In Our Time - John Clare

Episode Date: February 9, 2017

In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Northamptonshire poet John Clare who, according to one of Melvyn's guests Jonathan Bate, was 'the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced'. Clare worked in a tavern, as a gardener and as a farm labourer in the early 19th century and achieved his first literary success with Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. He was praised for his descriptions of rural England and his childhood there, and his reaction to the changes he saw in the Agricultural Revolution with its enclosures, displacement and altered, disrupted landscape. Despite poor mental health and, from middle age onwards, many years in asylums, John Clare continued to write and he is now seen as one of the great poets of his age.With Sir Jonathan Bate Provost of Worcester College, University of OxfordMina Gorji Senior Lecturer in the English Faculty and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridgeand Simon Kövesi Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, John Clare is seen now as one of the great poets of the 19th century, and according to one of our guests today, the greatest labouring class poet that England has ever produced.

He was born in Helpson on the brink of the fens near Peterborough in 1793, and knew the world around his Scottish. intimately. His work describes nature and country life in an extraordinary level of detail that few, if any, have equaled before or since. And Clare also fires up against the threat to that countryside. For this he achieved fame in his late 20s, and though often with the condescension from the London literary world who made allowances for the man they called the Northamptonshire peasant poet. The last 24 years of his life were spent in what was then called a lunatic asylum. With me to discuss the life and works of John Clare.

are Sir Jonathan Bate, Provost of Worcester College University of Oxford. Mina Gorgie, senior lecturer in the English faculty and fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Simon Covesh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brooks University. Jonathan Bate, what was the world into which John Clare was born? Okay, so he's born 1793, that's just after the French Revolution, contemporary of Lord Baron and John Keats. But he's born deep in the countryside, this little village called.

Held Helpson, halfway between Peterborough and Stamford, in what was then Northamptonshire, but is now part of Cambridgeshire, as you said, Melvin, on the edge of the great fen, the eastern flatlands of England. But his community was one that had really not changed for hundreds of years. His father was a casual agricultural labourer. He was bought up in a tiny cottage. But the way in which the agricultural system worked there was unchanged since the Middle Ages. It was the old open field system where each peasant would have a little strip of land and the commons were available where you could maybe graze a cow. And this was very different from the kind of landscape that emerged later. So as I say, dirt poor, agricultural labourer,

a little bit of education in the local school. Well, let's examine that poor, because I think listeners would like to know the degree of the poverty in this country then, in those sort of places. He started work part-time when he was 80, he left school, when he was 11, as you say, went to a Dame school,

he was taught reading and writing an arithmetic. But what sort of poor was it? His father was a day job chap. Sometimes he worked, sometimes. He didn't. There were siblings. They sold a few apples. They got fed, as it were.

Can you just go into that a bit more? Yeah, I mean, of course, labour is seasonal, and if it was a bad harvest, times were very, very bad indeed. There was always the threat of the workhouse, the poor house, the very little sanitation and a very basic diet. Although, having said that, I think one of the things that's so striking that emerges in Clare's poetry is the tremendous sense of community that for all the poverty, the high infant mortality,

the beggars that you would see, there was a tremendous sense of community. The village pub would be a place where the community would work together, gather together. Yeah, but for this point, a tremendous sense of, tremendous fact of children dying soon after they were born and diseases and malnutrition. I just want to establish that, but there's no fiddle going on, there's no weeping hearts, but that was what he was born into.

Absolutely. How did you discover poetry? That's a good question. I'm just going to add, he had a twin sister actually who died as an infant, you know, exactly an example of that. And so much of Claire's work is bound up with a sense of loss. And maybe losing that baby twin was some psychological part of that. But yeah, he was out working in the fields as a teenager.

And there was another boy who was reading a book. And Claire had got some education at the little local school. And the book was a volume of poems called The Seasies. called The Seasons by James Thompson. Very popular, genteel poetry, but a poetry of landscape. And Claire read it, loved it. So he saved up his little bit of earnings and went along to the bookshop in Stanford

and arrived before the shop was open. But Dooley bought a copy of this book. And that really got him hooked on poetry, combined with the fact that there was a great tradition of folk culture, of ballads. His father would love to sing ballads and folk songs. songs. His father was a fiddler. Indeed he was. Yeah. And could sing and play lots of songs. Yeah. And the gypsies as well. Claire, as a boy and as a teenager, began to speak to the local

gypsies and he would learn their songs. So it's a fascinating sense that there is this kind of folk culture, but he also discovers proper literature. But just to nail it, there is, it is accurate that there, because there's a feeling of boy genius suddenly arrives in nature, which we all rather like. Never mind. But he did read this book. He saved up to buy a big thing for him to do and he started writing poetry immediately so something struck. Absolutely, absolutely.

Mina Gordi, what can we say about his childhood and nature? Jonathan's given us some indicative lines already but what did he do? I mean, he was working a lot of the time. What else? He was a great noticer. He was a great noticer of the natural world.

He paid attention to things, There's a great attention to how the hawthorn bud would unseal, how the catkin was covered in Downey White, and he recorded these in his poetry. He paid attention to the tiniest details that other poets before him hadn't mentioned, and he also celebrated the landscape from where he was from, the local landscape, which was not a very glamorous place, really.

It was a sort of swampy, desolate place, his publisher described it as, and he found beautiful things there to celebrate. the wildflowers, the weeds, and he describes them in his poetry in an intimate detail. He weeds like the ragwort, which most farmers wouldn't like very much because it kills livestock, the flea bane. His poetry is full of celebrations of these unsung things in the natural world. Did he deliberately go out to look for subjects for his poetry? Was there a sense in which he said, I love the poetry of Thompson, I want to be like that?

I'm going to find things I can write about, oh, there's the rag word. Did he go out and look for subjects? No, I think they just came to him on his walks and on his rambles. And what's different, I think, about his poetry from Thompson's, is that he's sort of really very much inside the landscape. He's there in amongst it, not talking about it from above, really. And he, yeah, he's, it comes to him on his rambles, I think. He just, he, he, he's a very sensitive.

and perceptive poet. You talk about these rambles. He talked with lovingly about that part of his childhood where everything was open, as Jonathan's indicated. It's before the dread enclosure act, which you're going to come to. And he could walk everywhere, and he did walk everywhere. And he was a great noticer of things in detail. And so this was a whole world to him, however,

mossy and submerged, it might seem, to a lot of other people near the fens. Yeah, that's right. It was his world, a local world, in a world which he gave to people through his verse. We get a sense when you read class poems of him. As I said, being in the place, we hear the sound of the snow crumping underfoot. Crumping is a word you brought in, isn't it? Yes, it is a dialect word for the particular sounder foot makes on fresh snow.

How far did he use the informal language of the village? Jonathan said it goes back to medieval town. A lot of words, masses and masses of words are new to me and that particular area. And he brought those in. How far did he bring these in naturally and then how far did he have to tame it, as it were, for publication? It's a good question.

He's not a dialect poet like William Barnes or someone like that. His poetry, he used his dialect quite sparingly but very powerfully. One thing that's very noticeable about his poems that a lot of people love about his poems is that informality. It sounds like a conversation. But then now and again, these words come into great and powerful effect, a word like gulsh, which the sound tree makes when it falls on wet ground, or a word like prog, which is a dialect word for prodding,

which he uses in a poem called The Mouse's Nest to give a sense of... And when a word like that appears, a word like prog, we can kind of sense that it means prod, but it also gives his readers. He knew most of his readers wouldn't have been familiar with the dialect, but it gives him a bit of a startle in the way in which I suppose he was a bit startled when he saw this mouse

scurrying out of the nest. So he uses these words artfully, I think, and very deliberately to create effects of surprise or to create a sense of real vividness in the description because these words convey very particular senses. Like I said, the sound of a tree falling on wet ground, the sound of snow,

underfoot, fresh snow. And readers at the time would have been alerted to those senses in the glossary. They were given those meanings. So it brings vividness, but it also creates these other effects in the poem's effects of surprise. He also likes describing things that he must know. Very few people have seen, like a mouse scurrying across the field

with her young clinging on to her teats as she scurries across the field. And he's at a grotesque sight. But I think he gets a great pleasure in describing that. Simon, what was... Can we go back to the culture of the place? And there was a culture of the place. I feel that even nowadays people might condescend to that sort of culture. But it was quite rich, wasn't it?

Can you tell us about it? This is a little place, Helpson, what was really going on that enriched it, and out of which he wrote. I think, as Jonathan's already alluded to, there was enormous resource for Claire in terms of ballads and folk songs, the fiddles songs down the pub. Claire teaches himself to read music. It was just miraculous, really.

But there is also, I mean, you only one book in a village for everyone to read it eventually. And there is a sense that, although some people are very suspicious of Claire's habits roaming the fields on his own, writing poems on his hat, as he says himself. There is, in his family and in other parts of the village,

a real valuation of literacy and literary culture, even though there is a sense that it's quite remote. So Claire's own bedrock of kind of familial life supports him and getting a rudimentary education, but then he's really proud of him when he's starts writing poetry eventually when he confesses it to his parents and there is a sense of

real pride when he publishes so that there's no resistance to it there is however always a slight awkwardness in any working class writer as we recall them now entering the middle class bourgeois whatever you call it world of literary culture and i think claire's always got this awkwardness both a sense that he's doing something that takes him out of his laboring life and that puts him in a world which he hasn't really got the the social skills for he's not trained for An incident, coming to your point, is that he used to write on scraps of paper

and took them into a hole in all. His mother, who's illiterate, found them and used them as phylighters. He says that his parents are illiterate, but there is some paradox in that because they're clearly... They're real versions of literacy. So his dad knows at least 100 songs on the fiddle, for example,

which is itself a form of literacy. But his mother is illiterate and burns the early poems. She does, however, she also supports his education. You know, they save really hard, and part of his own labour when he's nine or ten when he starts threshing is to save money to go to pay for school. But there's always this contest in his life between labour and between leisure and writing.

And there isn't much space and much time for writing. But it's not exactly that his village is against literary culture, but there is also a suspicion of his habits. He was born into a world of war. You know, 1793 Britain's already at war with Revolutionary France. it doesn't end really until the Napoleon at war was finished in 1815 when Claire's in his 22nd year

so there is a suspicion of anyone walking around the countryside on their own and Claire which is one of the reason when he buys the book the seasons coming back from Stanford he jumps over a wall into Burley estate in order to secrete his reading so there's always a sense that he's got to be secret

and secrecy is a really important motif in Claire's life and back to Jonathan We've got this boy. He leaves school at 11. Yeah. And then the next big step is that he becomes a published poet. It seems a very big step indeed.

It does. I mean, so he, you know, through his teens and early 20s, he's writing this poetry, but he's also working in the fields, has a variety of part-time jobs for a time he works as a line burner. But then he has a bit of luck because, His poetry is seen by a local publisher. And there was something of a provincial literary culture of the time. It wasn't actually uncommon for a labouring class writer to get into print.

But usually when this happened, it would be with a very small local distribution. But this local publisher called Drury happened to have a cousin, a man called John Taylor, who was a London publisher. And Taylor had a very good eye for new talent. He kind of discovered John Keats. So Drury says to him, look, I found this local poet. I think he's really good. Let's join together and publish his work both provincially here in Stanford and down in London.

So in 1820, Claire's first volume is called Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery by John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet, is published in London and Taylor, the cousin of the local publisher. brings him to London and does a kind of brilliant marketing campaign. Robert Burns had been enormously successful a generation earlier in Scotland. So publishers in London were in a way on the lookout for the English Burns. The singing ploughman of the boarders, yeah. And that's what they thought Claire could be. So 1820, first book published. He's brought to London.

He has his portrait painted, and it's a great success. There are two things. You mentioned the enormous number of the local publishers up in the North West. in the Lake District. Lots of little publishers, lots of little local poets published at that time. Little local poets, lots of local poets published by small publishing house this time. And also there's underneath that

is that we didn't go into it, but just to mention words that have established writing about nature something magnificent to do. Kelly and Sheets had written about nature. So the idea of writing about nature was very much in the air, as much as the rural peasant genius, as they like calling them, burns, and they thought they'd found the English burns.

Exactly right, yeah. It wasn't the first time this had happened. A few years earlier, there was a poet also from the East Anglian district, a poet called Bloomfield, a kind of farmer's boy. And his poems were published not long after Wordsworth and Coleridge's lyrical ballads. And actually for a time, they were far more successful than Wordsworth and Coleridge. So as a publishers were always on the lookout for sort of new talent from unusual backgrounds. Meaning Gorgia, how did Claire react to his new fame?

He's taken to London. He goes, I think, four times in his life. We're told, hobnail boots in the cut down coat, and to be groped out, anthropologically, perhaps. Anyway, how did he react to his new frame? Well, it's unsettled him. I think it made him very anxious. He worried that he'd be forgotten very quickly

as he knew people like Bloomfield had been forgotten. Burns had been forgotten. Even, as Jonathan said, Wordsworth, had been, you know, was neglected when Claire was writing in the early days. So he worried that he'd be picked up and then sort of tossed aside by the kind of the world of fame. And so it made him... And also, in those brief years of fame,

he was treated, as you say, like a kind of cultural curiosity. Like Pocahontas? Yes, I mean, people would come, the local gentry and people from further afield, from London, would come in their coaches, to watch him at work in the field or to see how dirty his cottage was. It's come and have a peep at this peasant, poet and he said he hates what he calls the peep show, the puppet show he calls it.

It makes him very uncomfortable. I'd never see to do with him, haven't you? Push off. Yeah, anyway, that was happening. But let's talk about him. So he'd unsettled him. How did it unsettle him? Well, it could be that it contributed to the decline in his mental health. We don't really know, but they're being lifted up and the great excitement of that and then they're being dropped down into neglect and obscurity. And it's true that that neglecting, and it's true that that neglect does coincide with the beginnings of his

mental decline. We can never be sure, of course. Being a bit unfair, I've been a bit unfair there. People came because they're like this poetry as well as everything else, and people from the upper classes supported him. He was given small pensions, and he was published and helped along his way. That is also true and very helpful indeed.

The local wall he climbed over, the man who lived inside the local wall, gave him a small pension and so on and so forth. So he was upheld by people in London. Oh, absolutely. People in London. And also locally, as you say, the marquis, the local marquis from Burleigh House, he went to visit him in his hobnail boots. And, you know, he was going to support him.

I mean, Clare had worked as a gardener there in Burley House. And then the market invites him to visit and offer some support. And although Claire finds it mortifyingly embarrassing, the clatter of his hobnail boots on marble, he says he's so ashamed of a sound they utter on the market. on the marble. But still, as you say, I mean, he was being offered help, even though it made the kind of

the shift of worlds made him uncomfortable. But yes, he was offered support and help. It's true. Simon Coachery, it must have knocked him sideways, though, this business. All of a sudden he's walking on marble floors in London, being introduced to Charles Lamb, and we told Coleridge,

and so it goes. But he comes back and back. It's a huge magnet, isn't it, Hepstone? He goes back. How do his fellow labourers? How does his fellow, do we know anything about how the village took this and how he kept describing them? Well, I think the number of ways looking at this, the labouring class poets wrote to him a lot

and they would send him their work and say that, well, I want to get into print like you did, you know, how did you do it and all that? And sometimes he'd get annoyed because, of course, if you received a letter, you apt to pay for it and he didn't have a lot of money. But there was a sense, as I said, before of suspicion in Claire's work, of Claire's work.

Claire's a great celebrant of kind of ritual and habit and custom in village life in Helpsden. And these things, they are particular and very local, but they do have a really broad reach across real life in the country. Jonathan mentioned them going back to the Middle Ages, so what are they? One example would be, so in the open field system before enclosure, which we'll probably talk about in a moment, there would be a regular before the sowing of seed the whole village effectively would go and collect stones from the fields

if you're a kid and you found a stone with a hole in it you would try and string that to the master or the farmer's the back of the master's coat and if you did that then you would win a prize off all the other kids right what Claire says is this was fantastic rituals

this is an enormous amount of tactile play with sticks with pudges as little puddles as he calls with stones and they're ritualised in folk life at the time. What Claire says, the moment enclosure comes and the sense of the village

coming together in those big fields, those big jobs together, those customs disappear. Not all of them, but a lot of them. So there are fertility rituals and marriage rituals and rituals around predicting who's going to marry who

and rituals about going to a local spring and drinking the water to get healthy. And these things are very much curtailed by the process of enclosure. But we are talking about a close, busy, thatch of daily life, aren't we? Bounded by a very small area, but also figured by great things like the big tree

and the stream down there and the wood across there, which are a massive part of the furniture of the life. Yeah, yeah. I mean, many times Claire will refer to a bush or a tree or a lane, of course, and fields by name. You know, they're almost characters in his work. the intimacy in the detail with which he kind of maps out his local village.

It's not just his village. It's anywhere within a day's walk or so. He maps in really close detail. Jonathan, can you give us an instance or two of the detail? We've mentioned the detail several times. Just an instant of what we mean by the... Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just...

I mean, he described birds and nests in great detail. Oh, it's marvellous on birds and eggs. Yeah, yeah. He'll take the reader on a walk and then he'll spot a bird's nest and he'll look at the markings on the egg and say that it looks pen scribbled like writing that's for Yellowhammer's nest.

So an incredible eye for detail. But then also, as Simon says, this very, very strong sense of particular places. So for instance, there was a bush called Langley Bush, where the village always used to meet in a kind of village parliament that almost went back to the Middle Ages. And there's a lovely poem of his called Remembrances, where he just recites the names of bushes, lanes and trees. And these, he says, are all things that have gone because of this thing, the enclosure. So we should perhaps talk about the enclosure.

You better get on to the enclosure. I mean you're not in love. Let's get back here. So they decided that in Swism, they did. decided this open line, going for centuries and so on, and as common land for many people, should be privatised. And the privatisation considered fencing it off, barring ordinary people from it, diverting streams, cutting down woods, taking it over, and the trespasses were prosecuted. Exactly so. Couldn't imagine a better summary than that. 1809, when Claire's 16, the Inclosure Act is passed for Helpsom. So over the next 10 years or so, the landscape is transformed.

And of course that's at exactly the time that he's growing up and his childhood is disappearing. So he always associates the old open fields, the open moor, the common lands with a childhood that has gone. And he sees enclosure as an offence not only to village customs but also to nature. So all of a sudden the villages couldn't go to that little spring because it was on a piece of enclosed land with a no trespassing sign. But then he says even the birds are prevented from going there. And trees get cut down because of the enclosure. It's a wonderful poem of his called The Fallen Elm, where he looks at this elm tree, huge tree that had been part of village life for generations.

And suddenly a man owns it and decides he's going to cut it down for profit. And that's the end of that tree. That's the end of a long history. It's a form of tyranny, he says. In that poem Remembrance, he says, enclosure like a bonaparte came and destroyed everything. And destroyed his, as it were,

his reservoir, his reservoir of detail, his, the means through which he worked for. And in some sense, his identity, I think this is what Mina was suggesting when we talk about the decline in Claire's mental health, that his sense of who he was was so much bound to his community,

to the landscape of his early years, that when that began to go, coupled with the kind of alienation that he inevitably felt having been to London and come back, becoming an outsider, his whole sense of self begins to disintegrate. Before we disintegrate,

let's talk a bit more about his approach. He is, he is, let's reasonably contemporaneous with Keats. His publisher also publishes in years, you say at the beginning, as some have discovered Keats. They don't meet, they almost meet, and so on. But, Mina, can you give us some idea,

of the difference people then saw. Let's take the Nightingale. I've got sheets here. I've got some sheets, we can all sing if you want. It's of his and of Clare. It's a bit from the Nightingale. Now, can you just describe, they didn't, Keats thought that Claire merely described it.

Claire thought that Keats was pretentious. I don't think you use that word. Well, I mean... Over fancy. Claire did admire Keats, actually, but he did say that he described things as they appeared to his. fancies, not as

as though he'd seen them for himself. And Keats said, that's right, that Claire's work was too descriptive, but Keats, unfortunately, died before Claire's best poetry got going, and one of his best poems is this poem, The Nightingale's Nest. And it's such a wonderful poem and so different from Keats' wonderful ode.

Partly what makes Claire's poem so special is that the kind of informality, the way he takes you by the hand and brings you into this brings you in to see the nightingale. At one point he gets onto his hands and knees and he watches her while she sings. And where Keats has this... And describes the nest in incredible detail.

Incredible detail. The open leaves and so on. That's right. I mean, not only does Claire's nightingale tremble in her ecstasy, her feathers stand on end, where Keats doesn't see the nightingale at all. But also Claire, very importantly, takes us to her nest.

and her nest is made of dead oak and leaves, he said, and velvet moss and scant and spare of scarce materials down and hair. So he's taking us into the centre of this Nightingale's universe and the texture of this nest he describes to us so carefully. And another thing I think that... And also he does it die. I mean, he says, what's the line here? Has me marvell, had made me marl, that's so famed a bird,

you'd have no better dress than russet to brown. It's really alive. So this is very down to earth. Very down to earth. But at the same time, interestingly, the word russet, as Claire knew full well, was a word associated with labourers, with peasants. It was the kind of colour that they tended to wear the homespun cloth. So at the same time as being absolutely true that the nightingale is a sort of a russet brown,

it's also a way of connecting with this symbol of poetry on his level. But Keats is very keen, I mean, our case is a wonderful poet. I mean, to take the thing, he's connecting with, in the second line, my sense of Hemlock I had drunk, that's Socrates. I want leasy words I'd gone. That's back to classical. The dried in the trees is with the nymphs and so on. That's what he's going for.

And that's what people began to prefer. Well, except poor Keats was attacked for doing that because they said, well, you're a cockney. You're not allowed to do that. Not allowed to be educated. Absolutely. So there's a kind of interesting parallel between Keats and Claire. We tend to forget that about Keats, that he was...

But it's wonderful. the way that Keith goes for them, doesn't it? You think I don't know anything. Look, I know a lot. I know as much as you and more and I can do poetry as well. And he doesn't take any notice. He just keeps drilling in through what is at his feet? Or under his feet?

He's not so interested in the real nightingale. His knight and girl is an immortal bird, a symbol of poetry, a symbol of music, actually. But Clare's, what's special about Clare's, it's both those things. It's both a real, trembling, actual bird. And Clare's worried about how the bird is made anxious when he comes close to.

That's something very special. Claire, in many of his bird poems, is thinking about how the bird is feeling. It's panicking. It's scared. And Keats isn't thinking about the bird in that way at all. That there isn't that dynamic between the poet and the bird in that way. Sorry.

Simon, do we know how Claire's publishers and readers reacted to his verse? Do we know, did that? Can you just tell us about that? Yeah, I mean, he was reviewed very widely. The first couple of collections in 1820 and 1821 were very successful, especially the first one. We went through four editions in the first year. The reviewers were expressed both surprised that someone from what they called

an uneducated background with very little formal education who is sold by his editor, John Taylor, and his publisher, John Taylor, in the introduction as being the poorest of the poorest of the poor. So there is this vogue for not just a regional and dialect verse, but also poetry which includes the poor. And Wordsworth probably initiated that with the lyrical ballads, poems like Old Man Travelling, We Are Seven that Claire knows very well. But Taylor says, yes, we've seen these poets, but this poet is really poor. This poet, the life that Claire lives for Taylor's readers is shockingly poor. And he makes sure that you know that.

So the reviewers both are surprised and, you know, amazed. his work and the quality's work but also there is always that but if only he knew grammar a little better and maybe you know all these dialect terms well they're okay but where's the organising principle and one of the big tensions for Claire

and I think this is one of his great contributions actually to the literary tradition is that he doesn't always want to drive a poem's narrative so there isn't an organising principle telling a story and often he was criticised for listing things and this

and that because he didn't want to have an overarching kind of concept of how the countryside or our rural life or the natural world should be packaged. But on the whole it's interesting that the, as it were, the intellectual perception and appreciation of what he did wasn't really recognised until the 20th century, a couple of centuries later, and from Ed, more from London, right through to Ted Hughes and so on. Jonathan, back to you.

What speckled this conversation, as well as enclosures, the damnedable act, which it certainly was, which barred most people, keeping people out, is his mental ill health, which was then straightforward to call lunacy. He went into a private asylum, he came out, and then he went into an asylum where he stayed for the last 24 years of his life, although he had access to go outside and so. What was wrong with him? Well, reading his letters and his journals and getting a social... from correspondence people writing to him.

It looks as though he had what we would now call bipolar disorder. There would be periods of weeks where he would struggle to get out of bed in the morning. There would be other periods where he couldn't stop writing. He wrote over 3,000 poems. He was one of the most prolific of all English poets. So that does suggest a bipolar pattern of mania and depression. But there seems to have been something more complicated going on as well. One of the tragedies of Claire's life is that as his poetry got better, it became less known.

There was a recession, poetry publishing, got into trouble. Taylor went out of business. And by the time you get to the early 1830s, he's struggling to publish his poetry. And he's beginning to feel very cut off, both from the world of the fame that he's now lost, but also he gets cut off from his own community. His friends gather together and get him and his family a cottage at another village, about three miles away from Helpsdon. And somehow that's what tips him over the edge into madness.

Losing that immediate environment, he says that he just feels he's lost his own sense of who he is. And it's soon after that move that he's sent to the lunatic asylum. And then quite soon enough that we have a walk, he's given the freedom of the grounds and he goes into the town. and he decides just to walk home. It's 80 miles. He has nothing to eat except grass. Every night he lays down with his head facing knoll so he knows where to go the next morning.

And he writes that. I haven't read what he's written that. I presume you have a big prose account. Yeah, it's a beautiful piece of prose, three or four pages long called Journey Out of Essex, which just describes this walk out of the asylum. It's important to know that the lunatic asylums at the time were relatively liberal places.

We're not talking about straight jackets and Arn Barr's, he was allowed to walk in the woods, and that's why he was able to escape to go back home. But by this time, he is increasingly having delusions in that first asylum, the private asylum in the Epping Forest. He's written poems in the voice of Lord Barron, and he's announced that he is Jack Randall, a famous prize fighter.

There seems to be a real, you know, a real psychological disturbance there. Do you want to come in? No, right, I'm going to Simon. Samuel Gershi, how isolated it was in his later years and one of his great poems has written there so he's writing very, very fine poems. I am, though what I am. You might like to recite

the first few lines of it. I am, though what I am, none cares or knows. My friends forsake me like a memory lost. That would do, I think, before I start messing out. But no, so for a poet who is regarded as ecocentric rather than egocentric, so he's interested in the natural world and the material world much more than the self, actually clear.

does write a lot of poems that are considerations of the stormy self and the depressed self in some ways. One of the reasons, one of the routes of access for a lot of people is because of that. But it continues, there's no doubt it continues to write and that his physicians both in the first asylum in Epping Forest and in Northampton, the county asylum that he's committed to in 1841 for the rest of his life, they regard writing as a good thing for him to be doing.

I mean, just thinking about that relationship between the eco and the ego Simon was talking about, one of the most beautiful poems he writes in the asylum, I think, is called Clocker Clay. It's the Northamptonshire dialect word for ladybird. And that poem, he imagines himself into the being of a ladybird hiding in a cowslit people bell, cow slip bell, in a storm. And he imagines what it's like to be this little ladybird buffeted by the tempest in a storm. And on the one hand, it is a sort of expression. of his own feelings.

But on the other hand, it's a genuine, it's a sort of sense of, I mean, which other poet imagines himself imagines what it's like to be a ladybird in that way inside a cowslip bell. And it's a beautiful poem. In the cow slip bell peeps are lie, hidden from the buzzing fly,

while green grass beneath me lies, purled with dew like fish's eyes. So that poem is sort of expressing a kind of sense of menace as well as the cosy safety of being inside the cow slip. Quickly, John. Well, Claire writes his beautifully innocent poems of nature. He also adopts the voices of poets like Byron and Burns

to give himself a sense of identity that's confident with women, that's confident with the literary marketplace. But there's also an overriding sense in some poems, especially the bironic ones of 1841, of utter despair, with both the literary marketplace and with reliance on women and relationships. Jonathan. I mean, the extraordinary thing for me about his time in the asylum, in one sense, he is very isolated. One of his sons comes to visit him.

His wife doesn't visit him in the entire 24 years that he's there. But yet he still manages to make friends. They let him go into Northampton, into the town, and he sits outside the church, and he writes poems for local young men to sort of give to their girlfriends on St. Valentine's Day in return of some tobacco. and so he's got a little cottage industry going there. But many of the poems in the asylum are about this extraordinary sense of mental isolation, of being cut off from nature, cut off from family, cut off from the places that he knew. But fortunately, this enlightened lunatic asylum superintendent, William Knight,

wrote them down and many of them were published after his death. And probably the greatest of them all is this poem. I am, I am the self-consumer of my woes. And it's an extraordinary poem about loss into the nothingness of scorn and noise, into the living sea of waking dreams, where there is neither sense of life or joys, but the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems.

Even the dearest that I love the best are strange, nay rather stranger than the rest. Extraordinary sort of sense of isolation there. and then in the final stanza, he longs to go back to childhood to be lying with the grass below above the vaulted sky. Why did Clare drop out of fashion so much? I mean, he, in the last many years of life, he wasn't published, anyone who want to take that up?

I mean, I think he was very unlucky, Claire, wasn't he? Because he's, after Barron dies, sort of romantic poetry, kind of comes to an end. And then there's this odd sort of transitional period. period before Lord Tennyson and Victorian poetry comes along. And the novel-heaved interview. And of course, the novel-heaved's interview. Claire did once start trying to write a novel. He'd have been rather good novelist,

the way he writes sort of stories about village life. But he just disappears from view. He can't get his work published, and then he's in the asylum. And as you said earlier, it's only in the 20th century that poets, like Edmund Blondon and Seamus Heaney began recovering. Ted Hughes got him in Poet's Corner.

Just as a slight qualification for that, that Claire is talked about a lot. So there's a rumor in 1840 that Claire dies, and it spreads across the country. Every local newspaper talks about it. And then it's denied by the bloke who runs the asylum and says, let's raise a big subscription for Claire to pay the asylum fees because everyone owes me money.

And then throughout the 1850s and 60s, big Victorian writers like Samuel Smiles, Edwin Paxton Hood, Eliza Cook, write really celebratory verse about Claire. A lot of people use Claire as an example put on a warning to working class people don't have literary aspirations because you'll end up mad or drunk or dead because that's what happened to... They'll all end up

dead. Yeah, yeah. Well, they'll all end up dead but they might be accelerated to that death by their aspirations and by drinks. So they'll talk about Chatterton or Burns and Claire becomes an example of that. And then through the 19th century you get some really important autobiography and biographical

studies of Claire. So it's not that he's absolutely forgotten. It's that the big literary heavyweight, like Dickens, for example, were incredibly dismissive of Claire's... I'm surprised at the reader Dickens dismissed him, so... It's an odd one, though, isn't it really? It's an unfortunate miss for Claire, really. Yeah, and bad judgment on Dickens.

I mean, I thought... Because his detail is so brilliant and there it was. Anyway, which... You, Mina. No, don't you not? I thought you went in order to come in there. You mentioned the increasing reputation, and the reputation was...

Let's take Hughes and Haney and Pauline. It's been, it's no longer the peasant poet. It's no allowances have to be made anymore. He's one of the poets. He's in the top canon. It's absolutely right. I mean, you know, when I was at school in the 1970s, you know, we were taught Blake Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley Bar,

and they were the big six romantic poets. Claire, a few poems, some of the lovely animal poems, like wonderful poem about the badger. These were in anthologies, you know, often for younger children. But it really has only been in the last sort of, 20 or 30 years, that largely because of the work of poets who have admired his extraordinary eye for detail, it's only in that time that he's come to be regarded as one of the absolutely central great poets of the 19th century. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Mina Gorgi,

Simon Kubishi and Jonathan Bait. Next week, we'll be talking to all Al-Qozami, I'm very sorry about that, who invented algebra and the maths of the early Islamic world. I'll get it right by next week, I promise. Thanks for listening. Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I got I am lined up to do and you've got it, but I thought you read it very well, so that's absolutely fine. I ever thought you were going to go on. I don't like that poem. I'm on my own in that, apparently. Yeah, I'm not a big fan. I mean, partly because it imagines a world without women, which is the most ridiculous situation for Claire, and not even imagines

a world without women's emotions, where women never smiled or wet. And that, to me, Claire wants women all the time. He's rapaciously sexual. Yeah, see, one thing we didn't have time to talk about is this extraordinary thing about Mary Joyce, who is his childhood sweetheart, who he wasn't allowed, she was from a slightly better class of farmer. The father prevented the relationship, and he always uses this figure of Mary Joyce, you know, the first love, the innocent lost love, as a kind of symbol of innocence of childhood, a kind of prelapsarian symbol. and then of course, you know, when in his madness

he starts thinking he's got two wives and he actually thinks it's Mary Joyce, he's walking home to. So I don't think it's misogynistic in that sense. It's more, you know, imagining a time before the time. Why didn't you say it's like it on air for that reason? That would have been interesting.

Okay, yeah. I don't always know whether I should express that. I mean, there's a lot of clear people really love it, you know. Yeah, but you go and that's interesting. You're on the program, then on the programme. And it would have been defended by the other two, by myself. It'll be three to one against you.

You mean you can't take three of us on. Well, I think the other thing about Claire and women is that he's not as successful as Burns and Byron, who are notoriously kind of great lovers and terrible rakes really when it comes to the treatment of women. But he clearly uses

their modelling somehow to recover that kind of empowered relationship with women that he doesn't have in the asylum because he denied the company of women in the asylum. I mean, that is another aspect of his, the question of what was wrong with him mentally. It was quite interesting after I wrote my biography of him. I got a very learned letter from a doctor who was absolutely convinced that those

kind of delusional symptoms that Claire had in the later years were the result of the fact that when he went to London, he did briefly get involved with the prostitutes up the Tottenham Court Road. And the treatment for syphilis at that time, which was endemic in early 19th century, the treatment was mercury. and the notion that mercury poisoning might have actually, you know, caused that some of those weird sort of delusions that he had. It was an interesting theory. He complains about pains in the groin a lot, doesn't he?

There's an overarching sense of hypochondria and Claire really sets to about his own body. Is there any evidence for mercury causing mental distress? Yeah, there is. And, of course, syphilis itself in tertiary phase, it can also cause these symptoms of, you know, extreme delusional behaviour. How did he, I mean, I mean, it's quite interesting, isn't it, that question of when he's speaking in those different voices in the late asylum terms, is he, does he actually know that he's doing it? I mean, some people who visited himself, said, you know,

he's kind of more lucid writing his poems than in his conversation. Yeah, I mean, in his conversation, I think he said he was convinced he was, he was, he was convinced he was Byron, he was convinced he was the prize fighter Jack Randall. You know, I think Charles I thought he was at one point. Was that right? I mean, he thought when he spoke to people, he believed he was. Were there any signs of this condition much earlier,

before he went to London and might have met prostitutes and had the mercury? In 1820, Edward Drury, the guy who sort of discovers him in Stanford, writes to John Taylor and says that if Claire carries on writing this, this intensely, with this much energy, he's going to end up insane or worse, he's going to end up an alcoholic. So there are people. who are very worried about it very early on. We didn't bring up the drink either then.

No. We've given him a clean bit of health on this programme. Well, the podcast persons are getting the real thing. There's another thing, relationship to enclosure is not clean either. It's one of the things I wanted to say. So Claire works on the enclosure gangs for about four years. He also works in a lime kiln at three different places.

The reason there were so many lime kilns exploding through the moratorium period is to provide lime for the recovery of soil for agriculture. Lyme is the great fertilizer of the age. So Claire's relationship both to women and to enclosure is never quite as clean as we want it to be. We want it to be this great environmental protest poet. But his socio-economic position is such that he doesn't really have a position

that he can resist it economically. He had to bang in those fence posts himself. Digger ditches, yeah, absolutely. That would have been good. Oh, dear. Honestly. It was partly why he's so popular now also, actually, because we want him to be this great. environmental poem. It's one of the reasons he's much more widely read now because...

But he what, I mean, you know, that great poem, the lament of Swaddy Well, where he protests in the name of the land. He speaks in the voice of the land. Nobody has ever done that before. They haven't, no, it's incredible. It's just incredible empathy, that this ability to imagine what it's like to be the land, imagine what it's like to be the mole, imagine what it's like to be the bird, or the snipe out in the marshes, the lady bird and the cabaret, and the cab. and to write about that experience, that is quite incredible, I think. It makes his...

Mouser too said he, most nature poets look at nature over a five-bar gate, but he's on the other side. That was Edward Thomas. Edward Thomas, wonderful. No writer has ever seen the life of the farm as it has really lived, as opposed to how it is looked at over a five-barred gate. I mean, even our beloved Wordsworth does sometimes feel like he's looking over a five-barred gate. Oh, yeah. And Thomas loves Clare.

I mean, he's one of his earlier... Edward Thomas loves Claire and he loves how he says he enumerates the flowers he lists things, he gives things in their particularity and he loves the sort of weedy things I think Thomas loves Claire's weed poems and his own poem like Nettles or something maybe o-nettles, oh something maybe to that side of Claire

I think we're going to be made an offer you can't refuse by our producer Samant Tillerson It's tea or coffee, who likes tea or coffee? Or something else, 750th? I think I'll have cheapish. And for more podcasts on arts and ideas from the BBC, follow the link on our website to the best of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Programme.