John Clare and Biopolitics

Abstract

My essay intervenes in ecocritical readings of John Clare by tracking how enclosure dramatically altered the way he viewed the relations between humans and animals and shaped his later poetry. I argue that enclosure was biopolitical in nature, establishing, for Clare, distinctively estranging and violent modes of interaction between humans and animals. I track how Clare's poetry, from his early birds' nest poems to “The Badger” sonnet sequence, exhibits a differential ethical awareness, stimulated by the changing ecologies he observes, about animals. I show how his later poem, “The Badger,” exploits the fundamental paradox of prosopopoeia – its chiasmatic marriage of the human and non-human – to issue an ethical imperative that humans examine the violent ways in which they observe, describe, and treat animals or risk acceding to enclosure's biopolitical distancing effect between human and animal life.