‘Homeless at Home’: John Clare's Uncommon Ecology

Abstract

‘Poet of Nature’: this title is usually reserved for poets of locodescriptive verse – those who write manifestly about ‘Nature’. According to Romantic ecocriticism, few poets are more deserving of this title than John Clare. While critics praise Clare for his connection to the land, we have tended to focus too narrowly upon the material and political in his poetry, adhering to an ecocritical aesthetic of rootedness summarised well by James McKusick: ‘Just as all politics is local, so too all ecology is local; and a true ecological writer must be “rooted” in the landscape, instinctively attuned to the changes of the Earth and its inhabitants’. In accordance with this aesthetic, McKusick hails Clare as ‘one of the first true ecological writers in the English-speaking world’ (27): John Clare the rooted, who worked the fields, observed them intimately, and spent most of his life in and around his birthplace of Helpston. Implicit in this estimation are several assumptions about what ‘Nature’ is and about what it means to be ‘rooted’ in it; in other words, they are assumptions about the nature of one’s relationship with nature. This question of relation is the central crux of cultural ecology. Ecocritical inquiry is called to continually and rigorously question these ideas. Recent scholarship has begun to recognise and even embrace a more questionable nature. William Cronon points to this newer, uncertain manifestation of nature in his introductory essay to Uncommon Ground (1995), in which he contradicts the traditional narratives of balance and stability with the assertion that ‘“nature” is not nearly so natural as it seems’. Dana Phillips in The Truth of Ecology (2003) holds that ‘ecological research has shown that the ideas that nature seeks to establish balance and harmony and that everything in nature is interconnected are no better than platitudes’. Recent Clare scholarship participates in this more deconstructive approach – an approach to which this essay aims to contribute. I also present Clare as an ecological poet, but for reasons that are predicated upon a different understanding of ecology as read through its etymological root: oikos. As is well-known, the concept of ‘environment’ is founded upon a sense of environs – nature as that which surrounds us and is necessarily outside us. Michel Serres therefore urges that we ‘forget the word environment . . . It assumes that we humans are at the center of a system of nature’. Home becomes a tempting concept to reach toward in