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<\/a><\/p>\nSimon K\u00f6vesi is Professor and Head of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University<\/a>.\u00a0 He tweets as @kovesi1<\/a>.\u00a0 He has published widely on contemporary fiction (with a particular focus on the Scottish novelist James Kelman), on working-class literature and on the relationship between writing and the natural world.\u00a0 At the heart of his work, though, is his abiding interest in and love for John Clare, on whom he has published numerous essays and book chapters.\u00a0 He is the editor of the John Clare Society Journal<\/em><\/a> and the co-editor (with Scott McEathron) of New Essays on John Clare: Poetry, Culture and Community<\/em><\/a> (Cambridge University Press, 2015).\u00a0 He has recently led a high-profile campaign to highlight the threat posed to Clare’s archives by ongoing local authority cuts<\/a>. \u00a0<\/span>His passion for Clare’s work has also led to his being one of the very few academics to have sparred with a straw bear on the silver screen<\/a>.\u00a0 Below, we discuss his most recent monograph, John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History<\/em><\/a>, which was published by Palgrave in September 2017.<\/p>\n 1) What first drew you to John Clare?<\/strong><\/p>\n I was an undergrad on an exchange year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.\u00a0 It was clear to me then that the world needed my dreadful poetry, and (boldly) I showed it to a Professor of Romanticism, the brilliant Robert Kirkpatrick, who took pity on me, and kindly invited me to an evening poetry group at his house.\u00a0 I\u2019d written this nostalgic thing about watching a fox doing a wee \u2013 I suppose I was missing seeing them rifling through the bins of suburban London (to this day I\u2019ve never actually seen a fox doing a wee).\u00a0 Nevertheless, making the best of it, Kirkpatrick read us Clare\u2019s \u2018The Vixen\u2019.\u00a0 I\u2019d never known of anything poetical about a fox and I\u2019d never read any nature poetry of such precise clarity, all propelled by sharp, delicate sympathy, yet beneath no ostensible organising ego.\u00a0 I stopped writing poetry straight away, and thankfully.\u00a0 That was in 1993 \u2013 200 years after Clare was born \u2013 and so it happened to be a great year for high profile celebrations and publications about his work.\u00a0 When I returned to Glasgow for my final year, I became obsessed.\u00a0 More often than not, I read Clare instead of revising for finals.\u00a0 Early on, the rich pickings of his nature poetry were extended for me by the stylisations and politics of his (seemingly) wild language; by the capitalisation of land he occasionally protests about; by his diverse insights into folk culture and local traditions; by his unique prose; by his inversions of accepted valuations of nature; by his lyrical verse (which can be nothing but<\/em> ego of course); by his playfulness, his cheekiness, his political lubricity, his isolation.\u00a0 Like so many, I was haunted by the sad, depleted, often-romanticised story of his life.\u00a0 At the start, however, it was his late love poetry that grabbed me most of all and that was the focus of my PhD with John Goodridge.<\/p>\n 2) In your new book, you contend that ‘nature, feeling, fidelity persist as limitations on readings of Clare’, tracing the longstanding currency of characterisations such as ‘down-to-earth’ that serve to place and constrain him.\u00a0 To what extent do you think that modern criticism of Clare is still shaped by the social and critical conditions of his original reception?<\/strong><\/p>\n Those terms come from very early comments on his work.\u00a0 I argue in the book that while they have been blown apart by the best of Clare criticism, they have been latently reaffirmed by the polemical accommodation of Clare to the agendas of contemporary green criticism especially, particularly because criticism can have a deaf ear, or a ham-shaped fist, when it comes to class.\u00a0 The old model of Clare as \u2018honest John\u2019 does harm to the way we read his work \u2013 many have said so but it still creeps back.\u00a0 Many critics reveal discomfort in the way they deal with Clare\u2019s class; often, this manifests through treating his work as simple documentary evidence of landscaped fact, or a kind of social realism \u2013 as if he\u2019s not capable of slippery, literary sophistication.\u00a0 Partly this is Clare’s own fault \u2013 he often romanticises his agency out of the window \u2013 he denies his art and artfulness even in the manner in which he frames its conception.<\/p>\n In the book I also explore the ways critical awkwardness with Clare\u2019s class can sometimes be downright insensitivity.\u00a0 Calling Clare \u2018homeless\u2019 for example, is an historical nonsense, and yet it has such traction in Clare criticism, as it works well for a prevalent version of his relationship to land, or his supposed full-spectrum alienation.\u00a0 But \u2018homeless\u2019 is now a dead metaphor in Clare, and if anything serves to stop us thinking about the subtlety and variety of his versions of \u2018home\u2019, and his constant, learned attention to people without one.\u00a0 Perhaps because of its origins in conservation, but also because of founding tensions with the left and industrially-born socialism, ecocriticism has never been great on class; this is compounded in Clare studies by an understandable confluence between the sentimentalising of Clare\u2019s location with the turn to the local in moralising green criticism \u2013 which of course many green critics worry about.<\/p>\n From all kinds of politicised critical approaches, you can track tendencies to reduce Clare to a kind of na\u00efve holy fool whose knees and identity wobbled if he walked beyond the bounds of his parish \u2013 and that modelling (down to Clare himself of course \u2013 or at least partially so) has been entrenched by the blunter end of green criticism, but also by the crass end of historicism which can only see straightforward autobiography in a poem like \u2018The Flitting\u2019 (there\u2019s certainly a reductive channel of class prejudice in assuming every time Clare writes \u2018I\u2019 it is uncomplicatedly and \u2018honestly\u2019 him).\u00a0 Clare said himself in one of his most unbelievable and deliberately fragmentary poems \u2013 the wilfully fraudulent \u2018Child Harold\u2019 \u2013 that his life had been \u2018one chain of contradictions\u2019.\u00a0 He did wear a green suit to go dining with his new London Magazine<\/em> friends who all wore \u2018sable\u2019 \u2013 but a rich friend bought it for him.\u00a0 Clare did mostly live in Helpston throughout his life, but that doesn\u2019t mean he wanted to stay there.\u00a0 Clare did write himself into a tradition of anti-enclosure poems, which have convinced everyone of their veracity, but we should not forget that he worked in enclosure gangs for many years, wrote his best nature poetry after<\/em> enclosure, and continued to do so after he\u2019d left Helpston \u2013 and by no means all of it is looking back to a pre-enclosure Edenic childhood \u2013 not at all.\u00a0 Clare did thresh in a barn from the age of 8 or 9 \u2013 but by his own account, he suffered deep and lasting trauma over it.\u00a0 He did that labour alongside his father so that he could help pay for his schooling, not because he lusted after labour.\u00a0 He fantasised about having a domestic servant \u2013 we ignore these elements if we want honest John back.<\/p>\n It\u2019s indicative of the romanticisation of Clare that no one has ever asked, before me, why he was able to find work in lime kilns.\u00a0 Why were there so many lime kilns across the countryside in the Romantic period?\u00a0 The answer is obvious: lime was pretty much the only material cheaply available that could help drain, fertilise and regulate the acidity of newly-enclosed land.\u00a0 Lime was the main tool of enclosure and Clare helped make it, just before his launch as a poet; indeed the lime-kiln money was supposed to go towards funding his first publication of poetry.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t mean he is a hypocrite \u2013 and I don\u2019t care about it morally at all<\/em> \u2013 it just means he is not a green messiah.\u00a0 If we judge him, we have to be completely unhistorical to do so.\u00a0 He was a poor labourer, and working in enclosure gangs or slaking lime in a kiln was decent money, if offering extremely low social status.\u00a0 The only thing he seems to have worried about when working the enclosure gangs was the \u2018wild and irregular habits\u2019 of the itinerant men he was working with: not the \u2018wild and irregular\u2019 countryside they were enclosing.\u00a0 I think critics need to start incorporating the moral messiness of Clare into their valuation of him \u2013 else we\u2019re just forging self-affirming narratives and forgetting the contingencies of a life lived.\u00a0 We don\u2019t think any the less of the poems Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote, just because Lyrical Ballads<\/em> was designed to fund a trip to Germany.\u00a0 Clare is robust enough for these paradoxes, these tensions and multiplicities, to surface.\u00a0 Too much criticism of Clare is sentimental and patronising \u2013 delicate, even.<\/p>\n 3) In seeking to move beyond that echoing phrase from\u00a0By Our Selves<\/em>\u00a0– \u2018John Clare was a minor nature poet who went mad’ – which occluded aspects of Clare’s life and art do you think should be emphasised more strongly?<\/strong><\/p>\n We need to think about what we do when we emphasise Clare\u2019s \u2018lack\u2019 of education.\u00a0 What did he gain by not having a \u2018formal education\u2019?\u00a0 What forms of knowledge and routes to understanding did he have open to him that other poets \u2018lacked\u2019?\u00a0 Could Byron play the fiddle like Clare?\u00a0 What does Byron’s poetry lack because he didn\u2019t go to the pub and listen to storytellers spinning folk narratives?\u00a0 It\u2019s as if academics just don\u2019t know what to do with writers who have never been to a lecture, and so we flock to the poets who have.\u00a0 People like us, right?\u00a0 What we tend to do is express astonishment at writers like Clare and move awkwardly on: that\u2019s the history of the reception of working-class writing in academia in a nutshell.\u00a0 Clare\u2019s education was incredibly complicated \u2013 it needs much more attention.<\/p>\n In the book, I talk about \u2018place\u2019 being not just a liberation for Clare \u2013 it was not merely a \u2018positive\u2019 platform for his locally \u2018botanising\u2019 focus.\u00a0 Place was also a narrowing problem: being placed, knowing his place, keeping to his place, being regarded as \u2018down to earth\u2019 \u2013 the organicist impulse is still prevalent in contemporary criticism and you can see it in the accident of phrasing sometimes.\u00a0 Clare talks about feeling like a donkey tied to a post in his relation to Helpston.\u00a0 Too often we turn what was a severe limitation on the life of this poorest of poets, conflate it with a certain mood in some poems, and construct a magical green or folksily happy commitment to place, particularity and soil.\u00a0 This move can be dangerously patronising, dismissive of material suffering, and can mean we ignore Clare\u2019s constant changes of mood and temperament \u2013 let alone his shifting desires.\u00a0 To shift all of this into blanket \u2018alienation\u2019 is also to obfuscate things.\u00a0 Clare loved London, he loved travelling to the largest seasonal body of water in England (Whittlesea Mere \u2013 drained by one of his patron\u2019s sons when Clare was in an asylum), he loved going beyond the \u2018edge of the orison\u2019 \u2013 he wasn\u2019t ruined by doing so.\u00a0 And he loved Helpston too \u2013 but he resented its parochialness, the lack of anyone to talk to about books, and wanted it to move closer to London.\u00a0 There is a funny early poem where he speculates what his fantasy home will be like one day, when he\u2019s made it, and while the house he builds for himself is determinedly rural, someone else will be doing the labour and chores while he writes, and there\u2019s no family around to bother him, just a maidservant.\u00a0 He hated being poor and not being able to buy the books he wanted, or food for his kids, or travel.\u00a0 It is amazing we have to say this, but the fact is Clare criticism ignores it.\u00a0 The fraudulent Reverend of a quack who ran Clare\u2019s asylum \u2013 Matthew Allen \u2013 thought in 1840 that the only reason Clare needed help was what we would now call \u2018anxiety\u2019 over money coupled with a poor diet across decades.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no romance in poverty, rural or urban, just as there\u2019s little romance in hand-work or pre-mechanised agriculture \u2013 pre- or post-enclosure \u2013 though Clare does manage to squeeze a good deal of emotive nostalgia out of it, for sure.\u00a0 He can be sentimental and conservative, as much as he can cry for reform and protest against the monied and the greedy.\u00a0 His politics are as slippery as his accounts of grammar: in this mobility he is the most Byronic of poets.\u00a0 Like all good poets, Clare is an unstable subject, and we need to be aware of that much more \u2013 and stop reducing a very long writing career to a moment of fury, passion or creative depression.\u00a0 I think some of his greatest poems are not about enclosure or nature: they are about human poverty, about social mores, about status, ignorance and prejudice.\u00a0 And to answer the question directly, Clare could have been a great satirist but nobody encouraged him, for example, when he wrote \u2018The Parish\u2019, while his sonnet parodying Wordsworth\u2019s use of enjambment is brilliant, and his reworking of Byron by way of poetical masculinist empowerment is as foul as can be.\u00a0 He also writes light comic verse of which John Hamilton Reynolds and Thomas Hood would have been proud.\u00a0 He is so knowingly playful in rummaging amongst others\u2019 styles and techniques \u2013 a sociable yet solitary magpie \u2013 stealing shiny bits \u2013 lining his own poetic nest.<\/p>\n 4) Which of Clare’s works do you think are particularly ripe for reconsideration from a broader range of perspectives?\u00a0 Which texts would you select for an undergraduate seminar to try and give a balanced sense of his value and achievements?<\/strong><\/p>\n In Clare studies this is a sore point.\u00a0 There just are not enough editions of his verse \u2013 particularly cheap ones or selections with good scholarly notes.\u00a0 There are some good collections but they do not yet amount to easy access to the full range of his work.\u00a0 I hope scholars reading this blog will one day produce their own editions of Clare, according to a wide variety of editing principles and presentational styles.\u00a0 Imagine the possibilities of a manuscript-based facsimile edition online, with all sorts of reading texts (as the Cornell Wordsworth called them), of all the variants \u2013 which included (rather than demoted) lifetime published texts too?\u00a0 That\u2019s got to be the future of editing Clare.\u00a0 To answer the question, I think Clare\u2019s work offering social commentary does not get enough attention: sometimes it is satire, sometimes straight narrative, sometimes polemic, and some prose moments are also unique in the period; the letters can be really pointed in this area.\u00a0 We have good engagement with the nature poetry, for sure, though I think more emphasis on the work of the early 1830s would reveal some real gems \u2013 and I think it is in this period that Clare\u2019s writing about nature becomes super-sophisticated.\u00a0 Though most commentary would have it that after leaving Helpston he loses his mojo, the poetic evidence just does not support it.<\/p>\n 5) What new projects are you currently working on?<\/strong><\/p>\n A big travelling exhibition of Clare portraits, original manuscripts, books and ephemera, to kick off in January 2020, 200 years after the publication of Poems Descriptive<\/em>.\u00a0 It\u2019s a good time to take Clare on the road, I hope \u2013 just need to locate some funding.\u00a0 I\u2019ve just signed a contract with Palgrave to co-write a book with Bridget Keegan entitled The Occupations of Labour: Labouring-Class Writers, 1800\u20131900<\/em>; this will group what shoemaker Chartist poet James Dacres Devlin (one of my personal favourites) called \u2018hand-producer poets\u2019 into their occupations for thematic consideration.\u00a0 With Erin Lafford, I am putting together a collection of new Clare essays to propose to a publisher soon.\u00a0 The longer-term book I\u2019ve been chewing on for a while now is to be called British<\/em> Literature and Poverty: 1800\u20132000<\/em>, and the reading for that is opening up all sorts of new avenues for me.\u00a0 It\u2019s probably too big a project to ever finish, but I\u2019m happy to give it a go.\u00a0 Before any of that, I\u2019ve got to finish an essay on poverty in the Romantic period \u2013 especially in agricultural improvement debates \u2013 and another on Clare\u2019s reading, and rewriting, of Byron.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Simon K\u00f6vesi is Professor and Head of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University.\u00a0 He tweets as @kovesi1.\u00a0 He has published widely on contemporary fiction (with… Read more 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