John Clare and Community by John Goodridge

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 135 shadows by the close of her life, though perhaps this is simply because, as he notes, there is minimal documentation of her life after 1806. Never­ theless, with this biography Gross brings Damer and her world vividly and comprehensively to life, making a vital contribution to the history of Regency art and culture. Elizabeth Weybright City University of New York, The Graduate Center John Goodridge. John Clare and Community. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2013. Pp. vii+252. $99.99. A sketch among John Clare’s papers depicts a tombstone upon which he has written “To the Memory of CHATTERTON KEATS and BLOOM­ FIELD” (13). The image serves as a symbol of the influence of these men on Clare’s poetic sensibility and his desire to place them together for pos­ terity’s sake. Clare’s own appeal for posthumous fame took a different, lonelier form: he planned a simple memorial, stating: “I desire that no date be inserted there on (the headstone) as I wish it to live or dye with my po­ ems and other writings” (55). We see in this how, though Clare drew strength from real and imagined “brother bards,” he also saw himself as an outsider. His notion of solitude was complex, one of self-celebration and self-isolation. This book complicates the critical binary of Clare as sociable or forlorn, emphasizing the distinctive, earnest way Clare incorporated ex­ pansive, if tenuous, communities—poets, poems, songs, family members, storytellers, folk wisdom, animals—into his verse. Using various contradic­ tions in Clare’s personality and work—a desire for fame against the integ­ rity of his rural identity, for example—Goodridge creates a flexible, nondeterministic lens with which to read Clare’s work. The lives of other poets helped Clare to shape a posture as an artist in a shrewd, profit-driven world, such that Goodridge views Thomas Chatterton’s biography, for example, as having likely been as important to Clare as his poems. Clare first learned of Thomas Chatterton when his mother gave him a souvenir handkerchieffrom Deeping May Fair with the poet’s face embroidered on it, alongside some lines of “Resignation.” In the portrait, which the young Clare must have studied, perhaps he glimpsed all he would share with the troubled poet: self-doubt, suicidal thoughts, anxiety ofinfluence, and a keen sense ofthe double-edged sword ofsuccess. Clare and Chatterton even shared a predilection for “literary de­ ceptions”: Clare passed off several of his poems in 1825 as authored by a group of famous seventeenth century poets. His joyful irreverence in these SiR, 54 (Spring 2015) 136 BOOK REVIEWS moments, which required lying to his patrons, may have been a direct in­ heritance from Chatterton: Clare had read Cary’s biography which empha­ sized the poet’s cynicism around the patronage system. Though Clare and Keats never met, communicating only through shared acquaintances and letters, Goodridge traces with great care the sense of kinship between them. Clare was predictably outraged at the critical re­ sponse memorialized in “Adonais”; in a letter to Taylor upon learning of Keats’s death, he decries them as foxes that bite in the dark (76). The in­ fluence ofKeats’s poems also receives substantial treatment in this book; in particular, the manifestation ofKeats’s philosophical and aesthetic questions in Clare’s rural, community-oriented verse. As Clare writes admiringly of Keats’s 1820 volume, “he launches on the sea without compass ... if those cursd critics could be shoved out of fashion . . . but he is a child of nature warm and wild” (69). Ofadditional interest is Goodridge’s account ofthree hitherto unpublished letters written by Clare which reference Keats, in­ cluding Clare’s response to Keats’s death (twice: the first was a false alarm). Goodridge also traces Clare’s engagement with eighteenth-century poets Gray, Pomfret, and Cunningham in opposition to the prevailing view that Clare’s early work is simply a clumsy imitation of eighteenth-century texts, an awkward phase to be cast off. The productive, subversive way Clare en­ gages these works demonstrates that far from treating the works as “holy writ,” they were “as a new door to open a paintbox full...