John Clare
by Jonathan Bate
Buy on AmazonPublisher's description: John Clare (1793-1864) is the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self, but until now he has never been the subject of a comprehensive literary biography. Here at last is his full story told by the light of his voluminous work: his birth in poverty, his work as an agricultural labourer, his burgeoning promise as a writer--cultivated under the gaze of rival patrons--then his moment of fame in the company of John Keats and the toast of literary London, and finally his decline into mental illness and his last years confined in asylums.…
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"Birds are very prominent in poetry. Think of Shelley and the skylark, Browning and the thrush, Keats and the nightingale – and Coleridge and the albatross. Birds pop up in poetry all the time, and my favourite nature poet is John Clare, whom I like because he has got such a wonderful eye and ear for birds and such a strong ‘sense of place’. He’s a very good observer. He was brought up in rural Northamptonshire as a poor farm labourer, and he had an intense feeling for his local landscape and a very deep knowledge of all the wildlife around him. And he was a wonderful describer of birds. Whereas Keats speaks from his imagination, Clare speaks from experience. I quote him extensively in my book and include quite a few of his poems. He’s got a wonderful eye for just seeing exactly what the birds really are like, and seeing them as part of the landscape that he knew so well. He wrote about many other subjects too, but a lot of his best poems are about birds."
Birdwatching · fivebooks.com