John Clare and Poetic ‘Genius’

Adam White

doi:10.21825/aj.v3i2.1085

Abstract

The first half of this essay is an analysis of John Taylor’s Introduction to John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. It argues that Taylor—Clare’s editor and publisher—made claims for Clare’s special poetic ‘genius’ by combining an emphasis on his unpropitious personal and social circumstances with a thus far under-scrutinised presentation of the Romantic aspects of his poetic practice and verse. The second half of the essay connects Taylor’s Introduction to Clare’s own writing on ‘genius’. Clare wrote a number of poems to, or about, his Romantic contemporaries. In the particular cases in question here, Clare treats the ‘genius’ of Lord Byron’s ‘sublime’ work and poetic status and the ‘genius’ of William Wordsworth’s attention to the beauties of nature and ‘human kind’. A defining quality of Romantic genius, then, is imagined by Clare in aesthetic terms. Taylor constructed a very influential idea of Clare’s genius, but the poet also shows himself to participate in significant ways in a contemporary debate on the nature of poetic genius.

Highlights

The first half of this essay is an analysis of John Taylor’s Introduction to John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery
In the Introduction to Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820),1 Clare is presented by his editor and publisher John Taylor as a native, natural,2 and a Romantic, poetic ‘genius’
‘Genius’ is a concept with a long history, but Clare’s concern with genius shows us his engagement with Romantic aesthetics, at least so far as the poems analysed in the second half of this essay are about the sublime and beautiful nature of the poetic ‘genius’ of Byron and Wordsworth

Summary

Taylor on genius

Before turning to the Romantic aspects of Taylor’s Introduction to Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (hereafter Poems Descriptive) some further context for this narrative is needed. Taylor’s account must be situated within— as Catherine Boyle and Zachary Leader point out—the wider context of changing literary relations in the period [153] These include the move from patron and poet relations to publisher and poet relations, to new magazine and review ownership.. Taylor’s Introduction to Poems Descriptive serves to highlight wider processes involved in the publication of English poets at this time: The task of encouraging and promulgating the work of new writers was a profession, not a hobby. It demanded, not an instinctive understanding of what was good literature, but a specialised knowledge of the Trade, of the reading market, of economics and sales. The wider context here is that, as David Higgins argues, in ‘early nineteenth-century Britain’ there was an ‘unprecedented interest among writers and readers in the subject of genius and, in particular, in examining and discussing the personal characteristics and life histories of “great men”’ [1]

Taylor began his Introduction to Poems Descriptive with the declaration that

Clare on genius

Works Cited