but a personal identity; without it, his sense of self literally shattered.

Taylor could be easily made the villain, overwriting Clare with an editorial interventionism. Yet, as Leader reveals, Clare’s identity, and place in print culture, rested on this partnership which balanced Clare’s distinctive dialect voice of his manuscript page against the conventions of polite literary culture in print circulation.

Taylor’s ‘Introduction’ to Poems Descriptive elucidates this complex relationship between the ‘peasant poet’ and print culture. After providing biographical sketches of Clare as a rustic peasant, Taylor promises the reader they will find ‘no idly-feign’d poetic pains’. Taylor is himself at pains – commercial rather than poetic – to market Clare’s poetry as ‘genuine productions’ of an actual peasant-cum-poet. In the era of Robert Burns, nothing sells better than the narrative of a ‘discovered’ genius in the mucky fields, untainted by city life. And so, with deft enterprise, Taylor markets Clare as such.

Clare’s use of dialect did not face outright dismissal in his own era. This is not a neat narrative of pure, historic marginalisation and contemporary rediscovery and celebration. It was part of Taylor’s image of Clare’s poems as ‘genuine productions’. A letter from Charles Lamb to Clare from 1822 perhaps best illustrates the complex aesthetic implications of Clare’s language. He admits to the peasant poet:

In some of your story-telling ballads the provincial phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too profuse with them. […] Now and then a home rusticism is fresh and startling, but where nothing is gained in expression it is out of tenor.

It is this verb, ‘startle’, which encapsulates the simultaneously perturbing and vitalising effect of Clare’s use of dialect on his urban audience. Taylor similarly writes in the same year that Clare should write ‘between affectation’ and ‘plain language’, balancing the conventions of polite poetic diction with his fresh, yet vulgar, tongue.

The frustration Clare felt over how his voice was transferred, and occasionally distorted, from manuscript to the printed page is palpable in a letter to James Hessey (Taylor’s publishing partner) in July 1820. This followed many deletions made by Taylor to the third edition of Poems Descriptive. Clare jibes at Taylor’s editorial pen, threatening to muzzle and mute him, leaving the published volume only with blank pages:

I have seen the third Edition & am cursed mad about it the judgment of T[aylor] is a button hole lower in my opinion […] false delicasy’s seriousness muscles [i.e. muzzles] up the mouth & condemns it … I think to please all & offend all we shoud put out 215 pages of blank leaves & call it ‘Clare in fashion’ 

Even if Clare’s tone is read as tongue-in-cheek, we begin to see how issues of voice and textual control intersect with Clare’s mental state. There is a sense of foreboding in Clare’s phrase ‘cursed mad’ upon the prospect of his poetic voice being silenced. By 1837, on the recommendation of Taylor, Clare would enter a private asylum in High Beach, near Epping Forest in Essex, as a voluntary patient, following strange delusions. One is reminded of Leader’s point that the partnership between Clare and his editor in creating his printed voice was responsible for the construction not only of a poetical identity, but also a personal identity – ‘without it, his sense of self literally shattered’.

In an autobiographical fragment from the same year as Clare’s letter to James Hessey, the peasant poet provides impressively detailed insight into his own psychological condition and the impacts of his divided occupation as both a worker of the land and the page:

when I turned to the recollections of the past by seeing people at my old occupations of ploughing and ditching in the fields by the road side while I was lolling in a coach the novelty created such strange feelings that I could almost fancy that my identity as well as my occupations had changed – that I was not the same John Clare but that some stranger soul had jumped into my skin…

The coach Clare is ‘lolling’ in was heading for the capital. It would be the peasant poet’s first trip to London to meet his literary peers, such as the essayist Charles Lamb. The vignette almost has a cinematic intensity as we see Clare being physically and psychologically drawn away from his old occupation, class, and community into the dazzling, dizzying limelight of literary London.

While Clare co-operated diplomatically with Taylor’s revisions throughout the beginning of his career, things eventually turned sour. Clare’s third collection, The Shepherd’s Calendar, was composed between 1823 and 1824, but it was only published in 1827 after much procrastination on Taylor’s part. The stalling was over the issue of language. Taylor disliked many of the ‘provincial words’ and began cutting and altering the text as he saw fit. The Shepherd’s Calendar would, like Poems Descriptive, fail to gain attention. By 1831, Clare was in desperate need of money, telling Taylor in a letter that he will have to ‘commence cottage farming’. Clare was, humiliatingly, being forced to turn his hand from the pen back to the land.

The peasant poet’s career was falling apart. Clare even began desperately flogging copies of The Shepherd’s Calendar himself. Such pressures would become too much. In 1837 Clare would first enter a private asylum in High Beach. He continued writing verse, even re-writing Lord Byron’s Child Harold (as Clare spelt it) and Don Juan, believing, delusionally, that he was George Gordon Byron – poet and peer.

It can be no surprise that Clare – tormented by a lack of control over the land he loved due to enclosure, and the language of the printed page due to strained editorial relations – began exhibiting manifestations of an identity disorder. As Clare told a visitor to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he was eventually moved in 1841 until his death in 1864: ‘Literature has destroyed my head and brought me here.’ His self-diagnosis was therefore literary. Clare was traversing two worlds, two languages – two people even, being ‘not the same John Clare’. Between the land and the page, Clare seems to have got lost somewhere in between.

If we turn again to his verse, Clare beautifully connects the struggles of birds in their natural environment with his own in a hostile literary landscape; both poetic song and birdsong fight to be heard, whether that be from the leaves of a tree or a book. Clare’s bird poems come from this period of commercial failure, part of an envisioned collection titled Birds Nesting which would never come to fruition. Some of these bird poems would be haphazardly selected for Clare’s final published collection The Rural Muse (1835). Avian subjects became a means for the ‘peasant poet’ to reorientate and articulate his own song on the printed page. Clare’s sonnet ‘The March Nightingale’ captures this:

He stops his own and thinks the nightingale

Hath of her monthly reckoning counted wrong

‘Sweet jug jug jug’ comes loud upon his ear

Those sounds that unto May by right belong

There is a quirk here. Following the sonnet form, ‘nightingale’ and ‘ear’ should rhyme. An early reviewer, Octavius Gilchrist in The London Magazine, had previously excused Clare’s failure to keep the sonnet form, explaining that, as he is an ‘unlettered author’, he would be ignorant of such conventions. But there’s something deeper going on here, for the listener figured in the sonnet has mistaken the song of a blackcap bird for a nightingale. Clare therefore frustrates the expected rhyme on purpose to give a vividness to the startling effect of the birdcall – that onomatopoeic ‘jug jug jug’ – a seemingly impossible, magical birdcall due to this avian misidentification. Here we have a wondrous moment of awkwardness, of song misheard. The birdsong is just like Clare’s verse – beautifully out-of-place, daringly experimental, delicately textured, unique.