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John Clare produced some of English poetrys most poignant and glorious lyrics. Writing not as an observer of nature but from an intimate knowledge of the wheatfields, hedgerows, and ditches of his village in Northamptonshire, he described animals, insects, trees, rivers, sunlight, and clouds with sublime sensitivity. But as enclosures and improvements came in the early nineteenth century, dismembering the rural landscape, his later poems became infused with a sense of disorientation and loss, and scattered with threads of madness. Clares genius has been rediscovered by fellow poets in every generation since his death, from Dylan Thomas to Ted Hughes to Seamus Heaney. First time in Penguin Classics Landmark edition based on Clare's original manuscripts Includes introduction, explanatory notes, and glossary
TheaelizabetMental health problems (thought he was Lord Byron) that eventually left him and his family destitute. He‘s featured in the novel The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, which is where I first learned of his troubles. He wrote one of my favorite poems, I Am!, while in an asylum.(edited) 6y