I Am: The Selected Poetry of John Clare

by John Clare

Book Overview

Hail, humble Helpstone ...
Where dawning genius never met the day,
Where useless ignorance slumbers life away
Unknown nor heeded, where low genius tries
Above the vulgar and the vain to rise.
--from "Helpstone"

"I Am" The Selected Poetry of John Clare is the first anthology of the great "peasant poet"'s remarkable verse that makes available the full range of his accomplishments...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374528691
• ISBN13: 9780374528690
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Why should we read the poems of John Clare?

Everyone knows of Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan,' Keats' 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias.' These and other memorable poems of the Romantic period have been read and enjoyed by many and for very good reasons. Their authors were talented and accomplished writers whose poems bring us real pleasure. If we think about it, however, we need to consider that these poems were written in the comfort of warm studies by fairly well-off bookish men whose sensibilities, certainly in the case of Coleridge and Shelley, had been formed by an education in the classics - by the study of Latin and Greek mythology and of Homer, Virgil, etc. - by, in short, the products of long-dead civilizations. Clare, in complete contrast to these men, was far from comfortably well-off. As an uneducated farm laborer living in a cramped and drafty cottage his entire life was a struggle with poverty, ill health, and a multitude of other misfortunes. But this, ironically, was his great advantage. Springing as he did from the common people, the English folk who were products of a still living and vital traditional culture, he exhibited, unlike many of his supposed 'betters,' a sensibility deeply rooted in the 'real' as opposed to what was merely fashionable, pretentious, and ultimately superficial. His life, though one of poverty in one sense, was extremely rich in another since it was lived in contact with a vibrant folk culture and with the earth and its living creatures, things filled with a superabundant vitality in which he took great delight and which entered deeply into the fabric of his sensibility. His poems, in celebrating what I tend to think of as 'the importance of the ordinary,' spread before us a banquet that can never cease to nourish because Clare, in what a fellow reviewer has described as "his simplicity and innocence and utter goodness" saw that nothing, in fact, is ordinary since everything is a miracle, and it is this inspired vision of the sheer wonder of ordinary everyday things that he bequeaths to us. Clare, in short, rescues us from fantasies and brings us back in touch with realities; he enables us, as Van Gogh did with his amazing paintings of sunflowers and chairs and cypresses and boots, to grasp their essence more fully and see more deeply into their truth. That is why we should read him, though preferably in Eric Robinson's edition* since "Clare is not improved by regularizing him" as Bate has done here; he is in fact spoiled. *John Clare Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)

Poet of loss, at last gaining recognition

Underrated for so long as a result of the same English academic snobishness that leads intelligent people to deny that a homely man of Stratford-upon-avon could have written Hamlet, its good to see that John Clare is finally being recognised as the great poet that he was. Its often said that he was a consistantly good poet, without composing any real classic. Yet read the title poem 'I Am' a few times, learn of its context in the final admission of Clare into a lunatic asylum, and I defy you to remain unmoved by lines such as 'I long for scenes, where man has never trod, A place where women never smiled or wept'.

Great Stuff, Questionable Selection

The only thing more remarkable than John Clare's talent is that it has taken so long for it to receive the wider audience it deserves. Time and again in Jonathan Bate's appreciable but over-long biography we learn of great poems left to petrify in the dust of museums until "well into the twentieth century." That neglect alone qualifies as a disturbing testament to the cruelty with which some of literature's greatest geniuses flounder and fade under the rubble of history. Though Bate's recent biography is commendable in its success at introducing readers not just to Clare's complicated character, but also to the poet's technical, formal and linguistic ingenuity; he consistently describes poems in the biography that he chose not to include in this "Selected Poems." Most tragic is his decision not to include so many of the poems left out of the original published version of "The Rurual Muse." Moreover, to consider Bate's tantalizing description of some of the poems included in "The Rural Muse" along with his decision to leave them out of this Selected Poems is to encounter the strange misguidedness with which Clare's genius has been treated over the centuries. Writing of "Mary," the childhood love of Clare's life that haunted him into his grave, Bate says that "She is the subject of `The Milking Hour' which "recalls a final evening conversation with her, walking in a wheat field; and in `Nutting'" in which "Clare compares her auburn hair to the colour of ripe hazels, they shell nuts together, she flirtatiously throws the shells at him and then blushes when he pockets the husks as a keepsake." Yet neither poem can be found in this book. Even if page-count was the issue in putting this book together (one that contributed to the unfortunate underrepresentation of Clare's work in his lifetime), I seriously doubt that a lousy two more poems -- the very poems about which Bate speaks so seductively in his biography -- would have been problematic. Such tender images as Bate offers with regard to these poems must have made for some riveting verse from Clare, especially considering the enormous power of "First Love's Recollection," another poem about Mary from "The Rural Muse" Bate deigned to include here, or another of Clare's great "Mary" poems, "Love and Memory":Thou art gone the dark journeyThat leaves no returning;`Tis fruitless to mourn theeBut who can help mourningTo think of the lifeThat did laugh on thy browIn the beautiful pastLeft so desolate now?This is just the first stanza of a poem whose unusual lyrical intensity is sustained throughout. Why Bate couldn't have tossed in just a few more such poems - particularly the ones he talks about in his biography - is as baffling as it is enraging. After so much neglect and misfortune, one would think that Bate might have been a bit more discerning in his choice of poems to include here. It is time for Clare's reputation to be granted its very just reward, and I am afraid that Bate may have missed his chan

Correction of other review

The reviewer who states that Clare did not want his poems punctuated is in profound error, as I demonstrate at length in my biography of Clare. He did. 'Unpunctuated' Clare is a 20th century editorial construct that perpetuates the myth of the 'peasant poet'.(Apologies for filling in a rating box, but the system wouldn't let me leave it blank: how typical of our culture where everything has to be ranked rather than discussed!)