John Clare, Politics and PoetryJohn Clare, Politics and Poetry challenges the traditional portrait of 'poor John Clare', the helpless victim of personal and professional circumstance. Clare's career has been presented as a disaster of editorial heavy-handedness, condescension, a poor market, and conservative patronage. Yet Clare was not a passive victim. This study explores the sources of the 'poor Clare' tradition, and recovers Clare's agency, revealing a writer fully engaged in his own professional life and in the social and political questions of the day. |
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aesthetic agen Alan Moore appeared Barrell's Bate beauty Bloomfield Brownlow Cambridge University Press Clare's gypsies Clare's poems Clare's poetry Clare's sonnet conventional countryside couplet critical Crome cultural David Powell described Early Poems eighteenth century enclosed Eric Robinson essay flowers Gipsies Heath Helpston Ian Waites Idea of Landscape imagery Janowitz John Barrell John Clare John Crome Jonathan Bate Keegan Kingsthorpe labouring labouring-class Lamont Langdyke Bush Langley Bush letter Lincolnshire Landscape lines literary influence London look Mark Storey Mary Middle Period Midsummer Cushion Mousehold Mousehold Heath Natural History Northampton Northamptonshire Northborough period Northborough Sonnets open fields Open Winter otter holes Oxford Oxford Brookes University painting Palgrave Macmillan Patty Paul Chirico Peter DeWint Peterborough picturesque Pilsgate Hill poet poetic Prose reader representation rhetorical Robert Bloomfield Rogers's rural scene seems Shadows of Taste social suggests thee Tillemans tradition tree unenclosed landscape View of Langdyke walked William Gilpin Wordsworth woud written