John Clare By Himself

Clare John

John Clare was a defining voice of the rural poetic tradition. His story was first set down more than two centuries ago and has captured the imagination of the reading public ever since. it is told most vividly and poignantly in Clare's own words.

This volume brings together, in definitive form, all Clare's important autobiographical writing. His "Journal" is set alongside his "Sketches" and "Autobiographical Fragments" as well as his famous "Journey out of Essex". Maps of Clare's countryside are also included, as are his will and extracts from his asylum letters. Clare appears here as ploughboy, gardener's boy and militiaman; as lover and husband, acquaintance of Hazlitt, Lamb and Coleridge and finally, as inmate in an asylum: his manifold personas emerge with great freshness from this remarkable book.

About the Author

John Clare (1793-1864): Born the son of a thresher at Helpston, Northamptonshire, John Clare is a rural poet and story teller. He is a poet of spiritual originality, as compelling at his best as "Crabbe and Wordsworth" as a story teller in verse. He was an assiduous practitioner of the sonnet form at all periods of his poetic career. The sonnets he produced in the last few years before his institutionalisation in 1837, first at High Beech and then in Northampton General Asylum, are of particular interest, since he exploited the inherent brevity of the form to express a simultaneous precision of observation and starkness of vision that he rarely achieved either before or after.

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