Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage 
Tom Paulin
- John Clare: A Biography by Jonathan Bate
- ‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare edited by Jonathan Bate
- John Clare, Politics and Poetry by Alan Vardy
- John Clare Vol. V: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-37 edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson
In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since Martin’s, Bate’s should finally disprove Dickens’s dismissal of it as a ‘preposterous exaggeration of small claims’, and consolidate Clare’s reputation as a major Romantic poet (it’s strange to remember that he was much more successful in his lifetime than Keats, with whom he shared a publisher).
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Tom Paulin’s most recent book is Crusoe’s Secret. His study of poetic form, The Secret Life of Poems, will be published in January.
Other articles by this contributor:
In the Workshop · Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Entrepreneurship · Ted Hughes and the Hare
Diary · Trimble’s virtues
print layout
tell a friend