Clare's Lyric

Abstract

This book considers the lyric poems written by John Clare and three twentieth-century poets—Arthur Symons, Edmund Blunden, and John Ashbery—who turned to him at pivotal moments in their own development. These writers crafted a distinctive mode of lyric, ‘Clare’s lyric’, in which an embrace of mimesis goes hand in hand with a salient poetic medium. For these writers, accurate representation involves not only words that name objects, describe scenes, and create images pointing to a shared reality, but also patterns of sound, the syntactic organization of lines, and the shapes of whole poems and collections of poems. Chapters 1–3 explore Clare’s approach to accurate representation. In the late 1820s and 1830s, his experiments with the lyric subject, imagery, description, sound patterning, and poetic structure all bring his written words into close alignment with the world. In the 1840s and 1850s, he attempts to represent a world characterized by what it is missing, be it his beloved or his home. Chapters 4–6 examine how Symons, Blunden, and Ashbery each recreate ‘Clare’s lyric’ for themselves. Symons turns to Clare to integrate the fleeting details and resonant meanings of impressionism and symbolism with a genuine encounter with nature. Blunden takes from Clare a model for an ‘exact and complete nature-poetry’ that could represent the physical and psychic landscape destroyed by the First World War. Ashbery draws on Clare’s verse in his effort to translate the entire world in all its variety and multiplicity into a book of poems.