Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage

Tom Paulin

  • John Clare: A Biography by Jonathan Bate
    Picador, 650 pp, £25.00, October 2003, ISBN 0 330 37106 1
  • ‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare edited by Jonathan Bate
    Farrar, Straus, 318 pp, US $17.00, November 2003, ISBN 0 374 52869 1
  • John Clare, Politics and Poetry by Alan Vardy
    Palgrave, 221 pp, £45.00, October 2003, ISBN 0 333 96617 1
  • John Clare Vol. V: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-37 edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson
    Oxford, 822 pp, £105.00, January 2003, ISBN 0 19 812386 8

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).

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Vol. 26 No. 4 · 19 February 2004 » Tom Paulin » Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage (print version)
Pages 17-20 | 6821 words