Life and Remains of John Clare The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet JL Cherry 9781534947658 Books
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Life and Remains of John Clare The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet JL Cherry 9781534947658 Books
J. L. Cherry, Editor. Life and Remains of John Clare: "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Originally published 1873. Reprinted by BiblioBazaar, 2006. Paperback, 240 pages. ISBN 142643409X [This edition is one of many reprints of the earliest Clare anthology. It includes Cherry's excellent 105-page life of Clare, letters from his friends and associates not found elsewhere, extracts from Clare's diary, Prose fragments, Old Ballads, and a 120-page selection of his Asylum and other poems.]In his Journals*, John Clare tells us that Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry'** was one of his favorite poetry books. He loved it because he found in it what he describes as "the essence and simplicity of true poetry," qualities which are what he himself aimed at in his own poems.
Although Percy himself was an educated man, the old ballads and songs and poems he collected did not spring from a highly educated upper class, a class which lived out its life in book-lined studies and drawing rooms and salons remote from the soil and the people; these poems sprang instead from the British folk themselves. They were, in other words, products of a living and vital traditional culture as indeed was John Clare himself. Given this, it's easy to see why he loved them; they reflected his own sensibility.
In a revised edition of Percy's 'Reliques' published in 1876, its editor, Henry B. Wheatley, wrote (p.xxxii):
"The songs of a country are the truly natural part of its poetry, and really the only poetry of the great body of the people. Percy, in the dedication to his Reliques, calls ballads the "barbarous productions of unpolished ages." Nevertheless they are instinct with life, and live still, while much of the polished poetry of his age, which expelled nature from literature, is completely dead."
The educated classes of Clare's England, soaked as they were in the study of Roman and Greek models, had "expelled nature from literature," abandoned the native English tradition (which however lived on among the people) and were stuffing their poems with the sterile paraphernalia of alien and long-dead civilizations - Zeus and the gods and the Arcadia of nymphs and fauns and satyrs, sheer fantasies that even the old Roman Juvenal (55-140 A.D.) in his Satires*** complained about in his time as being stale, tired, worn-out, meaningless and utterly boring props.
Just how blind Clare's contemporaries were to the utter folly, in their rage to be fashionable, of abandoning their own native English tradition in favor of a moribund Graeco-Roman classical tradition, which they felt made them look sophisticated and "polished", is strikingly brought out in a letter to Clare by one of his educated friends, the writer Charles Lamb.
In this astounding letter, Lamb actually complains about Clare's naturalness (he calls it "rusticity") and advises him to "Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone" and give us poems in the true "Arcadian English" (Cherry, p.52). He utterly fails to understand that this is an absurd contradiction in terms. Arcady was long-dead; Englishness was still vibrant and alive, flowed powerfully through Clare's veins, and is what gives him his value and importance and makes him of such great interest to us today.
Happily for us, Clare had the good sense to ignore Lamb's well-meant though foolish advice and to remain himself, to remain John Clare, Englishman, a writer nourished by the robust and wholesome English tradition of song, by his native soil and the beauty of its manifold creatures, by, in short, living Nature itself as you will clearly see once you begin to read his wonderful poetry.
* John Clare - By Himself (Fyfield Books)
**Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets. Volume 1
***Sixteen Satires (Penguin Classics) See Satire I.
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Life and Remains of John Clare The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet JL Cherry 9781534947658 Books Reviews
J. L. Cherry, Editor. Life and Remains of John Clare "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Originally published 1873. Reprinted by BiblioBazaar, 2006. Paperback, 240 pages. ISBN 142643409X [This edition is one of many reprints of the earliest Clare anthology. It includes Cherry's excellent 105-page life of Clare, letters from his friends and associates not found elsewhere, extracts from Clare's diary, Prose fragments, Old Ballads, and a 120-page selection of his Asylum and other poems.]
In his Journals*, John Clare tells us that Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry'** was one of his favorite poetry books. He loved it because he found in it what he describes as "the essence and simplicity of true poetry," qualities which are what he himself aimed at in his own poems.
Although Percy himself was an educated man, the old ballads and songs and poems he collected did not spring from a highly educated upper class, a class which lived out its life in book-lined studies and drawing rooms and salons remote from the soil and the people; these poems sprang instead from the British folk themselves. They were, in other words, products of a living and vital traditional culture as indeed was John Clare himself. Given this, it's easy to see why he loved them; they reflected his own sensibility.
In a revised edition of Percy's 'Reliques' published in 1876, its editor, Henry B. Wheatley, wrote (p.xxxii)
"The songs of a country are the truly natural part of its poetry, and really the only poetry of the great body of the people. Percy, in the dedication to his Reliques, calls ballads the "barbarous productions of unpolished ages." Nevertheless they are instinct with life, and live still, while much of the polished poetry of his age, which expelled nature from literature, is completely dead."
The educated classes of Clare's England, soaked as they were in the study of Roman and Greek models, had "expelled nature from literature," abandoned the native English tradition (which however lived on among the people) and were stuffing their poems with the sterile paraphernalia of alien and long-dead civilizations - Zeus and the gods and the Arcadia of nymphs and fauns and satyrs, sheer fantasies that even the old Roman Juvenal (55-140 A.D.) in his Satires*** complained about in his time as being stale, tired, worn-out, meaningless and utterly boring props.
Just how blind Clare's contemporaries were to the utter folly, in their rage to be fashionable, of abandoning their own native English tradition in favor of a moribund Graeco-Roman classical tradition, which they felt made them look sophisticated and "polished", is strikingly brought out in a letter to Clare by one of his educated friends, the writer Charles Lamb.
In this astounding letter, Lamb actually complains about Clare's naturalness (he calls it "rusticity") and advises him to "Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone" and give us poems in the true "Arcadian English" (Cherry, p.52). He utterly fails to understand that this is an absurd contradiction in terms. Arcady was long-dead; Englishness was still vibrant and alive, flowed powerfully through Clare's veins, and is what gives him his value and importance and makes him of such great interest to us today.
Happily for us, Clare had the good sense to ignore Lamb's well-meant though foolish advice and to remain himself, to remain John Clare, Englishman, a writer nourished by the robust and wholesome English tradition of song, by his native soil and the beauty of its manifold creatures, by, in short, living Nature itself as you will clearly see once you begin to read his wonderful poetry.
* John Clare - By Himself (Fyfield Books)
**Reliques of Ancient English Poetry Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets. Volume 1
***Sixteen Satires (Penguin Classics) See Satire I.
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