Simon Kövesi

Conclusion: Clare as Our Contemporary; Clare as History

To conclude the book, this chapter turns both to the present – and considers the manner in which Clare is rewritten by contemporary creative writing – and to the past – assessing how historicism has avoided the problematic presence of Clare in its own practice. It focuses upon some of the problems of the dominant mode of critical historicism, and through the examples of contemporary writers such as Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair who have responded to Clare, this chapter turns to Gadamer’s theorisation of horizons of history and critical prejudice – to assess the manner in which horizons of situation (temporal, spatial, prejudicial) work in Clare studies. The book ends with a brief experiment – in which the possible claims to truth of differing modes of responding to Clare are compared.

John Clare and Place

This chapter tackles issues of place in the self-presentation and critical reception of John Clare, and pursues it across a number of axes. The argument centres on the placing of Clare both socio-economically and ‘naturally’, and limitations exerted upon perceptions of his work. Interrogating criticism this chapter finds a pervasive awkwardness especially in relation to issues of class and labour. It assesses the contemporary ‘placing’ of Clare, and seemingly unavoidable insensitivities to labour and poverty in the history industry, place-naming, and polemical ecocriticism. It assesses the ways Clare represents place – in poverty, in buildings, in nature – and, drawing on Michel de Certeau, considers the tactics Clare uses to negotiate his place. It pursues trajectories to ‘un-place’ Clare: the flight of fame in Clare’s response to Byron; and the flight of an early poem in songbooks and beyond, across the nineteenth century.

Looking, Painting, Listing, Noting: Clare, Women and Nature

This chapter focuses on a problematic and much-overlooked area of Clare’s oeuvre: his poems about women, and about love for women. It does so in part to test out the ecocentric theorisations, aesthetic patterns and complex manuscript issues raised in preceding chapters, and to consider whether Clare’s resistance to egotism is maintained, qualified, or rejected altogether, when Clare is in poetic pursuit of singular and sometimes objectifying desire. With extensive close reading of manuscript evidence, and an engagement with the rare moments of feminist criticism of Clare, this chapter tackles head-on the accusation that Clare displayed the ‘habits of a sex-murderer’, specifically in the paratextual matter in the late asylum notebooks.

Clare Making Text; Making Text of Clare

Following directly from the last chapter’s theorisation of Clare’s ‘green’ textual practice, and the problems inherent in his manuscripts, this chapter considers the relationship Clare had to print culture, assesses from where his peculiar problems and responses might stem, and discusses the recent, tortured critical history of the editing and presentation of Clare’s texts. The argument then turns to the manner in which Clare presents himself as a maker of text, and how that might inform future editions of his work, especially if editors are more open about the politics and intentions of their editing projects.

Clare and Ecocentrism

Drawing on the opening chapter’s assessment of ecocritical readings of Clare’s ‘place’, this chapter analyses Clare’s resistance to Romantic egotism: first, through the close and contextualised reading of a letter in which he theorises widely about limitations on his own expression and voices (and the political self-regard of public rhetoric); second, through an extended analysis of a sonnet and its manuscript contexts. This chapter both analyses Clare theorising what we might now call a ‘green’ levelling of the politics of writing styles, and then reveals what happens when he puts that ecocentric theory into poetic practice. It uses Deleuze and Guattari’s modelling of the rhizome to unlock significant patterns in Clare’s nature poetry. This chapter opens up problems of editing and interpreting Clare’s manuscripts.