'Hail England old England my country & home': Englishness and the Local in John Clare’s Writings

This article rethinks John Clare's connection to place, as well as the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘the local’ themselves. It argues that the localism of his work was enabled by potential alienation and displacement and was connected to a sense of wider national community. Clare's writings attempt to think of England in two related ways: as a political community brought together at times of threat, and as a community of taste brought together by a way of apprehending the natural world. His early patriotic verse is often strained and unconvincing, but poems such as ‘The Flitting’ present an idea of ‘native poesy’ that embodies the local and the national through careful description of the natural world. However, this idea was itself mediated through metropolitan attempts to reclaim the customs and literature of ‘merry England’. Thus Clare's localism and nationalism are shown to be ambivalent and uncanny

Major and minor criteria for gastric dystemperaments in Persian Medicine: Sari gastric dystemperament criteria-I (SGDC-I)

<div class="msocomtxt" id="com1" language="JavaScript" onmouseout="msoCommentHide('com1')" onmouseover="msoCommentShow('anchor1','com1')">Background: Gastric disorders are one of the most common human ailments, which impose a huge economic burden on countries. In Persian Medicine (PM), it is possible to predict the susceptibility to gastric diseases with diagnosis of gastric Mizajes (temperaments) and dystemperaments. The semiology of gastric dystemperaments has been investigated in PM textbooks, although the value of each sign and symptom is not mentioned. Consequently, this research is designed to determine the major and minor criteria for classifying gastric dystemperaments on the basis of valid manuscripts and with the help of PM specialists in the present era. Methods: This was a consensus-based study consisting of four phases. In the first phase, reference PM textbooks were studied. Symptoms and signs of gastric dystemperaments were collected and listed in four groups. In the second phase, semi-structured interviews with a sample of PM experts were carried out. Phase three included a focused group discussion with experts. Eventually, findings were integrated from the three study phases in a two-day meeting in Sari City. Results: Selected criteria included eight major and eight minor criteria for hot-cold dystemperament, as well as six major and eight minor criteria for wet-dry gastric dystemperament. Conclusion: Modern lifestyles and the interfering factors are responsible for some changes in diagnostic signs and symptoms according to PM. This was the first step to coordinate PM diagnostic criteria for gastric dystemperaments. Further studies are recommended to reach a unique protocol in the field of PM diagnostics. The next step includes design and validation of national diagnostic tools. &#160

John Clare and place

This chapter tackles issues of place in the self-presentation and critical reception of John Clare, and pursues it across a number of axes. The argument centres on the placing of Clare both socio-economically and ‘naturally’, and limitations exerted upon perceptions of his work. Interrogating criticism this chapter finds a pervasive awkwardness especially in relation to issues of class and labour. It assesses the contemporary ‘placing’ of Clare, and seemingly unavoidable insensitivities to labour and poverty in the history industry, place-naming, and polemical ecocriticism. It assesses the ways Clare represents place – in poverty, in buildings, in nature – and, drawing on Michel de Certeau, considers the tactics Clare uses to negotiate his place. It pursues trajectories to ‘un-place’ Clare: the flight of fame in Clare’s response to Byron; and the flight of an early poem in songbooks and beyond, across the nineteenth century

John Clare and the Language of Listening

This essay examines the representation of listening in a number of Clare’s 1832 poems, paying attention to the language used, including prepositions, ideophones, verb forms, dialect and literary allusion. It considers how listening locates and is located in his poems and argues that in ‘The Fernowls Nest’ literary allusion is an especially appropriate language for describing the poem’s strangely displaced sounds. It proposes that Clare’s listening is alert and responsive to different aural perspectives, that it is compound and reflexive, and especially attuned to moments of aural ambiguity, when the boundary between self and other, subject and object becomes blurred. Such moments offer a mode of ethical relation to the natural world that resists the politics of representation John Barrell has associated with the eye in loco-descriptive poetry. If the particularity and multiplicity of Clare’s poems offer an alternative to the visual mode of control and possession associated with the prospect view, the distinctive forms of listening we find in his poems, and, in particular, his attunement to aural ambiguity, represent another kind of resistance to the aesthetic expression of human ownership and control over the natural world. Listening in Clare is thus a form of environmentalist poetics

Clare's complex words A study of literary effects in the poetry of John Clare

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Listening for Stars

This article first appeared in The Poetry Review published by The Poetry Society, Autumn 2021, Volume 111, No. 3 © The author & The Poetry Society. www.poetrysociety.org.uk Reproduced by consent of The Poetry Society.This essay explores how poetry can enable and invite new ways of listening. It examines how how Coleridge, Hadfield and Oswald translate the experience of listening into new forms - how they use different strategies - visual, typographical, and rhythmical - the ways in which stress patterns and rhythmic shifts communicate and suggest – not only to our ears and our mind’s ears, but also somatically, drawing our bodies, our breathing, into new ways of thinking in and experiencing sound. These poems all begin with an act of listening – to the quiet of frost at midnight, to the cry of an owl, or the sounds of evening (heard through mist); but it is a listening that extends beyond the physiologically auditory – to where the imagining ear takes over – to hear the quiet of the moon, the voice of change, the distance of the past, the whisper of the stars

Lyric Listening

This essay examines representations of quiet in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” to ask broader questions about the ways Romantic Lyric can register and express volume and sound dynamics. It offers historical contexts for understanding the poem including the development of musical and rhetorical notation for volume as well as accounts of shifting reading practices in the period. It demonstrates how “Frost at Midnight” offers a rich nexus for thinking about the experience and the representation of volume, and of silence, in Romantic Lyric. The poem invites further thinking about the semiotics of sound and silence through a playful interplay between eye and ear. Coleridge was fascinated by visual codes for sound and the ways in which patterns of sound can be seen as well as heard, and his poems are full of accounts of different kinds of sound, which complicate the distinction between silent and vocalised reading. Coleridge provides an especially interesting case study not only because he was writing on what has been described as the cusp between reading aloud and silent reading, and during an era of scientific discovery and innovation in the realm of acoustics, but also because he was deeply interested in musical forms and in the science and semiotics of acoustics. The essay demonstrates how shifts in volume can be expressed and experienced in a poem’s own acoustic, rhythmic, and verbal textures and suggests that the representation of sound and quiet in “Frost at Midnight” challenges and extends what is understood by ‘silent’ reading. More broadly, it proposes that volume, a term which acquired its current acoustic sense in the Romantic period, is a significant figure in Lyric studies which has gone unacknowledged. It proposes that volume was not only important to Romantic poets such as Coleridge, who, as this essay shows, found subtle ways of modulating and expressing shifts in volume in his poetry, but also that, more broadly, volume should be understood as part of a critical discourse about genre. The essay explores the ways in which volume is figured and expressed in Coleridge’s writing, and especially in “Frost at Midnight,” and considers the critical language we might use to describe volume and dynamics in poetry more generally. Arguing that Coleridge’s lyric poetry has its own playful modes and codes for communicating degrees of sound, the essay proposes that volume is a neglected but significant figure in Lyric studies.British Academ