John Clare

Subtitle
A Biography

Author Jonathan Bate

John Clare (1793–1864) was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth or Shelley and a life to match. The "poet's poet," he has a place in the national pantheon and, more tangibly, a plaque in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, unveiled in 1989. Here at last is Clare's full story, from his birth in poverty and employment as an agricultural labourer, via his burgeoning promise as a writer cultivated under the gaze of rival patrons and moment of fame, in the company of John Keats, as the toast of literary London, to his final decline into mental illness and the last years of his life, confined in asylums. Clare's ringing voice quick-witted, passionate, vulnerable, courageous emerges through extracts from his letters, journals, autobiographical writings and poems, as Jonathan Bate brings this complex man, his revered work and his ribald world, vividly to life.

"What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world." — Seamus Heaney

Bio

Sir Jonathan Bate is a Foundation Professor of environmental humanities with a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Global Futures Laboratory, School of Sustainability.


Praise for this book

Exemplary ... wonderfully written and diverse.

Peter Ackroyd The Times (London)

Splendidly readable. .. a shrewd, nimbly written book, one of the few of its subject that will be read and enjoyed off campus.

Terry Eagleton The Independent (U.K.)