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Jan 10, 2019 · John Clare (1793-1864) has been called the greatest nature poet in the English language (by, for instance, his biographer Jonathan Bate), and yet his life – particularly his madness and time inside an asylum later in his life – tends to overshadow his poetry. So here we’ve picked ten of John Clare’s best poems which offer an ...
John Clare: Poems Chiefly from Manuscript, edited by Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter, Cobden-Sanderson, 1920, Putnam, 1921. Madrigals and Chronicles; Being Newly Found Poems Written by John Clare, edited by Blunden, Beaumont Press, 1924. Sketches in the Life of John Clare, by Himself, edited by Blunden, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1931.
1793-1864 • Ranked #119 in the top 500 poets. John Clare's life spanned one of the great ages of English poetry but, until about fifty years ago, few would have thought of putting his name with those of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning and Tennyson. Born in 1793 to humble and almost illiterate parents, Clare grew up in the ...
I Am! By John Clare. I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes. And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed. Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake, Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break. Opening their golden caskets to the sun, The buttercups make schoolboys eager run, To see who shall be first to pluck the prize—. Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies, And o'er her half-formed nest, with happy wings.
Poems by John Clare. Arthur Symons (Ed.) London, 1908; The Poems of John Clare - In two volumes. London, 1935; Selected Poems London, 1997; Works about Clare The only known photograph of Clare, 1862. In chronological order: Frederick Martin, The Life of John Clare, 1865; J. L. Cherry, Life and Remains of John Clare, 1873; Heath, Richard (1893).
