The Sense of Home and Memory in John Clare’s Asylum Poems

Abstract

As a basic human need from past to present, home has been the subject of many disciplines where different perspectives converge and intersect each other in a multidimensional framework. This interdisciplinarity has transformed it into a concept that conveys much more than a visible and tangible reality. John Clare (1793-1864), a 19th century English poet who spent the last twenty-seven years of his life in asylum, also widely used home as a central theme. His sense of home in his asylum poems emerges peculiarly in three dimensions which are the countryside of his childhood and youth, the cottage where he lived, and his first love. In such a perspective, the different meanings of the concept become interwoven, and home gradually transforms from a tangible reality into a mental image and metaphor configured in his memory. The aim of this study is to reveal how the sense of home in Clare’s asylum poems can be associated with the poet’s countryside, cottage and first love, and to investigate the consistency of this relation through memory. The study is limited to the asylum poems to show how Clare responds to what the concept of home evokes under the influence of his mental disorder.