John Clare and the Problem of Audience

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay investigates John Clare’s attempts, over two decades, to represent and shape an audience in response to the changing conditions of his career and the literary marketplace. Clare’s problem (and opportunity) is an existing discourse of patronage that blurs economic and emotional ties by representing the relationship between the laboring-class poet and his audience as “friendship.” Early in his career, Clare appropriates this language of friendship to appeal to wealthy readers; however, he cannot completely overcome his resistance to the deference that patronage requires. After a series of career setbacks, he revises this language by replacing patrons with an audience of his own class, imagining the sympathetic relation between poet and reader as an alternative to, not an extension of, the marketplace. To imagine the common people as his audience, however, Clare must replace the material realities of poetic production and consumption with ever greater levels of abstraction.