Clare's mutterings, murmurings, and ramblings: the sounds of health

Clare is valued as a poet of direct communication. His poems are filled with Northamptonshire dialect that fosters an instantaneous connection to his local environment, creating an immediate sense of place though sound. Likewise, Clare’s representations of natural sounds, such as the ‘whewing’ of the pewit, the ‘swop’ of the jay bird as it flies, and the ‘chickering crickets’, have a mimetic quality that creates a direct experience of what he hears.1 Seamus Heaney grouped Clare with what he called ‘monoglot geniuses’, meaning that he had a gift for conveying through poetry a ‘univocal homeplace’ that his readers could understand without necessarily belonging to that place themselves.2 However, this idea of Clare as a poet of such direct coherency is complicated by his madness or, specifically, by his repeated usage of a vocalisation which carries connotations of madness. This essay will consider the ways that Clare represents health and madness at the level of sound, by bringing them into relationship with a mode of speaking that recurs throughout his poetry and prose: his use of muttering. It will suggest that Clare’s poetic investment in muttering and the sub-vocal register as both a personalised, therapeutic mode of self-address, and a way to foster a deep poetic relationship with his natural surroundings, comes to complicate his formal representation of health as a clear ‘strong voice’.Arts and Humanities Research Council (PhD Studentship Award

John Clare, herbalism, and elegy

Discussions of Clare’s engagement with botany often trace his fraught relationship with taxonomy, exploring his admiration for common names over the ‘dark system’ of Linnaean classification. This essay expands understanding of Clare’s botanical imagination by considering how he brings his botanical ‘taste’ to bear on the flower as a key figure of elegiac consolation. I refocus attention on his formative preference for pre-Linnaean herbalism and explore how it informs his engagement with elegiac tradition and imagery, especially in relation to Gray’s ‘Elegy’. I attend to how herbalism is brought into relationship with poetic representations of the floral, focussing especially on the connection between Clare’s preference for herbals and Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica. I then discuss ‘Cauper Green’ and ‘The Village Doctress’ (Clare’s most sustained poetic discussions of herbalism) as elegies that try to reconcile the finite temporality of human life with the regenerative life cycles of plants and their flowers.N/

"Mild health I seek thee": Clare and Bloomfield at the limits of pastoral

In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams dismantled the “pastoral assumption” that the rural laboring class were pictures of health and vitality, uncovering instead the reality of embodied suffering in laboring-class poetry. This essay considers how Robert Bloomfield and John Clare interrogated this “pastoral assumption” of rural health, suggesting that to claim they merely rejected it risks losing sight of their subtle forms of poetic critique. The body, mind, and verse of laboring-class poets were subject to simultaneous cultural narratives of robust health and sickly weakness, within which Bloomfield and Clare had to forge their own distinctive poetic voices. They wrote poems, I argue, that ostensibly upheld a pastoral ideal of health emanating from the natural world, but also critiqued this ideal through an artful hesitancy, especially in their use of apostrophe. I consider the influence of Bloomfield’s “To My Old Oak Table” (1806), and “Shooter’s Hill” (1806) on Clare’s early poem “To Health” (1821) and one of his middle-period sonnets in particular. Far from being uncomfortable or under-confident in the pastoral mode, Bloomfield and Clare brought their own aesthetic experiments and experiences of precarious health to bear on some of its key tropes.N/

'But now we float': Cowper, air-balloons, and the poetics of flight

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“asking with tears forgiveness”: Weeping as 'gentling' in Blake's Milton

In this article I wish to counter a critical perception of Blake as a ‘hard’ and unforgiving poet through a reading of his epic Milton as a conscious study in the nature of forgiveness. Specifically, I frame Blake's model of forgiveness as integral to his belief that every human has an inherent right and potential to participate in a divine body of imagination, in order to conduct a study of how Blake sees this as being achieved. Our divinity, and therefore our humanity in Blake's terms, is made manifest, not through hardness, supremacy and strength that allows us to overcome difficulties, but through softness and gentleness. Specifically, I draw on the theologian Stanley Hauerwas' notion of ‘gentling’ (“Christ's Gentle Man,” 2010) to define this softness, a term he develops from a reading of the beatitudes of Matthew's gospel to forward an understanding of the divine, not as strong, but as broken and mourning, to argue that Blake attempts to gentle and forgive fragmented individuals by presenting them with moments of weeping in his poetry, an action that calls the weeping figure into divinity through a forgiving process of meeting, of both the self and others. Alongside Hauerwas' notion of gentling, Martin Buber's I and Thou (1937) also offers a way of situating forgiveness in the difference between hard and soft relations, as this article illustrates. The absence of connection or ‘meeting’ in Buber's ‘I–It’ relationship, I argue, is founded on ‘hardness’, the ‘I’ seeing the other only as an object from which he or she is removed. The ‘I–Thou’ relationship, however, is gentling and mutual, expressive of Blake's vision of forgiveness and its importance within the divine human

Forms of health in John Clare's poetics

This thesis is the first sustained study of the poet John Clare and his relationship to health. It considers health as an under-explored physical and mental state evoked across his poetry and prose that has heretofore been overshadowed by a critical preoccupation with his supposed madness. Under the banner of the Medical Humanities, I angle a critical lens on Clare and health beyond biographical readings of his mental deterioration and onto his written responses to the medical, cultural, and social understandings of health by which he was surrounded. Specifically, I argue that Clare articulates both his comprehension and also experience of health through poetic form. I take a thematic approach to the reach of Clare's works composed between 1804-1864, and focus on what I argue to be the most predominant 'forms' that health takes across his poetics: voice, breath, and place. The chapters unfold the poet’s engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical contexts such as nosology and theories of insanity, speech and elocution, climatic and atmospheric medicine, phrenology, and botany, in order to consider how the local formal techniques of his poems (metre and prosody, rhyme and other sonic devices, caesura, enjambment, and line-endings) shape and re-work the ideas of mental and physical health that these contexts put forward. Throughout the thesis I bring together formal and historical methodologies with modern phenomenological and cultural theories in order to draw out how Clare's exploration of health is both facilitated by the thinking of his own period, and also speaks to current research into health and illness as subjective experiences. Ultimately, I read health across Clare’s poetry at the level of form in order to reveal how health inspires a textual mode that defies determinacy and unsettles distinctions between the healthy and the pathological.This thesis is the first sustained study of the poet John Clare and his relationship to health. It considers health as an under-explored physical and mental state evoked across his poetry and prose that has heretofore been overshadowed by a critical preoccupation with his supposed madness. Under the banner of the Medical Humanities, I angle a critical lens on Clare and health beyond biographical readings of his mental deterioration and onto his written responses to the medical, cultural, and social understandings of health by which he was surrounded. Specifically, I argue that Clare articulates both his comprehension and also experience of health through poetic form. I take a thematic approach to the reach of Clare's works composed between 1804-1864, and focus on what I argue to be the most predominant 'forms' that health takes across his poetics: voice, breath, and place. The chapters unfold the poet’s engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical contexts such as nosology and theories of insanity, speech and elocution, climatic and atmospheric medicine, phrenology, and botany, in order to consider how the local formal techniques of his poems (metre and prosody, rhyme and other sonic devices, caesura, enjambment, and line-endings) shape and re-work the ideas of mental and physical health that these contexts put forward. Throughout the thesis I bring together formal and historical methodologies with modern phenomenological and cultural theories in order to draw out how Clare's exploration of health is both facilitated by the thinking of his own period, and also speaks to current research into health and illness as subjective experiences. Ultimately, I read health across Clare’s poetry at the level of form in order to reveal how health inspires a textual mode that defies determinacy and unsettles distinctions between the healthy and the pathological.</p

Palgrave advances in John Clare studies

Contributes to ongoing conversations about John Clare's work while offering new perspectives and directions on Clare scholarship, in an accessible writing style Serves as both a useful introduction to Clare and his work for students that are new to it, and a rich resource for scholars already working in the area Essays look at interdisciplinary topics including ecocriticism, environmental humanities, medical humanities, and posthumanism Features essays from established and early career scholars Is comprehensive in its coverage of popular and new topics in Clare studies.N/