John Clare: Scavenger Poet

Abstract

If what Yi-Fu Taun claims about the literature of farming—that “what we have is a vast, largely sentimental, literature on the farming life written by people with uncallused hands”—is true, the English poet John Clare (1793–1864) is one of the greatest exceptions (Tuan 98). A list of his early jobs is an impressive proof of calluses: thresher, shepherd, weeder of wheat fields, haymaker and bale-stacker, gardener, soldier, lime-burner. Clare was a subsistence scavenger. He often worked for wages, but more often than not he also scavenged: in the commons and the wastes, he looked for birds’ eggs and fuel. In the spaces at the edges of the field, he found not only rest, and poetic inspiration, but also food. Unlike the rising number of migrant wageworkers in the early 1800s, his family was attached to the village of Helpston and therefore had certain rights to waste spaces, to walking, and to work. The process of enclosure did not take away his right to a piece of “land;” it took away his right to a particular way of life: a way of life that moved between field and waste, the aesthetic and the practical, and private and common land.